These works, mainly large crucifixes, will make it possible to set a new stage towards understanding the models of reference in Bologna at that time. Here, moreover, the Middle Ages were enlivened by a flourishing multicultural climate, favoured both by the strategic position of the city on the Via Emilia, therefore between the Apennines and the routes to the other side of the Alps, and by the birth of a famous legal school in the late 11th century.
Such a cosmopolitan reality guaranteed a constant impulse for international contacts, trade, urban development and, last but not least, artistic commissions, including those of liturgical furnishings and ecclesiastical treasures destined to satisfy the growing devotional needs. Today, however, very little remains of these artefacts, as documented by medieval wooden sculpture which, also due to the perishability of the material, in Bologna has only a few examples according to a trend that all the great Italian centres have in common