The cathedral façade, with the magnificence of its marble, tells us that we are about to enter a sacred place: every element works together to prepare the visitor for the encounter with the Mother of God, to whose honor the Sienese chose to raise this house of worship.

The lower section was made by the master builder and sculptor Giovanni Pisano between 1284 and 1297. It consists of three deeply recessed portals topped by pediments which now hold busts of Blessed Ambrogio Sansedoni, Blessed Giovanni Colombini, and Blessed Andrea Gallerani, added in the seventeenth century. The splays of the portals are lined with slender twisted and grooved columns, with the addition in the central portal of two beautiful larger columns decorated by acanthus tendrils. But the most striking aspect of the façade is the profusion of statues inspired by the Gothic cathedrals of northern Europe, especially France, which are an absolute innovation in the history of Italian art. Even though up to then religious architecture in Italy often included sculpture, this was relegated to the decoration of the capitals of columns or at most short narrative cycles or individual statues on the architraves and lunettes of the portals. Giovanni’s sculptures, by contrast, are a real monumental sculpture cycle that corresponds to a unitary concept and a precise iconographic program, aimed at the exaltation and . . .