Florence: Piazza del Duomo and Baptistery

 

Edward Hutton began his account of the Piazza del Duomo with a discussion of the ancient Baptistery. Even today, if you attend the early daily Mass, you can get in before the crowds. 

On coming into the Piazza del Duomo, perhaps from the light and space of the Lung’ Arno from the largeness of the Piazza della Signoria, one is apt to think of it as too small for the buildings which it holds, as wanting in a certain spaciousness such as the Piazza of St. Peter at Rome certainly possesses, or in the light of the meadow of Pisa; and yet this very smallness, only smallness when we consider the great buildings set there so precisely, gives it an element of beauty lacking in the great Piazza of Rome and in Pisa too—a certain delicate colour and shadow and a sense of nearness, of homeliness almost; for the shadow of the dome falls right across the city itself every morning and evening. And indeed the Piazza del Duomo of Florence is still the centre of the life of the city… 

 

This enduring vitality of a place so old, so splendid, and so beloved, is, I think, particularly manifest in the Church of S. Giovanni Battista, the Baptistery. It is the oldest building in Florence, built probably with the stones from the Temple of Mars about which Villani tells us, and almost certainly in its place; every Florentine child, fortunate at least in this, is still brought there for baptism, and received its name in the place where Dante was christened, where Ippolito Buondelmonti first saw Dianora de’ Bardi, where Donatello has laboured, which Michelangelo has loved….

 

The mere form, those octagonal walls which, so it is said, the Lombards brought into Italy, go to show that the church was used as a Baptistery from the first, though Villani speaks of it as the duomo; and indeed till 1550 it had the aspect of such a church as the Pantheon of Rome, in that it was open to the sky, so that the rain and the sunlight have fallen on the very floor trodden by so many generations. Humble and simple enough as we see it to-day before the gay splendour of the new façade of the Duomo, it has yet those great treasures which the Duomo cannot boast, the bronze doors of Andrea Pisano and of Ghiberti….

 

It is strange to find Ghiberti’s work thus completing that of Andrea Pisano, who, as it is said, had Giotto to help him, till we understand that these southern gates stood where now are the “Gates of Paradise” before the Duomo. Standing there as they used to do before Ghiberti moved them, they won for Andrea not only the admiration of the people, but the freedom of the city. To-day we come to them with the praise of Ghiberti ringing in our ears, so that in our hurry to see everything we almost pass them by; but in their simpler, and, as some may think, more sincere way, they are as lovely as anything Ghiberti ever did, and in comparing them with the great gates that supplanted them, it may be well to remind ourselves that each has its own merit in its own fashion.

 

 

###

 

 

Edward Hutton: Florence and Northern Tuscany with Genoa, second edition, London, 1908. Pp. 169-171.