A Brief History of the Florence's Cathedral.
The Republic of Florence began to plan it's cathedral in the late 1200's AD, when Dante was just a kid, to replace the old cathedral that was too small for the growing city!
The government of Florence raised money to pay for their new cathedral with a tax on people's wills. The new church was very big - it is the fourth biggest church in the world - which made it's construction very difficult. In fact it was so big that their was a huge whole where the dome is now...because they didn't have the technology to cover such a large opening!
Arnolfo di Cambio, the first architect to work on the Duomo (Duomo means Cathedral in Italian), designed the duomo in the Gothic style, with a main nave and two side aisles, and an apse in the back. But after di Cambio died in 1302, and a new group of men took over the government of Florence, work stopped for a long time.
In 1334, the artist Giotto agreed to work on the Duomo, but only had time to build the campanile (bell-tower) before he died three years later in 1337.
Pisano then took over as the architect, but when a terrible plague killed thousands of people in Florence in 1348, work stopped again. (This was the plague that killed many of Boccaccio's friends and family).
Twenty-seven years later, in 1375, workmen actually tore down the old cathedral and began building the new one, somewhat modernized from the original plan which was now almost a hundred years old. In 1418, with most of the cathedral built, Brunelleschi designed a great dome to go over the high altar at the crossing (where the transept crossed the nave), and worked out how to build it.
The cathedral was basically finished in 1436, even though the red, white, and green marble on the outside wasn't finished until four hundred years later. Also, the Medici family was one of the biggest supporters of Brunelleschi and encouraged the design and construction from the very beginning.
On the inside, there are fresco paintings by Paolo Uccello.
The Baptistry:
This is where people were baptized in medieval Florence. The building stands on top of an earlier Roman building, and it is thought that there was probably an earlier baptistery built here around 500 AD.
The octagonal baptistry you see next to the Duomo was built in the Romanesque style around 1100 AD. The outside is covered with patterns of red, white, and green marble. The architect most likely got his patterning from earlier buildings from the Islamic Empire, across the Mediterranean from Florence, like the Great Mosque at Cordoba or the Dome of the Rock mosque in Jerusalem, both built in the 700's.
The inside of the baptistry is decorated with mosaics from the 1200's. Some of them were made by visiting artists from Venice, and others by artists from Florence. One of the Florentine artists was the famous Cimabue.
The baptistry boasts fancy bronze doors on three sides. One set of doors was molded, using lost wax casting, by Pisano in 1330 AD. The other two sets of doors were molded by Ghiberti in the 1400's.
Ghiberti carved the first set of doors when he was only 23 years old.
Just some of the many interesting stories that make Florence what it is today. Now you know what you're taking pictures of...:)
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Duomo Firenze
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Florence's baptistery
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Things to do in Florence
By Admin Apartments Florence (1/9/2009 4:22:06 PM, in Holidays in Florence, read 4,175 times)
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