The design of the architectonic complex of the Baptistery, which this sculpture belongs to, can be without any doubt attributed to the father Nicola.

The succession of the busts in the arcades has a Byzantine origin, even if realized according to gothic canons. The several busts are not simply aligned and independent one of each other, but convergent toward the centre, that is exactly toward the Madonna with child, which was conceived from a frontal view.

The original disposition foresaw in fact at the left side of the Madonna the Mose, holding the tables of law, the evangelists Matthew and Luca, while at the right side there were Saint John the Baptist, the evangelist Saint John and Saint Mark.

Saint John the Baptist
Bust probably authored by Nicola Pisano (1270-1276) with the collaboration of Giovanni, originally placed in the gallery of the baptistery. The aquiline profile is probably due to a successive reductive intervention and the disposition of head toward the left side is due to its original collocation to the right of the Madonna with child.

Mould of one of the panels of the door of Bonanno Pisano
Particular of one of the panels in bronze decorated with biblic and evangelic episodes and with prophets, which compound the San Ranieri's door of the Duomo, sculptured around 1186. The theme which is represented is the massacre of innocents. The main door of the Duomo was made by Bonanno too, but was destroyed in the fire of 1595. The panel and the door as a whole, represent one of the most outstanding medieval examples of casting in cire perdue which has came to us. In the panel it can be distinguished on the left side the profile of Erode, sat on a field chair inspired to the early Christian art of sarcophaguses
and most ancient Hellenistic ivories. On the right side a soldier rises up the child upside down on the point of decapitating him, while the mother is tearing her hairs in desperation, motifs derived from the Byzantine iconographic language.

The dancer or Salome':
Made by Giovanni Pisano, belonging to the group of sculptures realized for the top of the Baptistery between the 1278 and the 1285. The acephalous figure is raising up the dress with both her own hands as on the point of dancing. The statue was created over the ample curve which goes up from the the base to the neck and which is strongly harmonized with the plastic masses. The dress is hold under the breast by an high belt, while two concentric pleats converge toward the left hand which is adhering to the ankle.

The head, by judging what remains at the basis of the neck, probably was sticking out ahead, anticipating the solutions later adopted in the statues made for the front of the Duomo of Siena, such as the "Maria di Mose'", and in the successive solutions of the Pisan pulpit, as in the group of the "Church" and in the "Cardinal Virtues". The dynamic power of the bending of its body gets the upper hand of the reality of volumes, so much that the draperies seem to be invested by a sudden gust of wind. Notwithstanding the statue is headless and without the right arm, it represents one of the highest plastic expressions of Giovanni, where the gothic linearism and the evidence of emergent volumes are resolved into a admirable synthesis of shape and movement.