| religious front, even though the church was powerful, there were the conflicting factions such as the Spirituals, who denounced wealth, and the Dominicans, who were devoted to the works of Aquinas, with a subgroup of Conventuals, who were moderates, and then the Franciscan Order, which seemed to have swayed away from its original vow to poverty and become quite wealthy. "The turn of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries was a time of critical doubt when, to rich and poor alike, salvation outweighed security and salvation was not secure" (Carli, 124). On top of all these distractions which Giovanni must have experienced, there was an earthquake in Pistoia in 1298. Giovanni's family had already done a lot of work in Pistoia by the time he started the pulpit, Chapel of San Jacopo in the Cathedral and the font for the church of San Giovanni Fuor Civitas, so he wasn't a stranger in an unstable land, but he must have been subjected to the pressure from this chaos along with the pressure of being such a busy artist and responsible for different work at the same time.
The genealogy of the decoration of pulpits is Medieval and for the Pisanis, there part in this tradition was substantial. "The pulpits were intended to be works of instruction and the exposition they were designed to illuminate was very far from simple" (Carli, 27). Pistoia is chronologically the third great pulpit, a brilliant elaboration of the scriptures upon the monument from which they were read. In |