Parma Baptistery
— — pink stone, holding the late light.
Not only on a wall.
“An octagonal tower of pink Verona marble in Piazza Duomo, beside the cathedral. Begun in 1196 by Benedetto Antelami, the sculptor who carved the cycle of the twelve months and four seasons standing inside the lower walls. The eight sides carry an old Christian idea: the eighth day, the day after the seventh, the day of resurrection. Late afternoon light warms the stone past pink toward something closer to coral, then back. People come for the cathedral next door and find this beside it.
Parma Baptistery, on ceramic.
Each tile is finished by hand in our Knoxville studio. Artwork is slowly infused into the ceramic surface under high heat and pressure, and rests beneath a thin glossy finish. The colour lives in the surface, not on top of it.
Pick any four 4-inch tiles — National Parks you've been to, a Smokies set, the four seasons of one place. $ for a set of , cork-backed, ready to live on the table.
Each tile ships in a kraft box, tied with cream ribbon, with a handwritten note from the studio if you'd like to add one.
Three or five different vistas, hung together — a chapter of places you've been, or want to go.
The place, in three passes.
The Parma Baptistery stands in Piazza Duomo at the centre of Parma, in Emilia-Romagna, between Milan and Bologna in northern Italy. The octagonal building rises about 34 metres in pink Verona marble, with four levels of loggias circling above the ground floor. An inscription on the north portal records that work began in 1196 under the architect-sculptor Benedetto Antelami, who would also carve the figural reliefs around the three doorways. The baptistery sits next to Parma's twelfth-century cathedral and the bishop's palace, the three buildings forming the medieval religious core of the old city. Parma is about an hour west of Bologna by train, on the via Emilia.
The exterior is rosso ammonitico, the pinkish-red Verona marble that gave Antelami his colour, quarried from the Lessini hills about 110 kilometres east in the Veneto. Four levels of open loggias circle the upper walls above the three carved portals, an arrangement that looks back to Pisa's earlier baptistery, started in 1152. The north tympanum carries Antelami's Last Judgment in low relief, with Christ enthroned among the apostles and the dead rising from their tombs along the lintel. The pink-rose stone shifts colour through the day, palest at noon, warmest in the half-hour before sunset, when the whole octagon turns the colour of a ripe peach against the brick of the bishop's palace next door.
Inside, set into the lower walls of the octagon, runs Antelami's sculptural Cycle of the Months, one of the most complete medieval depictions of the agricultural year in Europe. Twelve standing figures, each absorbed in the labour of its month: pruning the vines in February, scything wheat in July, treading grapes in October, the pig butchered in December. Four allegorical seasons stand beside them, each holding her attribute. Antelami carved the cycle between roughly 1196 and 1216, taking the iconography from the labours of the months long carved into French cathedral portals; the Parma cycle is the first in Italy to bring the labours inside the building and place them at eye level. The frescoes above, added through the thirteenth century, paint the dome as the heavenly Jerusalem of Revelation.