L´Ange avec la tête du Baptiste de Pistoia: un modèle français

• Autores: Francesca Frucco
• Localización: Revue de l'art, ISSN 0035-1326, Nº. 180, 2013, págs. 29-43
• Idioma: francés
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• Resumen

  • The Angel with the Head of the Baptist, today in the museum of the Cathedral of Pistoia is a wood sculpture, to which recent studies attribute a French origin and put forward the name of Giovanni Pisano as the author of the detached head, replaced after the arrival of the work in Italy. This article examines the possibility that the sculpture constitutes a transposition in wood of a lost figurative monstrance. It takes as its departure point the inventories of the Saintre Chapelle in Paris, where the only object known today, a reliquary of the head of the Baptist, which disappeared during the Revolution, in all likelihood shared an iconography with the sculpture. In the context of the relations between Saint Louis and the mendicant orders, the characteristics of the bloodied, enlarged head, with tousled hair and an expression of suffering of Saint Jean the Baptist, preacher of penance, who, according to the Evangels, imitated Christ better than anyone else in life and in death, leads to the idea that the motifs of the commission in Pistoia were inspired by a mendicant spirituality. Leading to its realization is the choice by the municipality of an imago lignea whose value to exalt was that of a famous relic in the Sainte Chapelle, whose prestige and power were supposed to reinforce the aura of sacredness of the city and its attraction tied to the ancient cult of Saint James, which already exerted its influence on the pilgrims on their way to Rome