The following is a brief guide to Florence, which, I hope, will help you to prepare for your visit to one of the world's most beautiful cities. For a more detailed and comprehensive guide which I have written to the city, visit: Florence.
The old city of Florence was divided into four distinct areas (San Giovanni, Santa Croce, Santa Maria Novella and Santo Spirito) and I shall be observing this division in my guide. The opening times of museums in Florence can be a very complex and occasionally fickle business, which is why I recommend you to check the city's official website: www.firenzeturismo.it
Note: If a monument or museum is highlighted in red, please click on it for a link to the official website.
San Giovanni: Baptistery > Duomo > Campanile
Where better to start a tour of Florence than in the religious heart of the city, a space dominated by three great monuments, the Baptistery, the Cathedral and the Bell Tower.
The Baptistery
Sitting on a perfect east-west axis with the cathedral, the Baptistery is thought to be the oldest building in Florence, dating back to the 11th century. It is certainly one of the most revered; generations of Florentines have been baptised here, including Dante, who called it Il Mio Bel San Giovanni.
The interior is decorated with beautiful mosaics from the 13th century, the only medieval mosaic cycle to be found in the city.
In time, the decoration of the Baptistery became the responsibility of Il Arte di Calimala, the Guild of the Cloth Merchants, whose emblem, the eagle gripping a bale of cloth, can be seen on the north side of the building. (The guilds were local associations of the masters of particular trades and professions and the Cloth Merchants' Guild was one of the most prominent).
In the early 14th century, the Guild commissioned the first of three sets of bronze doors, which have earned the Baptistery a central place in the history of European sculpture. The earliest set can now be found on the north side of the building and are the work of Andrea Pisano. Almost nothing is known about the background and training of the sculptor and this is the only work he ever signed. His name and the date, 1336, (in Roman numerals) can be seen on the top edge of the frame. The actual casting of the doors had to be entrusted to Venetian craftsmen, because such highly technical skills were not to be found in 14th century Florence. The subject of twenty of the panels is the life of St John the Baptist, the patron saint of both Florence and the Baptistery. The bottom two rows are devoted to depictions of the cardinal and theological virtues.
The 'Lost Wax' Method of Bronze-Casting
During the Renaissance the complex technique of casting in bronze was essentially the same as it had been in the classical world. It consisted of the following steps:
- A wax model of the subject was made and covered with a clay shell.
- The shell was baked, at which point the wax melted and disappeared through a series of channels, which had been cut into the clay shell.
- This left a hollow space, which was filled by the molten bronze.
- When the bronze had cooled the shell was broken and the relief was removed.
- The sculpture was finally chased and gilded.
 | In 1401, the Guild decided to add another set of bronze doors to the Baptistery and, in time-honoured fashion, held a competition to see who should be awarded the commission. The theme of the contest was the Sacrifice of Isaac and each entrant had a year to complete a relief. The format had to be quatrefoil in keeping with Pisano's design. There were seven entrants and the judges whittled this number down to two. Both men were native Florentines and both had been trained as goldsmiths. Their names were Lorenzo Ghiberti and Filippo Brunelleschi. The reliefs they made for the competition have survived and are now on display in the Bargello.
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Ghiberti was elected the winner and charged with the commission. The subject matter of the reliefs was changed from the Old to the New Testament, but the number and format of the panels remained the same as the earlier set of doors by Pisano. The bottom two rows of panels, however, were to contain depictions of the four Evangelists and the four Fathers of the Church.
The doors took Ghiberti over twenty years to complete and were so well received that he was immediately commissioned to cast a second pair, which now hang on the east side of the Baptistery facing the Cathedral.
The second set of doors took Ghiberti almost thirty years to complete and were only finished in 1452, three years before his death. It seems that the wait was worthwhile, for the doors made such a favourable impression on the authorities that it was decided to place them in the prime position facing the Cathedral. Andrea Pisano's doors were duly relegated to their present position on the south side of the Baptistery.
For centuries Ghiberti's second pair of doors have been known as 'The Gates of Paradise'. The panels we see today are not, however, the original ones, but copies. The original panels are on display in the museum of the cathedral, which sits behind the east end of the Duomo.
Ghiberti made huge changes in the design of his second set of doors, reducing the number of panels from twenty-eight to ten and changing the format from the fancy quatrefoil to a simple rectangle. A reduction in the number of panels did not lead to fewer stories, because Ghiberti borrowed from painters a device known as continuous narration, where aspects of a story that differ in terms of time and place are shown as if occurring simultaneously. In the panel of Adam and Eve, for example, we can see four events: God creating Adam in the lower left corner, His creation of Eve in the centre, the Temptation in the distance at the extreme left and the Expulsion in the bottom right.
Opposite the Baptistery stands the Cathedral of Florence, Santa Maria del Fiore, more commonly known as the Duomo.
The Duomo
In Italy a Cathedral is often referred to as a Duomo, which comes from the Latin word domus or house. The Cathedral is seen as the Domus Dei or the House of the Lord. The Duomo in Florence was commissioned in 1296 to replace a much smaller cathedral dedicated to Santa Reparata. From the beginning, the ambitious nature of the project was clearly laid out: "The Florentine Republic... desires that an edifice shall be constructed so magnificent in its height and beauty that it shall surpass anything of its kind produced in the times of their greatest power by the Greeks and the Romans."
No doubt, the Florentines also had in mind the recent building of a magnificent cathedral by their hated neighbours, the Sienese. As far as sheer size is concerned, the building thoroughly fulfilled the original expectations. It was designed by Arnolfo di Cambio, but later modified by Francesco Talenti. The most powerful Guild in the city, that of the Wool Merchants, was entrusted with the project. By 1417, over one hundred and twenty years after the first stone was laid, the cathedral was almost complete, all that remained was the erection of the cupola.
This, however, presented the builders with an awesome technical challenge and one to which they had absolutely no solution! The space to be vaulted was almost 140 feet (42m) wide and 150 feet (45m.) from the ground. Such a vast space had not been vaulted in stone since the days of the ancient Romans and knowledge of their technique had long since been lost. The essential drawback lay in the support. The traditional method of vaulting an open space in stone was to use a fixed wooden support, which would hold the stone together until the cement had dried. This technique, known as centring, would have required a forest of scaffolding to fill the vast space of the cathedral crossing.
The authorities had no choice but to launch a competition, which was won by a model submitted by Brunelleschi, the goldsmith we last met competing at the Baptistery. Work started in 1420 and was completed a mere sixteen years later in 1436.
Brunelleschi's dome is one of the engineering and architectural triumphs of the Renaissance. His solution to the problem of how to support the erection of the dome at such a height was to suspend the wooden scaffolding from the drum, which overcame the problem of building it up from the ground. He then addressed the problem of the immense weight of the dome, which threatened to put too much pressure on the drum, by building it out of two concentric shells. The shells were made out of stone and brick, which were bonded together in an interlocking herring-bone pattern. This technique, in effect, made the dome self-supporting. The cavity between the two shells not only made the structure lighter, it also provided a means of access for future maintenance work.
For a very readable guide to Brunelleschi's colossal achievement, see 'Brunelleschi's Dome' by Ross King.
In 1446, the year of his death, Brunelleschi's beautiful lantern was added to the top of the dome. Twenty-two years later, in 1468, it was crowned with a bronze orb and cross, the work of Andrea del Verrocchio.
 | The Cathedral was almost finished. It had taken one hundred and seventy years to build and had cost the staggering amount of 18 million gold florins. There was, however, one tiny detail still to address, namely, the facade, which was still only half complete. It would remain in this condition until the end of the 16th century (see right) when the marble was finally removed.
The bare stone was then covered with plaster bricks, which were painted to look like marble. The bricks, faded with time, would remain in place until the second half of the nineteenth century when the cathedral finally received the marble facade we see today. |  |
Many people's reaction to the interior of the Duomo is one of disappointment. The lavishly decorated exterior, with its multi-coloured marble veneer,leads them to expect something much more ornate inside. However, the sheer size of the interior is nothing less than overwhelming. It is supposed to be able to accommodate a congregation of thirty thousand people, which would have been a half to two-thirds of the entire population of the city in the middle of the 15th century.
If you stand in the crossing and look up at the dome, you will get an idea of how daunting the task of vaulting such a space must have seemed at the beginning of the 15th century. In the following century the vault was frescoed with a staggering 3,600 square metres of images illustrating the theme of the 'Universal Judgement' (1572-9). The frescoes were started by Giorgio Vasari and finished by Federico Zuccari.
Both the theme and the layout of the frescoes (in a series of circular rows) recall the 13th century mosaic cycle in the Baptistery.
In the centre of the vault, directly above the High Altar, is an image of 'Christ Resurrected'. This powerful image would have been seen in relation to a sculptural group, which Baccio Bandinelli had already carved for the High Altar. This represented the Dead Christ surmounted by a statue of God the Father. The congregation would have contemplated the Dead Christ and then by raising their eyes to the Dome they would have seen Christ Resurrected and in Glory. Bandinelli's sculpture, however, was removed in 1842.
In terms of stained glass, the Duomo boasts the greatest number of original pieces in the whole of Italy. Seven of the eight roundels in the drum contain beautiful images based on designs by four of the leading artists of the Renaissance, namely, Donatello, Uccello, Ghiberti and Andrea del Castagno. The one roundel or eye that is visible from the nave contains the 'Coronation of Mary' by Donatello (1434-7). It is deliberately positioned on the same axis as the mosaic of the same theme by Gaddo Gaddi (early 1300s). The glorification of the Virgin, to whom the church is dedicated, is continued in the stained glass window above Gaddi's mosaic, the 'Assumption of Mary into Heaven' by Ghiberti.
The cathedral is not only home to religious imagery; on the wall of the north aisle are two enormous equestrian portraits in fresco. They represent two mercenaries who fought successfully for the Florentine Republic. The figure in the second bay is 'Niccolo da Tolentino' by Andea del Castagno (1456), while the other is 'Sir John Hawkwood' by Uccello (1436).
Sir John Hawkwood hailed from the county of Essex in England and was the leader of a group of soldiers known as the White Company. He was successfully employed by the Florentine Republic to stave off threats to its independence from the Milanese at the end of the 14th century. When he died in 1394 the Republic agreed to erect a marble monument to him in the cathedral in recognition of his services to the city. However, when the English king, Edward III, asked for Hawkwood's remains to be returned home the idea of the marble monument was quietly dropped and replaced by that of a fresco, an infinitely cheaper option!
The second mercenary, Niccolo da Tolentino, also came to the rescue of the Florentines against the Milanese at the battle of San Romano in 1433. Two years later he was less successful and was taken prisoner, dying before the ransom was paid. His remains were brought back to Florence and buried in the cathedral. The state had equally grand ambitions to erect a grand monument in his honour, but in the end he received the same treatment as his English counterpart and was immortalised in fresco rather than marble.
The Campanile
To the south of the Cathedral stands the elegant campanile or bell tower. Work began on the free-standing structure in 1334 and the design was entrusted to Giotto. The campanile is generally referred to as Giotto's Tower, in spite of the fact that the building had only reached the height of the first story when he died in 1337. Andrea Pisano became the Capomaestro or Head of Works and continued Giotto's design on the second story before changing it by dividing the four sides with pilasters. A decade later Pisano moved on to a better position in Orvieto and the post fell vacant. In 1352 Francesco Talenti was appointed to the position and he made his mark by altering the design once more, adding the twin Gothic windows surmounted by a single Gothic window in the final story.
The tower was finally completed in 1359 and rises to a height of 280 feet (85m.).
The first two storeys of the tower are decorated with a series of diamond and hexagonal reliefs from the workshop of Andrea Pisano. They illustrate the evolution and salvation of mankind, a theme which is often found on the facades of medieval churches, but is unusual on the facade of a bell tower. (The original reliefs, which can be seen in the cathedral museum, have been replaced by copies).
The entrance to the campanile is on the east side and dates back to 1431. Prior to this, the tower was directly connected to the cathedral by means of a footbridge.
