ARCHITECT, Italian
(active 12th century in Arezzo)

Interior view

12th century
Photo
Santa Maria della Pieve, Arezzo

The church is documented since as early as 1008, and, during the communal period of Arezzo, it was the stronghold of the city's struggle against its bishops. It was rebuilt in the 12th century. The bell tower was finished in 1330.

The church adopted a flattened portico entry similar to that at Pisa Cathedral. Although geographically closer to Florence where a similar blind porch frames three portals, the high relief of the Pieve's second- and third-level arcades and fourth-level gallery shows a stronger debt to Pisa. The same applies to the treatment of architectural details, where the builders relied exclusively on sculpture for their articulation, abandoning polychromatic intarsia or the planar harmonic subdivision of San Miniato or the Florentine baptistry.

However dominant Pisa and Florence were at the time of the Pieve's interior and new façade, which were executed in the twelfth and early thirteenth century, the flat-roofed elevation and the later, early-fourteenth-century show traces from one of the earliest sources of Italian Romanesque architecture, Ravenna.