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 glorification of the Virgin Mary. The figures represent prophets, patriarchs, sibyls, and philosophers, all personages who in the ancient past announced that Our Lady would come into the world and give birth as a virgin; not coincidentally each one holds a scroll bearing the words of the prophecies. Below them are six half-figures of allegorical animals; the horses symbolize the Church, the lions the Resurrection and Royalty of Christ, the gryphon his Vigilance and the ox his Sacrifice.
Positioned in front of tabernacle-like niches or perched on corbels, the statues set up a dialogue with the space in all their three-dimensional majesty, and the architecture was conceived as a backdrop for them. For conservation reasons, in the course of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries the original sculptures were replaced by copies and are now on display in the Museo dell’Opera.
Still in its original position is the façade’s only narrative relief, the architrave of the main portal, showing Stories from the Childhood of the Virgin, carved by Tino di Camaino around 1297-1300.
It was Tino’s father, Camaino di Crescentino, who finished the upper section of the façade in 1317, giving it the three gables it has today. In the center is a rose window holding a sixteenth-century stained-glass window of The Last Supper, framed by niches with busts of Apostles and Prophets. The three gables each house a mosaic, made in 1878 on a drawing by Alessandro Franchi, showing on the left The Presentation of Mary in the Temple, on the right The Nativity, and in the center The Coronation of the Virgin.
Finally, in 1958 new doors were installed in the main portal, cast of bronze by Enrico Manfrini, showing The Glorification of Mary.