Florence`s Museo dell`Opera del Duomo: New and Double the Size

n° 374 - marzo 2016
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Florence’s Museo dell’Opera del
Duomo: New and Double the Size
Donatello, Cantoria
Now on more than 5,500 square meters, the largest collection – and the
highest expression – of Florentine monumental sculpture
The new Museo dell’Opera del Duomo
opened in Florence last autumn and
now presents its masterpiece collection in stunning spaces, some truly
enormous (up to forty metres in length,
with six- to eighteen-metre ceilings),
to offer visitors marvellous views of
the exhibits as they wend their ways
through twenty-five rooms.
Founded in 1891, the Museo dell’Opera del Duomo is home to the
world’s largest collection of Florentine monumental sculpture: medieval
and Renaissance statues and reliefs
in marble, bronze and silver by Arnolfo
di Cambio, Andrea Pisano, Lorenzo
Ghiberti, Donatello, Luca della Robbia, Antonio del Pollaiolo, Andrea
del Verrocchio, Michelangelo Buonarroti and others. Almost all of these
works were created for the exteriors
and interiors of the ecclesiastical structures facing the museum: the Baptis-
tery of San Giovanni, the Cathedral
of Santa Maria del Fiore (Duomo),
Giotto’s Bell Tower; that is, the buildings making up what is today called
the ‘Grande Museo del Duomo’.
Originally, only two of the museum’s
rooms were open to the public; over
time, their number increased to eighteen but the space was still patently
insufficient to contain the collection’s
hundreds of works: the largest pieces
therefore remained relegated to the
repositories. In the 1990s it became
apparent that yet other works, removed from monuments for restoration, would in the future have to be
placed in the museum for conservation reasons – but where?
In 1997, the Opera del Duomo was
offered the opportunity to purchase
a vast structure next to the old museum: 3,000 square metres to add to
the existing 2,500. Built in 1778 as
2
above Arnolfo di Cambio: Model of the old facade
of the Florence cathedral
right Michelangelo: Pietà
a theatre, the building had progressively fallen into disrepair until, at
the time of acquisition, it was being
used as a parking garage.
One glance at the 36-metre length of
the old theatre, its 20-metre height
and like width, and we knew: here,
it would be possible to reconstruct
the ancient facade of the Duomo designed by Arnolfo di Cambio (and
never completed) as we know it only
from a drawing made at the time it
was dismantled in 1587. The new
spaces proved adequate to exhibit the
upwards of 100 existing fragments of
the medieval facade: forty statues,
many monumental in scale, and some
sixty elements from the external
cladding with sculpted and mosaic
decoration.
Thus, in accordance with the plan by
Florentine architects Adolfo Natalini, Piero Guicciardini and Marco
Magni, one whole side of the new
museum’s first room – the Room of
3
Paradise – is occupied by a huge model
of the 14th-century facade of the
cathedral, with the statues placed as
shown in the 16th-century drawing.
Across from the facade are Lorenzo
Ghiberti’s Gates of Paradise and the
other two bronze doors of the Baptistery with, above each, the monumental statuary groups sculpted in
the 16th century and intended for
these positions. The two large Roman sarcophagi which stood outside
the Baptistery throughout the Middle Ages and the Renaissance are on
exhibit in the same room.
This grandiose hall, evoking the magnificence of the cathedral square, is
followed by three smaller rooms: a
Chapel of Relics showcasing masterpieces of medieval, Renaissance and
Baroque goldsmithery; a room of votive altarpieces, with at the centre Donatello’s Penitent Magdalene; and a
sort of sanctuary, in Tuscan grey stone,
housing Michelangelo’s next-to-last
sculpture, the mysterious Pietà, possibly intended for the artist’s tomb,
depicting him placing the Dead Christ
in the arms of the Virgin Mother.
On the first floor, a 36-meter gallery
hosts sculptures created for Giotto’s
bell tower – sixteen life-size works by
Andrea Pisano and Donatello and
their workshops – and almost sixty
carved panels, some by Luca della
Robbia. Along one side of the gallery,
a series of apertures look down onto
the Room of the First Facade. A second gallery, twenty metres in length
and six in height, is devoted to
Brunelleschi and the construction of
his dome: 15th-century wooden models and period building materials and
tools, Brunelleschi’s death mask and,
in a commemorative niche, the 16thcentury portrait of the architect – all
in the very rooms he occupied during the works.
On the second floor is yet another
gallery exhibiting late 16th- and early
17th-century artworks documenting
the Grand Duke’s attempts to ‘modernise’ the cathedral, large-scale wooden
models of the projects by Bernardo
Buontalenti, Giovan Antonio Dosio,
Gherardo Silvani and others for a new
facade to replace the one dismantled
in 1587, as well as the elaborate scenery
for the wedding of Grand Duke Ferdinand I to Princess Christina of Lorraine in 1589.
In the rooms on the first floor of
the old museum, a new layout evokes
the interior of the cathedral with a
selection of medieval and Renaissance
gold-ground panels and Luca della
Robbia’s and Donatello’s choir lofts;
other rooms house twenty-five reliefs
sculpted by Baccio Bandinelli for the
16th-century choir, the Baptistery’s
silver altar and the monumental silver Crucifix by Antonio del Pollaiolo.
Accompanying these pieces are liturgical textiles of particular importance,
including twenty-seven embroidered
panels, also designed by Pollaiolo in
the 1460s, for the sumptuous décors
for the feast of the city’s patron Saint
John the Baptist.
The last rooms document the multidecade process that culminated, in
the 1880s, with completion of the
neo-Gothic facade of the Duomo
as we see it today: drawing, paintings,
marble statues, casts and models recreate the variegated architectural and
decorative panorama of the Risorgimento, the period of Italian unification. Florence was, in fact, the capital of Italy from 1865 until 1871,
when the seat of government was
moved to Rome, and the new facade
of the Duomo was the first important monument of the new Italian
State.
Timothy Verdon
Director of the Museo dell’Opera
del Duomo of Florence
Photos: Antonio Quattrone
Donatello: Penitent Magdalene
following restoration)