Diotisalvi

Diotisalvi, also recorded as Deotisalvi or Deustesalvet, was an architect from Pisa who worked in the twelfth century, and very little else about his life is firmly known. He is best known as the original architect of the Baptistery of Pisa in the Piazza dei Miracoli, where an inscription inside the building gives the date 1152, which the source equates with 1153 in the Pisan style of dating. He built only the ground floor; the building was continued after his death by Nicola Pisano and completed by Giovanni Pisano, who changed much of his intended form. He is also tied to the church of the Holy Sepulchre in Pisa, whose belltower carries a sign in which Deustesalvet claims to be the builder. The records call him fabricator in 1113 and magister in 1153. Further Pisan works, among them the Chapel of Saint Agatha, the bell tower of San Nicola and, on the strength of recent studies that argue by analogy, the Leaning Tower of Pisa, are attributed to him without signatures, so those attributions remain hypotheses rather than settled fact.