Gothic-Italian art

Bulzi, church of San Sebastiano, deposition

The tyrrhenian circulation of artists and their artifacts must refer to the export to Sardinia of sculptures and paintings produced in central Italy, in particular the polychrome wooden statues that make up the “Deposition from the Cross” group, attributable to the first decades of the 13th century, already in the church of San Pietro del Crocefisso and today in the church of San Sebastiano in Bulzi.
Of this flow of works of art, especially from Tuscany, active throughout the thirteenth century, the arborense area seems to have preserved the thickest and most significant documents. Like the oldest of the musical codes today in the treasury of the Oristano cathedral, illuminated around 1275 perhaps in the “scriptorium” of the cathedral of Arezzo, even the dosal of the “Madonna and Saints”, already in the cathedral of Santa Giusta and today in the archbishopric of Oristano, attributed to the Pisan Master of San Torpè and painted in tempera on panel around 1300, could have arrived in Sardinia through the Franciscan commission, addressed to the Italic side and open to Gothic innovations.
In 1297 Pope Boniface VIII created the “Regnum Sardiniae et Corsicae” and, regardless of the objective situation of Sardinia divided between the Arborense judiciary (at that date the only survivor of the Sardinian medieval kingdoms) and the Pisan-Genoese lords, he feuded it to James II, king of Aragon. In 1323, the infant Alfonso landed on the island and headed for Pisana Cagliari to besiege it; in 1326 the Cagliari Castle was finally handed over to the Aragonese.
However, only in Cagliari does this event close the cycle of artistic civilization marked by Italian presences; in the rest of the island, only gradually the commercial and cultural routes that were headed by Pisa and Genoa are replaced by the Mediterranean ones between Naples, Sardinia and Barcelona, and the artistic products of Italian Gothic are replaced by those of Catalan Gothic.
In fact, for the entire course of the 14th century, the Giudicato d'Arborea continued to import Gothic sculptures from the Tuscan workshop, as attested by the marble statue of the “Holy Bishop”, signed by Nino Pisano and attributable to about 1360, in the sacristy of San Francesco, or the wooden one of the “Annunciata” in the cathedral of Oristano, which recent studies have removed from the Pisan area of the workshop of Andrea and Nino, to return it to the production of a Tuscan workshop active between Pisa, Siena and Lucca, and between the end of the 14th century the beginning of the 15th century.
The same chronological and formal position suits the “Archangel Gabriel”, today in the parish church of Sagama: the late dating of the two works is proof of the Italic orientation of Arborense artistic culture up to the threshold of the 15th century, due to the anti-Catalan policy of Mariano IV de Bas-Serra, judge of Arborea.
From 1347 until the year of his death, in 1376, Mariano IV was the strong personality who guided not only the drafting of the “Rural Code” and, in all likelihood, the first and real formative phase of the legal corpus of the “Carta de Logu”, but also every other “exposed message” within the framework of the Arborense judiciary, and every cultural initiative that connects with it, since his first appearance as a donnicello in the painted image of the “Ottana Altarpiece”, executed in tempera on wood between 1339 and 1344 The cathedral Octanese di San Nicola.
It was to him that, in September 1353, the rupture of the alliance with Peter IV the Ceremonious and the beginning of the open war with Aragon, which ended (after his death) with the Arborense defeat on the Sanluri camp in 1409 and then, in 1410, with the entire island territory in Aragonese hands, with the exception of the marquisate of Oristano absorbed in 1478 and then, together with the entire island, became part of the domains of the Crown of Spain.

Update

8/6/2026 - 13:47