The Lion’s Stance: Overwhelming its Victim, Overcoming Gravity

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Abstract:

The great Romanesque pulpits of Italy frequently feature lions trampling their prey to support columns and pilasters. The charismatic beasts brought iconographic and historicist references into the complex programs of these ecclesiastic monuments, but the architectonic problems posed by introducing such quadrupeds as structural supports introduced a significant challenge, and called for noteworthy artistic bravura. The series of exceptional pulpits that emerged from the Pisan ambit form the core of the argument, focussing mainly on the pulpit of Guglielmo now in the cathedral of Cagliari, reused within the Baroque chancel screen. 

Biography:

Sarah M. Guérin is Associate Professor of Medieval Art in the History of Art Department at the University of Pennsylvania. Her research centres on materials and materiality, with an accent on the socio-economic structures which inflect production and use. Her first monograph, French Gothic Ivories: Material Theologies and the Sculptor’s Craft (2022), concentrated on the medium of elephant ivory, which called for engagement with the economics and material culture of West Africa in the period contemporary with the European Middle Ages. This led to her participation on the steering committee for the award-winning exhibition Caravans of Gold, Fragments in Time: Art, Culture and Exchange across Medieval Saharan Africa (2019). The pulpit by Master Guglielmo is enmeshed in the Pisan mercantile network linking the Italian peninsula to North Africa, a system central to Guérin’s current book project, Goldrush 1270: Paris, Florence, Tunis, Ni-Jimi.