Florence’s New Cathedral Museum Unveiled

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The prophet Jeramiah by Donatello in the Cathedral Museum

If Florence is the center of Italian Renaissance art, the new Duomo Museum, which preserves treasures from the Cathedral complex of Santa Maria del Fiore and opens to the public on October 29, with free admission from 2:30 to 6 pm, is truly the heart of the art.  Like all hearts, it is one with many secrets.

The first lies in numbers: 563 names engraved in stone in the Wall of the Artists near the museum entrance, those have worked on the Cathedral complex over the past 850 years.  The Opera del Duomo, or Florence Cathedral Works, was founded in 1296 by the Florentine Republic to oversee the building of the Cathedral complex.

The original Museum of the Opera del Duomo was founded on the site of the stonework’s warehouse in 1891 to house the sculptures that were removed for remodeling or that needed to be stored indoors.

The many craftsmen engaged had access to an area where the immense quantities of marble and other materials used for building and embellishing the Cathedral and adjacent buildings were stored.  It was there that Michelangelo sculpted his celebrated David from abandoned block of pure Carrara marble, originally intended to placed near the roofline on the Cathedral’s exterior.

In the eighteenth century, part of the Opera warehouse became a theater, the Teatro degli Intrepidi.  Not distinguished by good acoustics, it was torn down during WWI and turned into a parking garage before the Opera del Duomo purchased the space in the 1990s to expand and completely renovate the museum.

Evolving out of the original theatrical setting, the new museum design features a monumental stage set in the form of a four-story life size replica of the original Cathedral façade as it looked before it was torn down in 1586-87.  Forty of the marble statues from the 14th and 15th centuries sculpted for the façade by Arnolfo di Cambio, Donatello, Nanni di Banco and others have been placed in their original positions. Those on the top tier are resin and marble dust replicas; the originals are found below at eye level.  The statues in this vast recreated Piazza are the actors on the architectural stage, engaging in a spirited dialogue with each other through time and space.

On the opposite side of the room, visitors come face to face with Ghiberti’s monumental bronze doors from the Baptistery:  the Gates of Paradise and the North Doors. After 400 years, according to Duomo Museum director Timothy Verdon, the Gates of Paradise face the Cathedral facade as it looked in Ghiberti’s day, re-establishing a visual and iconographic harmony that was lost for over four centuries.

Virtually a secret is the fact that the zone between the Cathedral and Baptistery was known as “paradise,” for which its most famous doors are named.  The Cathedral square was also an open-air museum for Roman sarcophagi, serving as tutorials in visual classicism and realism to the pioneers of the Renaissance style.  These artists were creating works of art “più bello non si può” (“as beautiful as can be”), as stipulated by their contracts for art works to decorate the Duomo, Bell Tower and Baptistery to rival the majestic Cathedral squares in Pisa and Siena.

Ghiberti’s North Doors, the first set of doors he designed for the Baptistery, have been newly restored, and they are a revelation. The removal of centuries of dirt and incrustation has revealed another secret; original gold, along with incredible naturalistic details visible for the first time in decades, such the tiny insects and animals which populate the decorative frames surrounding the scenes. There is also a bronze self-portrait of the young Ghiberti.

The monumental doors are new additions made possible by the incorporation of the former theatre; the Duomo Museum has more than doubled the previous exhibition capacity — over 750 pieces are now on display.

Directly opposite the wall of artists at the entrance is a large plaque with the names of the architects and technicians responsible for the new museum as well as almost 50 individual conservators and restoration firms (including, besides the majority of Italians, three French natives, three Japanese, two Americans and a German) who worked to bring new life to sculptures, paintings, drawings, textiles, and precious liturgical objects.  The venue for where restorers often carried out their delicate was often at “Art Defender,” a high tech storage facility with the security of a Swiss bank in Calenzano.

The museum itinerary continues on the ground floor where its works of greatest spiritual significance are located.  Donatello carved his Penitent Mary Magdalene (1453-55) to show a woman devoured by years of fasting and material deprivation, her wasted figure seemingly barely able to stand.  But her rapt gaze and outstretched hands emanate a spiritual strength sure to enthral the viewer.

The Magdalene also became a symbol of the resilience of the Florentine people themselves during times of hardship, especially so during the devastation flood in Florence in 1966, when photographs of the statue covered in mud, a stricken survivor, acted as a magnet drawing people from around the globe to come to the city’s aid.

Michelangelo’s Florence Pietà, carved over a period of eight years from 1547 to 1555, was originally intended by the sculptor for his own funerary monument in Santa Croce.  But the aging sculptor, during a period of intense depression following the death of his friend and muse, poet Vittoria Colonna, became dissatisfied with the piece.

According to Vasari and other contemporary biographers, when a vein in the marble caused a crack to open up in the Christ figure, in a fit of rage Michelangelo tried to smash the statue to pieces with a hammer. He succeeded in completely destroying Christ’s left leg; his pupil, Tiberio Calcagni, eventually completed the poetic work.

Donatello’s and Luca Della Robbia’s cantorie, the choir galleries originally located over the cathedral’s sacristy doors are on display upstairs. Replicas of the bronze spiritelli or little spirits sculpted by Donatello now mischievously perch atop the cast of Luca Della Robbia’s Cantoria.  A never-before-seen treasure is a gilded and painted cross, attributed to Paolo Uccello, recently rediscovered in the sacristy of the Duomo.  This is exhibited close to vestments with embroidered panels designed by Antonio Del Pollaiuolo.

The Duomo Museum, located at Piazza Duomo 9, will be open seven days a week 9 am to 7 pm; last entrance at 6 pm. Admission is part of a cumulative 15 euro ticket valid for 24 hours fallowing access to the Cathedral crypt, Baptistery, Bell Tower and Cupola.

Pope Francis will be able to bestow his special blessing on the completely renovated museum during his historic visit to Florence on November 10, in conjunction with the National Ecclesiastical Convention, which will be held in the city from Nov. 9 – 13. Overcoming floods, pestilence, pollutions and crowds of tourists, the modern and innovative Museum, the Opera’s most ambitious undertaking since the Cathedral’s façade was completed in the 1870s, proudly stands at the heart of art.  (elizabeth wicks/additional reporting by rosanna cirigliano)