Lombard Pulpit (7th Century)

The Romanesque architects did not remain insensitive to one of the most beautiful furnishings of the Lombard church, so much so that they decided to conserve it and insert it in the new parish church: it is the stone pulpit that was placed against the balustrade that delimited the presbytery area, on the right side called in cornu epistulae of the main nave; in fact we can see that the rear part now rests on stone blocks used as recycled material, sculpted in bas-relief with spiral motifs, rosettes and a very eroded animal figure and perhaps forming part of the external decoration of the parish church. The presbytery area of the Lombard church was separated from that of the faithful by three steps, also present in the right nave, and by a stone balustrade probably with smooth panels separated by pilasters, as in other Italian examples: the pulpit leaned against this balustrade to the rear part, while the other rested on the base which is still preserved; the various parts will then be separated and reassembled for the Romanesque parish church, it is not certain whether in the original arrangement of the mirrors.
Stylistically the pulpit was initially interpreted as the work of a primitive, "barbarian" Romanesque, until in 1987 Mario Bucci was the first to understand its belonging to the Lombard culture while not completely abandoning a place in the barbaric environment: in reality the so-called "barbarian" art, which generally includes that of the invaders who arrived in Italy, was once considered an expression of artistic and cultural decadence; today, however, it is recognized that the "barbarians" were responsible for the invention of new aesthetic techniques and canons, which deliberately deviate from the classical ideal of beauty and its proportions to draw on a language where the fantastic and the symbolic join the imagination and color in an original vision of the world.