( fl Bitonto, nr Bari, mid-13th century). Italian ?sculptor. A sculpted slab from Bitonto Cathedral (Bitonto, Mus. Dioc.) bears the inscription POLLICE, the interpretation of which is controversial. Belli d’Elia claimed that Pollice was the name of a sculptor, but Calò Mariani proposed that the word ‘pollice’ alluded to the manual dexterity of the unknown carver of the slab. On the slab is represented a symbolic tree with wide branches flanked by four pairs of panthers and cheetahs, alternately confronted and addorsed; above them are small birds. The slab is decorated with coloured putty and glass inserted into small holes carved in the marble (sottosquadro technique). Other similarly carved fragments to the Pollice slab have been found in Bitonto Cathedral, which suggests that they could all have been part of an iconostasis similar to that made for Bari Cathedral by Peregrino da Salerno. The Pollice relief is datable to the first half of the 13th century by comparison with an ambo (1229) in Bitonto Cathedral by NICOLAUS and with fragments from an altar (c. 1240; Bitonto, Mus. Dioc.) by Gualtiero da Foggia (d before 1286). The sculptor was probably active in Bitonto in a workshop related to that of Nicolaus, of whom he appears to have been a considerably less gifted imitator.