32 LaCitadeSancta
square. This font resided until about 1400 in a small chapel inside the west
doors of the duomo, on the left. Piacenza has preserved its late antique font
in the Cappella di Santa Caterina at the duomo. It is a bath-tub-shaped
vessel of white Verona marble measuring 2. 97 meters by 1. 56 meters, with a
depth of 0. 74 meter.^99 Vicenza had a ‘‘Longobard’’ font similar in size to
that at Ferrara. It was kept in a small baptismal chapel on the right as one
entered the cathedral, and it continued in use there until the Napoleonic
period.^100 None of these fonts was monumental; they were placed in small,
cramped chapels. They were just large enough to baptize a single infant by
the immersion method used in early medieval Italy.
During the baptistery building boom of the later twelfth and early thir-
teenth centuries, font style underwent a radical change. The best-known
example of the new style is in the baptistery of Pisa (fig. 22 ). That font, which
is larger than the ancient baptismal pools, is raised two steps above the floor.
The eight-sidedvasca,like the bays of the building, is oriented to the compass.
At alternating angles of the octagon, four cylindrical stalls are attached to
the inside of the font. These provided dry places, within but separated from
the water-filled vessel, where clerics could stand while baptizing. The upper
gallery of the Pisa baptistery offers a fine view of the font and actions in or
around it (fig. 23 ). The large baptistery and vessel served, not for private
individual baptisms, but for multiple, assembly-line baptisms during public
rites. One can see a small version of the same type of font in the cathedral
of Massa Marittima, where it is celebrated as the font in which Saint Bernar-
dino of Siena was baptized. Unfortunately, a Renaissance font in the modern
style, useful only for individual baptisms, has been imposed on top of the
communal one, hiding most of the vessel and rendering the priests’ stalls
almost invisible. Dante’s San Giovanni in Florence once housed a font of the
same shape. To this day, the floor pavements there mark the site of a huge
eight-sidedvasca.In a famous passage ofInferno,Dante used the ministers’
cylindrical stalls in this font as the model for the tubes into which the simoni-
acs were thrust head-downward.^101 The simoniacs suffered eternal death in
an image of the very vessel from which they had sold the baptismal gift of
eternal life. Like the new positioning of the baptistery in relation to the
cathedral, these new fonts point to the baptisms of Easter Saturday as a great
public rite of the city.
About 1140 the canonist Gratian, in Case 30 of hisDecretum,envisioned
baptism in the communal period. In Gratian’s hypothetical case great
crowds lined up before a font. The priest handed a newly baptized infant to
the child’s own father in the press of the crowd—thereby making the man
his own son’s godparent. Since this mistake gave the man spiritual affinity
99. Rossi, ‘‘Battistero,’’ 65 – 70.
100. Vicenza Stat. ( 1264 ), 203 – 7 n. 1.
101. Dante,Inferno, 19. 16 – 21.