May 24, 2024 - Classic Italy
Florence:  Duomo Museum

Our next stop was the Duomo Museum, located behind the church.

The Museum was founded in 1891 and in 2015 it was radically renovated. It is conceived as an educational path to discover the places and artists who gave life to the monumental complex of the Opera, the cradle of the Renaissance, and it is today one of the most important museums in the world, both for the value and the number of works of art kept inside, as well as for the architectural and technological avant-garde of its environments and its museographic equipment. Here are preserved the original masterpieces of art that over the course of seven centuries have decorated its monuments: from Michelangelo, to Donatello, Brunelleschi, Ghiberti and countless others.

This is a wood model of the Duomo's medieval facade.
   
This is no model.  It's a full-scale display of the cathedral facade, with original sculptures correctly located.
   
The first facade of Santa Maria del Fiore was never built beyond the level which we can see here.  It was demolished in 1587.  This full-scale model, has been reconstructed on the basis of a drawing dating to the time. This has made it possible to replace many of the statues carved for it in their original positions, opposite the Baptistery doors with their narrative panels.
   
The reconstructed facade recreates the dialogue between ancient, mediaeval and Renaissance sculpture for which Florence was famous. I
   

The Renaissance began in 1401 with a citywide competition to build new doors for the Baptistery.  Lorenzo Ghiberti (1378 - 1455) won the job and built the doors for the north side of the building.  Everyone loved them, so he was then hired to make another set of doors -- these anels -- for the east entrance, facing the Duomo.  These bronze "Gates of Paradise" revolutionized the way Renaissance people saw the world around them.

These are the original "Gates of Paradise" bronze doors created by Ghiberti.
   
The detail in each panel is amazing.
   
 
   
One of the two huge bronze doors are the reverse side of the Baptistery's North Doors, realized by Lorenzo Ghiberti for the Baptistery between 1403 and 1424.
 
The reverse sides of the North doors are thus bronze panels fixed onto a huge wooden frame. The bronze panels are centrally decorated with a circular motive with lion heads, probably an allusion to the “Marzocco” lion, one of the symbols of medieval Florence, still visible today in sculptures and decorations on many civic buildings, such as Palazzo Vecchio and the Loggia della Signoria.
   
The second door.
   
The detail was pretty amazing on these doors as well.
   
Close-up of one of the original statues.
   
Sixteenth-century statuary group above the entrances to the Baptistery.
   
A Roman sarcophagi that stood in the piazza from the Middle Ages up to the twentieth century,
   
A close-up of one of the statues.
   

We came to an interesting exhibit on how the Duomo's dome was built.

The city council approved Arnolfo di Cambio's design for the new church in 1294.  The first stone was laid on 9 September 1296.  The building of this vast project was to last 140 years.  The nave was finished by 1380 but after a hundred years of construction and by the beginning of the 15th century, the structure was still missing its dome.

The basic features of the dome had been designed by Arnolfo di Cambio in 1296. His brick model, (15.1 ft) high, 30.2 ft long, was standing in a side aisle of the unfinished building.  It called for an octagonal dome higher and wider than any that had ever been built, with no external buttresses to keep it from spreading and falling under its own weight.

The commitment to reject traditional Gothic buttresses had been made when Neri di Fioravanti's model was chosen over a competing one by Giovanni di Lapo Ghini.  That architectural choice, in 1367, was one of the first events of the Italian Renaissance, marking a break with the Medieval Gothic style and a return to the classic Mediterranean dome.

Neri's model depicted a massive inner dome, open at the top to admit light, like Rome's Pantheon, partly supported by the inner dome, but enclosed in a thinner outer shell, to keep out the weather. It was to stand on an unbuttressed octagonal drum. Neri's dome would need an internal defense against spreading (hoop stress), but none had yet been designed.

The building of such a masonry dome posed many technical problems. Brunelleschi looked to the great dome of the Pantheon in Rome for solutions. The dome of the Pantheon is a single shell of concrete, the formula for which had long since been forgotten.

Brunelleschi chose to follow such design and employed a double shell, made of sandstone and marble. Brunelleschi would have to build the dome out of brick, due to its light weight compared to stone and being easier to form, and with nothing under it during construction. To illustrate his proposed structural plan, he constructed a wooden and brick model with the help of Donatello and Nanni di Banco, a model which is still displayed in the Museo dell'Opera del Duomo.

A modern understanding of physical laws and the mathematical tools for calculating stresses were centuries in the future. Brunelleschi, like all cathedral builders, had to rely on intuition and whatever he could learn from the large scale models he built.

To lift 37,000 tons of material, including over 4 million bricks, Brunelleschi invented hoisting machines and lewissons for hoisting large stones. These specially designed machines and his structural innovations were Brunelleschi's chief contribution to architecture. Although he was executing an aesthetic plan made half a century earlier, it is his name, rather than Neri's, that is commonly associated with the dome.

The dome was finally completed in 1436.  Michaelangelo was born in 1475 so he would have been very familiar with the Duomo and its dome.  The colorful façade was still unfinished and would remain so until the 19th century.

A huge statue of Brunelleschi now sits outside the Palazzo dei Canonici in the Piazza del Duomo, looking thoughtfully up towards his greatest achievement, the dome that would forever dominate the panorama of Florence. It is still the largest masonry dome in the world.

This is a photo of a large Dome model.
   
Historical tools and equipment used on building sites (tackles, pulleys, levels, compasses, slings, brick molds, ropes and a cart) mainly from the 15th century, showing how construction work was carried out at the time Brunelleschi’s dome was built.
   
For his daring construction of the dome Filippo Brunelleschi had to design a series of ingenious machines to transport and raise the materials required. These were in addition to the tools and equipment already in common use, some of which are on display here to illustrate the building work started in 1420.
   
The tackles and pulleys were particularly important to raise the stones.
   
White and polychrome marble singers gallery, with bronze and vitreous paste inserts, carved by Donatello for the Cathedral between 1433 and 1438. Embellished by a frieze depicting dancing angels and by two bronze heads sculpted by the artist and possibly by Michelozzo Michelozzi. Donatello’s choir loft, like that of Luca della Robbia, on display nearby, was attached to the crossing piers of the Cathedral, above the high altar. It was sited on the south-east wall, above the Canons Sacristy, and housed the organ, and during services, the choristers.
   
 
   
An interesting stone relief:  this one of a drunkard.
   
A flutist.
   
An aviator!
   
Series of twenty-four marble reliefs, considered among the masterpieces of Florentine sculpture of the 16th century, sculpted by Baccio Bandinelli with the collaboration of Giovanni Bandini and Vincenzo de' Rossi between 1547 and 1572. These were part of the eighty-eight that adorned the exterior of the enclosure of the sixteenth-century choir of the Cathedral, designed by Bandinelli himself, and which, during the restoration of the interior of the Cathedral in 1842, were removed together with the colonnade and the colossal sculptures that decorated the altar, also by Bandinelli, that is, a God blessing, a dead Christ (today at Santa Croce) and, on the back, Adam and Eve (today at the Bargello Museum). The figures in the reliefs, reminiscent of Michelangelo's powerful anatomies in the Sistine Chapel, all vary in appearance, age, sex, pose and shape and probably depict biblical patriarchs, prophets and sibyls. Their identification with characters who lived before the coming of Christ would also symbolically correspond to their original location, outside the enclosure: here they had their backs to the main altar and therefore to the sculpture of the deposed Christ and, during mass, to the Eucharist, where for the Catholic faith the body of the Savior is truly present.
   
Located in the “Treasury” room is this magnificent altar frontal, made of silver.  Commissioned by the Arte di Calimala, the cloth merchants’ guild, and made by several generations of artists starting from 1366, these intricate assemblages of thousands of elements were the focus of the most important religious celebration of the Florentine Republic: the feast of the patron saint of the city, John the Baptist, on 24 June. On this day they were erected in the church dedicated to Saint John, namely the Baptistery.
   
Also in the "Treasury" are surviving embroideries from the set of vestments known as the Parato di San Giovanni. These are twenty-seven panels embroidered with scenes from the life of Saint John made to a design by Antonio del Pollaiolo, and originally arranged on the two dalmatics, the chasuble and the cope in white brocade which were worn by the officiating priests on the feast of the patron saint. The value of these embroideries is primarily artistic, offering an all-embracing synthesis of Florentine fifteenth-century painting, encompassing perspective, anatomy, gestural expressiveness and architectural setting. In iconographic terms they represent the most articulated cycle of images on a single subject to have been produced in Florence in the second half of the fifteenth century.
   
Fancy duds!
   
 
   

We left the Duomo Museum.

This horse and buggy driver deliberately turned his head when I tried to take a picture of him with the Duomo in the background.  Where's the love?
   
On the walk back to our hotel, Lynnette checked out some possibilities for the granddaughters.
   
Looking back at the Ponte Vecchio, a picturesque medieval arched river bridge with Roman origins, lined with jewelry & souvenir shops.
   
Proceeding alongside the Arno.
   
Another look at the Ponte Vecchio.
   
Passing the Ponte Santa Trinita.
   

We had dinner with the tour group at the Ristorante Il Profeta Firenze, a little restaurant just down the street from the Westin Excelsior.  The owner personally reviewed the menu for us.

Here Lynnette samples the "John Travolta" special.   Apparently John Travolta dined here and this is what he likes.
   
I myself tried some Italian calamari.  The presentation was great, but the calamari just had no taste.  The artichoke hearts between the calamari was pretty good though, as I recall.  I cleaned the plate, though.
   
I had heard good things about Italian steak, but again, although it looked delicious, it just had no taste, and was in dire need of seasoning.  The asparagus was very good though.  Overall, the restaurant was a very good experience:  the firendly owner, the presentation, the service, the wine, and the atmosphere made up for my own personal issue with the food.
   
 
   
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