If you visit the famous Piazza dei Miracoli in Pisa, you may
enter the Camposanto Monumentale (the ancient cemetery annexed
to the cathedral). There, in a corner at one end of the long cloister,
stands the imposing nineteenth-century marble statue of Leonardo
Pisano, or Fibonacci as he is better known in modern times. The
inscription on the pedestal reads: “A Leonardo Fibonacci
Insigne Matematico Pisano del Secolo XII”. The indication
of the 12th Century is not quite exact, as Leonardo lived from
about 1170 to the 1240s and his books were produced, starting
in 1202, during the first decades of the 13th Century.
If observed at close distance, the statue shows the scars of
the wounds it suffered during World War II, but it has been satisfactorily
restored and at first sight it looks as if practically undamaged.
However the fingers are lacking from both hands.
The likeness of the statue is a work of fiction. Any portrait
or statue of Leonardo must have been created out of fantasy, since
there are not extant any contemporary portraits of him and nobody
knows what his appearance looked like.
The initiative of honouring the memory of Fibonacci with this
statue was not taken in Pisa but in Florence. The merit goes to
two politicians from ancient aristocratic families in Tuscany:
baron Bettino Ricasoli and marquis Cosimo Ridolfi. In 1859 the
Grand Duke had been exiled and the following year Tuscany was
to be annexed to the Savoy reign, soon to become the new unified
Italian state. During the intervening months, Tuscany was ruled
by a provisional government. Ricasoli was the Prime Minister and
Ridolfi was the Secretary for education. They both were active
in promoting culture (they founded a modern institute for advanced
studies that later became the University of Florence). With a
decree of 23 September, 1859, they resolved that the State of
Tuscany should finance the carving of a statue of Fibonacci, “the
initiator of algebraic studies in Europe”, to be placed
in Pisa.
The work was commissioned to a sculptor in Florence, Giovanni
Paganucci. The statue was finished in 1863 and was placed in the
Camposanto of Pisa, where other statues of eminent personages
were kept.
In 1926 the fascist authorities in Pisa removed three of the
statues from the Camposanto and placed them in three squares of
the town. They tought that the statues should be visible to all
the people and not kept hidden within a cloister. All the three
statues were of personages called “Pisano”: one
was our Leonardo, the other two were the famous sculptors and
architects, father and son, Nicola and Giovanni Pisano. (Of course
“Pisano” means simply “from Pisa”
and in medieval times, when the use of surnames was not yet established,
it was customary to designate persons from their town.) A sentence
was added to the inscription on the pedestal of each statue: “From
Oblivion to Glory for Fascist Will”. Perhaps this inscription
was the reason why one night in 1945 the statue of Giovanni was
blown up with gunpowder at the hand of unknown persons.
Fibonacci’s statue was placed in a prominent position,
just in front, at its southern end, of Ponte di Mezzo, the bridge
on the river Arno at the centre of the town. In 1944, when American
and German troops fighted for over a month from the opposite sides
of the river, the town suffered from widespread destruction. The
area around Ponte di Mezzo was gravely ruined and several buildings,
and the bridge itself, were destroyed. But the statue was still
standing, even if somewhat damaged, when the battle ended. At
this website,
http://www.edizioniets.com/architetturepisane/Arch_Pis_01_b_Tolaini.pdf
one can see a photograph (Figure 14) with a view of the place
as it showed after the battle. One can discern, a little to the
right from the centre of the photograph, the white profile of
the tall statue on the dark background of the "Logge".
Now the statue had to be removed for leaving space for the rebuilding
of the bridge. The Camposanto was itself partly ruined and under
restoring. The statue was enclosed inside a depôt and left
there forgotten for several years. Eventually it was somewhat
repaired and was placed at Giardino Scotto (Scotto Garden), a
small park up the river at the eastern access to the old town.
The street that borders the wall of Giardino Scotto and runs along
the river is called Lungarno Fibonacci. (Lungarno is the common
name for any street running along the river Arno.) It was as recently
as 1950 that a street in Pisa was named after Fibonacci, even
if there are no less than nine other streets named after the one
or the other of the many Pisanos who honoured the ancient history
of the town.
Finally, in the years around 1990 the statue was accurately restored
and was placed back in the Camposanto where it belongs.
