Violence erupts across the cathedral pulpit completed in 1311 by Giovanni Pisano, the most ambitious pulpit in the Pisani tradition and, according to many scholars, a landmark of a new psychology that heralded the Renaissance artist. The turbulence of the pulpit’s marble narrative reliefs was unprecedented in Tuscan sculpture. The introduction of Passion scenes highlights Christ’s torment with new physicality and vocality. In addition, inscriptions running parallel to these images call to mind local disturbances. One mentions recent civil unrest. Another tells of Giovanni’s work provoking hostility toward him. Resonance between the portrayal of Christ and Giovanni as victims heighten sympathy for the sculptor by making his plight Christ-like. My paper argues that these reliefs and inscriptions were coordinated to manipulate the emotions the pulpit’s audience, the people of Pisa, for a civic end. Violent imagery served to engage audiences in the Middle Ages with figures in pictures, writing, and theater, as scholars have observed. The Pisa cathedral pulpit went further by stirring viewers to take its maker’s side. The aim here, I contend, was to rally a competitive viewership that would reassert Pisa’s claim of superiority at a time when the commune faced acute economic, military, and civic hardships. Seen this way, the pulpit anticipates late medieval formations of community through violent spectacles as described by Mitchell Merback. But while Merback and others take mimetic resemblance between ‘real’ and pictured violence as the framework for examining the beholding of violence, I relate the violent acts evoked by the pulpit to allegorical images of the ‘suffering city’ that soon emerged in Pisa and elsewhere through personifications of communes being ravaged by citizens. My approach highlights the contribution of the pulpit’s inventive attacks on individuals to a tradition of violent scenes that helped viewers’ envision threats to community.