The Visitation

Religious meditation, fed by a subtler awareness of the impulses of the human heart and a lyrical expansion of feeling, produced in Nicola Pisano's art a gradual softening in style and expression. In this work it appears clearly, and perhaps for the first time in the history of art. The poetry of the meeting and communication between two beings is resolved with extraordinary bravura. They are linked in a tacit, entirely human knot of affection by the delicate quivering of the light. Within this calm transfiguration, descriptive yet inevitably symbolic of the Biblical event, Nicola's art completely surpasses the classical references by which some have tried to justify his great originality.