Museo dell’Opera del Duomo
Map: Duomo Museum—Ground Floor
Brunelleschi’s dome, Ghiberti’s bronze doors, and Donatello’s statues—these creations define the 1400s (the Quattrocento) in Florence, when the city blossomed and classical arts were reborn. All are featured at the Duomo Museum, plus a Michelangelo Pietà that was intended as his sculptural epitaph. While copies now decorate the exteriors of the Duomo (cathedral), Baptistery, and Campanile (bell tower, called Giotto’s Tower), the original sculptured masterpieces of the complex are now restored and displayed safely indoors, filling the Duomo Museum. This museum is a delight, though it’s overlooked by most visitors to Florence. There’s never a line.
(See “Heart of Florence” map, here.)
Cost: €10 ticket covers all Duomo sights, covered by Firenze Card.
Hours: Mon-Sat 9:00-19:30, Sun 9:00-13:45, last entry 45 minutes before closing. This is one of the few museums in Florence that’s open every Monday. It also stays open later than most.
Renovation: The museum is undergoing a major renovation until fall 2015. In the meantime, it will remain open, though some rooms will be closed and some works sent on loan. Fortunately, the Gates of Paradise and Michelangelo’s Pietà will remain on display.
Getting There: The museum is across the street from the Duomo on the east side, at Via del Proconsolo 9.
Information: Tel. 055-282-226 or 055-230-7885, www.operaduomo.firenze.it
Tours: The audioguide costs €5. Guided English tours are generally offered daily in summer for €3 (as they use volunteer guides, schedules vary—stop by or call to ask).
Length of This Tour: Allow 1.5 hours. With limited time, focus on Ghiberti’s doors, Michelangelo’s Pietà, Donatello’s sculptures, and the pair of finely carved choir lofts (cantorie).
Photography: Allowed, but no flash around paintings.
Starring: Brunelleschi, Ghiberti, Donatello, and Michelangelo.
Ghiberti’s doors are on the ground floor, while Donatello’s statues are on the first floor. The Pietà is on a landing halfway between floors.
(See “Duomo Museum—Ground Floor” map, here.)
• Browse the first few small rooms.
Roman sarcophagi, Etruscan fragments, a chronological chart, and broken Baptistery statues attest to the 2,000-year history of Florence’s Duomo, Baptistery, and Campanile. The Baptistery was likely built on the site of a pagan Roman temple. It was flanked by a humble church that, by the 1200s, was not big enough to contain the exuberant spirit of a city growing rich from the wool trade and banking. In 1296, the cornerstone was laid for a huge church—today’s Duomo—intended to be the biggest in Christendom.
• The first large room features statues from the original facade (1296-1587). You’ll see a tall, seated pope and a cheery Virgin-and-Child known as the...
The architect Arnolfo di Cambio designed this statue to sit in a niche on the church’s exterior. The building was dedicated to Mary—starry-eyed over the birth of Baby Jesus. She sits, crowned like a chess-set queen, above the main door, framed with a dazzling mosaic halo. She’s accompanied (to our right) by St. Zenobius, Florence’s first bishop during Roman times, whose raised hand consecrates the formerly pagan ground as Christian.
Despised by Dante for his meddling in politics, this pope paid 3,000 florins to get his image in a box seat on the facade. His XL shirt size made him look correct when viewed from below. Though the statue is stylized, Arnolfo realistically shows the pope’s custom-made, extra-tall hat and bony face. (Most of the room’s statues are straight-backed, to hang on the facade.)
• On the long wall opposite the Madonna, find...
A hundred years later, Arnolfo’s medieval facade became a showcase for Renaissance sculptors.
John sits gazing at a distant horizon, his tall head rising high above his massive body. This visionary foresees a new age...and the coming Renaissance. The right hand is massive—as relaxed as though it were dangling over the back of a chair, but full of powerful tension. Like the mighty right hand of Michelangelo’s David, and the beard of Michelangelo’s Moses, this work is a hundred years ahead of its time.
At 22 years old, Donatello (c. 1386-1466) sculpted this work just before becoming a celebrity for his inspiring statue of St. George (original in the Bargello, copy on the exterior of the Orsanmichele Church). Donatello, like most early Renaissance artists, was a blue-collar worker, raised as a workshop apprentice among knuckle-dragging musclemen. He proudly combined physical skill with technical know-how to create beauty (Art + Science = Renaissance Beauty). His statues are thinkers with big hands who can put theory into practice.
• To the right of the Madonna, in an adjoining room, find a...
In Renaissance times, this is what the Duomo would have looked like. (The model, by Franco Gizdulich, is 1:20.) The glassy-eyed Madonna was over the main doorway, Pope Boniface was to the left, high up, and Donatello’s St. John was to the left, farther down. You can see that only the bottom third was ever completed with marble facing—the upper part was bare brick. Had Arnolfo’s design been completed, the three-story facade would have looked much like today’s colorful, Neo-Gothic version, with pointed arches and white, pink, and green marble, studded with statues and gleaming with gold mosaics. In 1587, the still-incomplete facade was torn down.
• Up a few steps at the end of the long statue room is a...
These medieval altarpieces, which once adorned chapels and altars inside the Duomo, show saints and angels suspended in a gold never-never land. In the adjoining room, the ornate reliquaries hold bones and objects of the saints (Peter’s chains, Jerome’s jawbone, and so on), many bought from a single, slick 14th-century con artist preying on medieval superstition.
In the 1400s, tastes changed, and these symbols of crude medievalism were purged from the Duomo and stacked in storage. Soon artists replaced the golden heavenly scenes with flesh-and-blood humans who inhabited the physical world of rocks, trees, and sky...the Renaissance.
• Go into the little chapel at the far end of this room. The first glass case on the right as you enter the chapel contains...
The severed index finger of the beheaded prophet is the most revered relic of all the holy body parts in this museum.
• Pass through a few more rooms into the ground-floor courtyard, where you’ll find...
The Renaissance began in 1401 with a citywide competition to build new doors for the Baptistery. Lorenzo Ghiberti (c. 1378-1455) won the job and built the doors (now on the Baptistery’s north side), which everyone loved. He then was hired to make another set of doors—these panels—for the main entrance facing the Duomo. These bronze “Gates of Paradise” (1425-1452) revolutionized the way Renaissance people saw the world around them.
The original 10 panels from the Gates of Paradise were moved from the Baptistery to the museum to better preserve them. (Copies now adorn the Baptistery itself—see the graphic on here for the original layout.) But even indoors, corrosive oxides gathered between the bronze panels and their gilding. After years of restoration, the doors are now back on display. The panels are under glass to protect against natural light and gassed with nitrogen to protect them from oxygen and humidity.
• Here’s a description of a few of the panels:
With just the depth of a thumbnail, Ghiberti creates a temple in the round that’s inhabited by workers. This round temple wowed Florence. Armed with the rules of perspective, Ghiberti rendered reality with a mathematical precision we don’t normally impose on what we see, when our eyes and minds settle for ballpark estimates about relative size and distance. For Florentines, suddenly the world acquired a whole new dimension—depth.
Ghiberti tells several stories in one panel—a common medieval technique—using different thicknesses in the relief. In the sketchy background (very low relief), God in a bubble conducts the Creation. In the center (a little thicker), Eve springs from Adam’s side. Finally, in the lower left (in high relief), an elegantly robed God pulls Adam, as naked as the day he was born, from the mud.
Ghiberti welcomed the innovations of other artists. See the angel flying through an arch (right side). This arch is in very low relief but still looks fully 3-D because it’s rendered sideways, using the perspective tricks of painting. Ghiberti learned the technique from one of his employees, the young Donatello.
The “background” arches and the space they create are as interesting as the scenes themselves. At the center is the so-called vanishing point on the distant horizon, where all the arches and floor tiles converge. This calm center gives us an eye-level reference point for all the figures. Those closest to us, at the bottom of the panel, are big and clearly defined. Distant figures are smaller, fuzzier, and higher up.
Ghiberti has placed us about 20 feet away from the scene, part of this casual crowd of holy people—some with their backs to us—milling around an arcade.
On one mountain, we see Cain and Abel offering a sacrifice at the top, Adam waving at the bottom, and the first murder in between. In early panels such as this one (pictured at right) Ghiberti used only a sketchy landscape as a backdrop for human activities.
Ghiberti, the illegitimate son of a goldsmith, labored all his working life (more than 50 years) on the two Baptistery doors. Their execution was a major manufacturing job, requiring a large workshop of artists and artisans for each stage of the process: making the door frames that hold the panels, designing and making models of the panels (forming them in wax in order to cast them in bronze), gilding the panels (by bathing them in powdered gold dissolved in mercury, then heating until the gold and bronze blended), polishing the panels, mounting them, installing the doors...and signing paychecks for everyone along the way. Ghiberti was as much businessman as artist.
The receding arches stretch into infinity, giving the airy feeling that we can see forever. All of the arches and steps converge at the center of the panel, where the two monarchs meet, uniting their respective peoples. Ghiberti’s subject was likely influenced by the warm ecumenical breeze blowing through Florence in 1439, as religious leaders convened here in an attempt to reunite the eastern (Constantinople) and western (Rome) realms of Christendom.
If the Renaissance began in 1401 with Ghiberti’s doors, it ended in 1555 with Michelangelo’s Pietà.
• From the courtyard, look for two staircases almost side by side. Ascend the old (not new) staircase to the first landing, where you’ll find...
The aging Michelangelo (1475-1564) designed his own tomb, with this as the centerpiece. He was depressed by old age, the recent death of his soul mate, and the grim reality that by sculpting this statue he was writing his own obituary. Done on his own dime, it’s fair to consider this an introspective and very personal work.
Three mourners tend the broken body of the crucified Christ. We see Mary, his mother (the shadowy figure on our right); Mary Magdalene (on the left, polished up by a pupil); and Nicodemus, the converted Pharisee, whose face is clearly that of Michelangelo himself. The polished body of Christ stands out from the unfinished background. Michelangelo (as Nicodemus), who spent a lifetime bringing statues to life by “freeing” them from the stone, looks down at what could be his final creation, the once-perfect body of Renaissance Man that is now twisted, disfigured, and dead.
Seen face-on, the four figures form a powerful geometric shape: a circle inside a triangle, split down the middle by Christ’s massive (but very dead) arm. Seen from the right side, they seem to interact with each other, their sketchy faces changing emotions from grief to melancholy to peaceful acceptance.
Fifty years earlier, a confident Michelangelo had worked here on these very premises, skillfully carving David from an imperfect block. But he hated this marble for the Pietà; it was hard and grainy, and gave off sparks when hit wrong. (The chisel grooves in the base remind us of the sheer physical effort it must have taken for a senior citizen to sculpt this.) Worst of all, his housekeeper kept bugging him with the same question that Pope Julius II used to ask about the Sistine Chapel—“When will you finish?” Pushed to the edge, Michelangelo grabbed a hammer and attacked the flawed marble statue, hacking away and breaking off limbs, then turned to the servant and said, “There! It’s finished!” (An assistant later repaired some of the damage, but cracks are still visible in Christ’s left arm and only leg.)
• Continue upstairs to the first floor, entering a large room lined with statues and two balconies. Donatello’s prophets are at the far end.
(See “Duomo Museum—First Floor” map, here.)
The room displays two choir boxes (cantorie) and the original 16 statues (by several sculptors) from the bell tower’s third story, where copies stand today.
Donatello did several statues of the prophets, plus some others in collaboration. (Some of the statues may be under restoration during your visit.)
Donatello (“Little Donato”) invented the Renaissance style that Michelangelo would later perfect—powerful statues that are ultra-realistic, even ugly, sculpted in an “unfinished” style by an artist known for experimentation and his prickly, brooding personality. Both men were famous but lived like peasants, married only to their work.
Donatello’s signature piece shows us the wiry man beneath the heavy mantle of a prophet. Habakkuk’s rumpled cloak falls down the front, dividing the body lengthwise. From the deep furrows emerges a bare arm with well-defined tendons and that powerful right hand. His long, muscled neck leads to a bald head (the Italians call the statue Lo Zuccone, meaning “pumpkinhead”).
The ugly face, with several days’ growth of beard, crossed eyes, and tongue-tied mouth, looks crazed. This is no confident Charlton Heston prophet, but a man who’s spent too much time alone, fasting in the wilderness, searching for his calling, and who now returns to babble his vision on a street corner.
Donatello, the eccentric prophet of a new style, identified with this statue, talking to it, swearing at it, yelling at it: “Speak!”
• Nearby, look for...
Watching Jerusalem burn in the distance, the ignored prophet reflects on why the Israelites wouldn’t listen when he warned them that the Babylonian kings would conquer the city. He purses his lips bitterly, and his downturned mouth is accentuated by his plunging neck muscle and sagging shoulders. The folds in the clothes are very deep, evoking the anger, sorrow, and disgust that Jeremiah feels but cannot share, as it is too late.
Movement, realism, and human drama were Donatello’s great contributions to sculpture.
The two marble balconies in this room are choir lofts. They once sat above the sacristy doors of the Duomo. Donatello’s is on the right (from the entrance); Luca della Robbia’s on the left. Della Robbia’s is a reconstruction from casts, with the original 10 panels displayed below.
After almost 150 years of construction, the cathedral was nearly done, and the Opera del Duomo, the workshop in charge, began preparing the interior for the celebration. Brunelleschi hired a little-known sculptor, 30-year-old Luca della Robbia, to make this balcony choir-box (cantoria) for singers in the cathedral. It sums up the exuberance of the Quattrocento. The panels are a celebration of music, song, and dance performed by toddlers, children, and teenagers.
The cantoria brings Psalm 150 (“Praise ye the Lord”) to life like a YouTube video. Starting in the upper left, the banner reads “Laudate D.N.M.”—“Praise the Lord”—while children laugh and dance to the sound of trumpets (“sono Tubae”) and guitars, autoharps, and tambourines (“Psaltero... Cythera... Timpano”). In the next level down, kids dance ring-around-the-rosy, a scene in the round on an almost-flat surface, showing front, back, and in-between poses. At bottom right, the Psalm ends: “Everybody praise the Lord!” Della Robbia’s choir box was a triumph, a celebration of Florence’s youthful boom time.
The Della Robbia family is best known for their colorful glazed terra-cotta, such as the round “Lamb of God” panel (over your left shoulder), by Luca’s nephew.
If Della Robbia’s balcony looks like afternoon recess, Donatello’s looks like an all-night rave. Donatello’s figures are sketchier, murky, and filled with frenetic activity, as the dancing kids hurl themselves around the balcony. Imagine candles lighting this as the scenes seem to come to life. If the dance feels almost pagan, there’s a reason.
Recently returned from a trip to Rome, Donatello carved in the style of classical friezes of dancing putti (chubby, playful toddlers). This choir box stood in a dark area of the Duomo, so Donatello chose colorful mosaics and marbles to catch the eye, while purposely leaving the dancers unfinished and shadowy, tangled figures flitting inside the columns. In the dim light, worshippers swore they saw them move.
• Beneath Donatello’s cantoria is a statue of...
Carved from white poplar, originally painted with realistic colors (like the medieval crucifix displayed in the next room), this statue is less a Renaissance work of beauty than a medieval object of intense devotion.
Mary Magdalene—the prostitute rescued from the streets by Jesus—folds her hands in humble prayer. Her once-beautiful face and body have been scarred by fasting, repentance, and the fires of her own remorse. The matted hair sticks to her face; veins and tendons line the emaciated arms and neck. The rippling hair suggests emotional turmoil within. But from her hollow, tired eyes, a new beauty shines, an enlightened soul that doesn’t rely on the external beauty of human flesh.
The man who helped rebirth the classical style now shocked Florence by turning his back on it. Picking up a knife, he experimented in the difficult medium of woodcarving, where subtlety can get lost when the wood splits off in larger-than-wanted slivers.
Sixty-five-year-old Donatello had just returned to Florence, after years away. His city had changed. Friends were dying (Brunelleschi died before they could reconcile after a bitter fight), favorite pubs were overrun with frat boys, and Florence was gaga over Greek gods in pretty, gleaming marble. Donatello fell into a five-year funk, completing only two statues, including this one.
• Enter the adjoining room (to the right as you face Mary Magdalene).
The exquisite half-ton silver altarpiece honoring John the Baptist, which dominates this room, once stood in the Baptistery. Each of the immaculately restored silver panels depicts an episode from John the Baptist’s life: birth, baptizing Jesus, and so on. Around the right side are his execution and the presentation of his disembodied head to Herod during a feast.
• Pass back through the large room of the cantorie and into the next room. Work clockwise from the entrance.
These 28 hexagonal and 28 diamond-shaped, blue-glazed panels decorated the Duomo’s Campanile, seven per side (where copies stand today). The original design scheme was perhaps Giotto’s, but his successor, Andrea Pisano, and assistants executed most of the panels.
The panels celebrate technology, showing workers, inventors, and thinkers. Allegorically, they depict humanity’s long march to “civilization”—a blend of art and science, brain and brawn. But realistically, they’re snapshots of that industrious generation that helped Florence bounce back ferociously from the Black Death of 1348.
The lower, hexagonal panels (reading clockwise from the entrance) show God starting the chain of creation by inventing (1) man and (2) woman, then (3) Adam and Eve continuing the work, (4) Jabal learning to domesticate sheep, (5) Jubal blowing a horn, inventing music...
• Continuing along the next wall...
(6) Tubalcain the blacksmith and (7) Noah inventing wine and Miller Time. (8) An astronomer sights along a quadrant to chart the heavens and the (round, tilted-on-axis, pre-Columbian) earth, (9) a master builder supervises his little apprentices building a brick wall, (10) a doctor holds a flask of urine to the light for analysis (yes, that’s what it is), and so on.
• Skip ahead to the fourth wall, the second panel.
(20) The invention of sculpture, as a man chisels a figure to life.
The upper diamond-shaped panels, of marble on blue majolica (tin-glazed pottery tinged blue with copper sulfate), add religion (sacraments and virtues) to the civilization equation.
• Enter the next, narrow room to find tools, scaffolding, and, at the end of the corridor, a wooden model of the cathedral dome’s lantern.
Look at this model of the dome’s top portion (or look out the window—if it’s open—at the real thing). Brunelleschi’s dome, a feat of engineering that was both functional and beautiful, put mathematics in stone. It rises 330 feet from the ground, with eight white, pointed-arch ribs, filled in with red brick and capped with a “lantern” (cupola) to hold it all in place.
In designing the dome, Brunelleschi faced a number of challenges: The dome had to cover a gaping 140-foot hole in the roof of the church (a drag on rainy Sundays), a hole too wide to be spanned by the wooden scaffolding that traditionally supported a dome under construction. (An earlier architect suggested supporting the dome with a great mound of dirt inside the church...filled with coins, so peasants would later cart it away for free.) In addition, the eight-sided “drum” that the dome was to rest on was too weak to support its weight, and there were no side buildings on the church on which to attach Gothic-style buttresses.
The solution was a dome within a dome, leaving a hollow space between to make the structure lighter. And the dome had to be self-supporting, both while being built and when finished, so as not to require buttresses.
Brunelleschi used wooden models such as these to demonstrate his ideas to skeptical approval committees.
Although no scaffolding supported the dome itself, the stonemasons needed exterior scaffolding to stand on as they worked. Support timbers were stuck into postholes in the drum (some are visible on the church today).
The dome rose in rings. First, the workers stacked a few blocks of white marble to create part of the ribs, then connected the ribs with horizontal crosspieces before filling in the space with red brick, in a herringbone pattern. When the ring was complete and self-supporting, they’d move the scaffolding up and do another section.
The dome weighs 80 million pounds—as much as the entire population of Florence—so Brunelleschi had to design special tools and machines to lift and work all that stone. (The lantern alone—which caps the dome—is a marble building nearly as tall as the Baptistery.) You’ll see sun-dried bricks, brick molds, rope, a tool belt, compasses, stone pincers, and various pulleys for lifting. Brunelleschi also designed a machine (not on display) that used horses to turn a shaft that reeled in rope, lifting heavy loads.
The dome was completed in 16 short years, capping 150 years of construction on the church. Brunelleschi enjoyed the dedication ceremonies, but he died before the lantern was completed. His legacy is a dome that stands as a proud symbol of man’s ingenuity, proving that art and science can unite to make beauty.
• Facing the lantern model, find...
Filippo Brunelleschi (1377-1446) was uniquely qualified to create the dome. Trained in sculpture, he gave it up in disgust after losing the Baptistery-door gig. In Rome, he visualized placing the Pantheon on top of Florence’s Duomo, and dissected the Pantheon’s mathematics and engineering.
Back home, he astounded Florence with a super-realistic painting of the Baptistery, as seen from the Duomo’s front steps. Florentines lined up to see the painting (now lost) displayed side by side with the real thing, marveling at the 3-D realism. (Brunelleschi’s mathematics of linear perspective were later expanded and popularized by Alberti.)
In 1420 Brunelleschi was declared capomaestro of the dome project. He was a jack-of-all-trades and now master of all as well, overseeing every aspect of the dome, the lantern, and the machinery to build them. Despite all his planning, it’s clear from documentary evidence that he was making it up as he went along, exuding confidence to workers and city officials while privately improvising.
• The models you’ll find two rooms farther along represent the...
The church wasn’t done. In 1587, the medieval facade by Arnolfo was considered hopelessly outdated and torn down like so much old linoleum. But work on a replacement never got off the ground, and the front of the church sat bare for nearly 300 years while church fathers debated proposal after proposal (like the models in this room) by many famous architects. Most versions champion the Renaissance style to match Brunelleschi’s dome, rather than Gothic to fit the church.
• Two rooms later, we reach the conclusion to the Duomo’s long history.
Finally, in the 1800s, as Italy was unifying and filled with a can-do spirit, there was a push to finish the facade. Emilio De Fabris (portrait) won a competition, and began to build a neo-Gothic facade that echoed the original work of Arnolfo. The new-old facade was dedicated in 1887. Notice that even De Fabris changed designs as he went—the spikes along the roofline in some of the designs are not there today.
Critics may charge that De Fabris’ facade is too retro, but it was the style of the church beloved by Ghiberti, Donatello, Brunelleschi, and the industrious citizens of Florence’s Quattrocento, who saw it as Florence’s finest art gallery.
If you climb the stairs to the sparse third-floor landing, you might see lab-coated workers busy in the restoration studio. They belong to the Opera del Duomo, the organization that does the continual work required to keep the cathedral’s art in good repair (opera is Italian for “work”).
For another behind-the-scenes peek, make one more stop after leaving the Duomo Museum: Head to the left around the back of the Duomo to find Via dello Studio (near the south transept), then walk a block toward the river to #23a (freestanding yellow house on the right; see map on here). You can look through the open doorway of the Opera del Duomo art studio and see workers sculpting new statues, restoring old ones, or making exact copies. They’re carrying on an artistic tradition that dates back to the days of Brunelleschi. The “opera” continues.