Episode 28: Florence – Florence Cathedral

Buongiorno, I’m Dr. Rocky Ruggiero. Join me in Rebuilding the Renaissance and making art and history come to life.

Welcome to the Rebuilding the Renaissance podcast, your guide to the art and history of Italy from the glory of Rome to the magnificence of the Renaissance. Now here’s your host, Dr. Rocky Ruggiero.

Buongiorno, everyone. The subject of this podcast is the Great Cathedral of Florence, which is technically referred to as Florence Cathedral, also as the Duomo of Florence, then by its dedication, which is to Santa Maria del Fiore.

The architect was named Arnolfo di Cambio. The year in which construction began is 1296. The patron of the Great Cathedral was the Commune of Florence, and technically the architectural style of the building is gothic.

Let’s unpack all of this information. Now, you may remember from my podcast about Siena Cathedral, that in order for a church to qualify as a cathedral, it has to have a bishop or higher in terms of ecclesiastical ranking, that the root of the word cathedral is the Latin word, cafedra, which means seat or chair. A cathedral is the seat of a bishop.

As I remind all of my students, all cathedrals are churches, but not all churches are cathedrals, technically.

Now, the other name that you hear for the building, which is the Duomo of Florence, D-U-O-M-O, which in Florence, probably more than any other place in Europe, the term Duomo was mistaken to mean dome, for two pretty obvious reasons. One, because it sounds so much like the English word dome and two, because when you look at Florence Cathedral, Brunelleschi’s great dome just dominates the entire structure.

Whereas the Italian word for dome is cupola, C-U-P-O-L-A. If any of you are planning on climbing up there when you are in Florence, you want to climb up the Cupola of Brunelleschi.

Duomo is a nickname for a cathedral. The word itself was invented by mangling together two Latin words, the first of which is Domus, D-O-M-U-S, Latin for home or house. In fact, English words like domestic and domiciled come from the Latin Domus, and the other Latin word is Dei, D-E-I, which translates as God.

We nicknamed cathedral’s House of God , because they are typically so large that the idea is that they could accommodate the almighty. They are representative of the cities in which they are located.

The other name that you’ll hear for Florence is Santa Maria del Fiore, or St. Mary of the Flower. Now, if you have never heard of St. Mary of the Flower, it is because she does not exist. In other words, if you were to check the books, this version of the Virgin is not in there. In Florence, in fact, they invented this version of Mary to link the name of the church to the name of the city. If you remember all the way back in my podcast about the historical origins of Florence, and that when the Romans founded the city in the year 59 BC, that they named it Florencia.

Then in the Middle Ages, that somehow evolved into the name Fiorenza. Then in the 19th century, they cleaned it up into Firence, and then of course you all show up and you call it the city Florence. All four names mean the same thing. The flowering city. By calling Florence Cathedral, St. Mary of the Flower, is roughly the equivalent of saying St. Mary of Florence. They localize the dedication, if you will.

The architect, Arnolfo di Cambio. You may remember from my podcast about Santa Croce, of how I nickname Arnolfo “Super Arnolfo di Cambio,” because we have this tendency in Florence, we simply blanket attribute everything that was being built at the end of the 13th century to Arnolfo. His name does appear in some of the very early documentation concerning the cathedral. It does not appear in connection to Santa Croce, ,to Palazzo Vecchio and to any other building that they might ascribe to him.

It’s just difficult for us in the 21st century, of course, to attribute such massive structures like the Palazzo Vecchio and Santa Croce to an anonymous team of stonemasons, which in reality is probably who designed and built the church. We like this idea of an individual creative genius, and so we simply blanket attribute everything to Arnolfo. Again, at Florence Cathedral, we know that he was the original architect.

The year’s 1295. The construction of Florence Cathedral falls into this massive building campaign at the end of the 13th, beginning of the 14th century, where just about all the Florence was being built. The patron being the commune or the city, because technically speaking, Florence Cathedral is the Metropolitan Church of Florence. In other words, it is the church that represents the entirety of the city.

Now, the demographics of Florence in the Middle Ages essentially broke up the city into four sections or quarters. We talked about this in an earlier podcast, and each of those quarters has a head quarter church, a capo quartiere, as we say in Italian. The area in which Florence Cathedral is located is actually represented not by the cathedral itself, but by the Baptistry, which is located just in front. that is the quartiere of San Giovanni, the Quarter of St. John the Baptist.

The fact that it was built with public money of course, means that it is the church that was meant to celebrate the entire city as well.

I told you the architectural style is gothic, and we know it’s gothic because of its date. We went through that timeline in my, Put It In a Box podcast, where we were talking about the different historical and art historical periods and styles. If you remember, the gothic architectural and artistic style fell between the years 1200 and 1400 AD, Florence Cathedral, 1296.

It is not the most, let’s say, successful of gothic structures. meaning, it’s not the lightest building, in terms of comparison to, let’s say Notre Dame or Chartres, but pointed windows, lots of decoration. The walls are quite thick, which is not very common for gothic churches. There’s enough about it that makes it gothic, I think that we can safely describe it as such as well.

Now, the building material of Florence Cathedral is pietraforte, is that brown sandstone that you see everywhere throughout the city. Do not be fooled by all of that green, white, and pink frosting, as I like to call it on the outside of the building. That is simply marble facing on walls underneath, which are made of brownstone of pietraforte. Again, building with the most readily available building materials.

Now, that marble that you see, the white stuff is from Carrara, which is where, of course, most of that statuary marble comes from as well. The green marble comes from a nearby town called Prato. Prato is about seven miles west of Florence. The quarries are still operative for the green stuff, but they won’t let it out for commercial purpose. You can only use the green marble or purchase the green marble technically, if you need it for restoration, because there is a very limited amount, and obviously if you need to replace marble in a structure as largest Florence Cathedral, the probability of running out sometime soon is quite high.

The pink marble that you see on the outside of the church is instead from southwestern Tuscany in the area of the Maremma. It is local stone that they are using to dress Florence Cathedral.

Now, as I mentioned, the construction of Florence Cathedral begins in the year 1296, and consider that when they decided to build Florence Cathedral 723 years ago, there was already an 800 year old church standing on the building site, and that church was called Santa Reparata.

I make mention of this because still today, many older generation Florentines refer to Florence Cathedral by the name Santa Reparata, by the name of the church that was there almost two millennia ago. Now, that church had been built sometime in the sixth century after Christ, and not everyone in Florence was keen about knocking down the old church to make room for the new church.

The architect Arnolfo was in a very difficult position, because half the city was for building the new cathedral, the other half of the city was for keeping the old. He had to figure out a way to keep everyone happy. His solution was ingenious. I mentioned in previous podcasts that most churches are built from back to front, or from altar area to facade. The reason you build this way is because these structures take so long to complete, that you can actually start using the church, while the rest of it is under construction.

Arnolfo’s solution to this dilemma of the 800 year old church standing on the building site, was to actually build his new cathedral around the preexisting structure. In fact, he just demolished a small portion of that older church, about a tenth of the anterior or front part of the building, and left 90% of it standing. The first part of Florence Cathedral that actually went up was the massive brownstone facade wall, which you can no longer see obviously because it’s covered in the green, white and pink marble, but that was the first structure that went up as a surrogate facade, directly across this big hole in one side of that older church.

Then he proceeded to construct his cathedral walls around the older church. This idea kept everyone in Florence happy, because if you wanted the old church, you still had it. If you want the new church, you are getting it. That old church would remain standing within the walls of the new church for nearly a full century. When they finally knocked down Santa Reparata in the year 1385, there was not the slightest peep of protest on the part of the Florentine citizenry.

The reason? All those who wanted to keep the old church were now dead. Nearly three generations of Florentines have come and gone, and all those Florentines who of course had been initiated into Christianity, into that church, were used to going there, were now six feet under. In fact, perhaps the most important thing I can teach you on these podcasts about Florentine social philosophy is the word pazienza, P-A-Z-I-E-N-Z-A, which translates as patience in English, because if you live in Italy and you do not have industrial quantities of pazienza, either you put the gun to your head or you’re putting it to someone else’s. Take it from me as an Italian, someone who lived in Florence for just over 20 years.

The Italians do not quantify time the way we do in the United States. In the United States, if you want something, you wanted it yesterday. Whereas in Italy, in fact, the sound that expresses this notion of just time stretching wider and longer than it does in the US, is perfect to say, “Signora, you want something today? If it doesn’t come today, it will come tomorrow. It will come next week. If it’s not during my lifetime, it will be done in my son’s lifetime or my grandson’s lifetime,” and it’s just the same.

Now, as frustrating as that might be for someone from an Anglo Saxon or American background, ultimately, the Italians are proven correct, because that cathedral, Florence Cathedral would require 172 years to build, but inevitably it was built. It was finished, just much longer than we’d imagined, and of course, taking their time in that sense created a structure which 700 years later, is still standing there.

This first architect Arnolfo was essentially responsible for getting the project off the ground. He was the one who figured out a way to overcome this first massive hurdle, which was the previously existing structure. Now, the problem with Arnolfo though, is that he died very early in the project. Now, depending on how you read his death certificate, he either died as early as 1302 or 1310, but that limits his direct involvement in the construction of Florence Cathedral to a maximum of 14 years.

Obviously, he didn’t see much completed. In fact, this is also testimony to these architects, because they were taking on projects, which they knew perfectly well, they would not see finished. yet, they took them on anyway, almost as an altruistic mentality.

Now, when Arnolfo died, the [Opera 00:13:08] , which if you remember from my previous podcast, was the building committee was in a very difficult situation, because back in the Middle Ages, there were no blueprints. If I’m an architect today, I essentially design distinct blueprints for my electrician, for my plumber, for my carpenter, for my ID person, and each of these can work independently. If they need me, they call me on the cell, I pop over, we have a quick chat, and then I move on to another building project.

In the Middle Ages, the process involved the capomaestro, or the head architect, showing up to the building site, taking a sharp stick and drawing in the dirt. Simply outlining what it was that his crew was going to work on that day, that week, that month. There was no master plan, in other words, with the architect dying, essentially the project itself died.

The Opera kept up as best they could through the first couple of decades of the 14th century. There was probably enough built that they continued at least up to a certain extent, but then essentially had no idea how to continue. Public money keeps coming in to construct it. You could imagine of course that the citizenry is now grumbling about how this money is perhaps being misused.

The Opera makes a very important decision in the year 1334, and that decision was to essentially begin building another component of the cathedral complex, which they are going to have to build sooner or later anyway, which is a lot smaller than the cathedral, so should not take as much time. In 1334, they commissioned the construction of the bell tower or campanile.

To really make it seem like they have things under control, they hire a big gun to design in. That big gun was the painter, Giotto, who many of you already know is on my top five greatest painters of all time list, but also was the most important painter of the 14th century.

Now, Giotto was very old at this period in his life, and in fact, I equate the hiring of Giotto to essentially what many sports franchises do today when they cannot afford to have a young superstar. You buy instead a older, nearly washed-up super star, because it convinces the fans, that technically things are under control. I use the Brett Favre example, which may be showing my age, but it’s something, of course, that many sports franchises have done.

This is what the Opera was doing with Giotto. Consider that Giotto was so old when they hired him, that he died three years later in 1337. In fact, there’s quite a bit of debate amongst art historians about just how involved Giotto was. Was it in fact his direct design, or was it a honorary title that the Opera had bestowed upon him, in an attempt to keep him in the city of Florence.

We’ll probably never know, but I’m inclined to believe that Giotto had very little to do with the architectural design, simply because in the 14th century, architects were not painters, and painters were not architects.

All right. Then in the year 1342, the Opera hires another artist to design the bell tower. His name was Andrea Pisano. Now, no relation to the Pisano that we talked about in Siena, but he was also from Pisa, as his name went indicate, and Andrea Pisano was most celebrated for the bronze doors that he produced for the south portal of Florence Baptistry.

If you go into the Cathedral Museum, you can find all three sets of Baptistry doors, The Gates of Paradise by Ghiberti, the north doors by Ghiberti, and while this podcast is being recorded right now, the south doors are under restoration, but as soon as that restoration is completed, they will be on display inside the cathedral museum as well.

Great hopes on this Andrea Pisano, who took over the bell tower project in 1342, but two years later was fired. He was dismissed from service, and the specific accusation made against him by the Opera for their dismissal, was that he was too Germanic in style. Remember, Germanic was the adjective they used before they coined the term gothic, to describe northern European art and architecture.

The Italians were so adamantly against the gothic, that you could actually lose your job the way this Pisano did for doing it. Then we have another minor interruption, which was the Black Death of 1348. Just like in Siena, we were too busy dying in Florence to actually build anything.

Then, and this is a big, then, in the year 1357 an architect by the name of Francesco Talenti, talent with an I, and you may remember this name because Talenti was the Florentine architect who dissuaded the Sienese from completing the construction of their Duomo Nuovo, which would have been the largest church in the Christian world. Coincidence or not, when he got back to Florence, Talenti was given the head architecture job for the bell tower project.

He completed that bell tower in two years, 1357 to 1359. He is perhaps the most popular man in the city, if there was a mayoral election, I’m sure Talenti would have won, and the Opera rewarded him for his efforts in dissuading the Sienese, but also in completing the bell tower by then giving him the head architect position for the cathedral proper. In 1361, Francesco Talenti was made capomaestro of the entire cathedral.

Now before I continue with the cathedral, let’s back up. If you happen to be in Florence or happened to be looking at an image of the Bell Tower of Florence Cathedral, you can actually see the hands of the different architects at play. Look at the ground level and the first level, which are the two that we attribute to Giotto, or at least were done under his direction. The third level where you have statues placed in niches, and then the fourth level where you can see actually that it was predisposed for statues and niches, but that they abandoned the idea, and those are blind niches. They’ve been walled up.

Those are the two levels that we attribute to Andrea Pisano. They abandoned his plan for the niches with the statues inside. Then levels five and six and seven are the ones that we attribute to the architect Francesco Talenti, who was responsible for completing it.

You can see those distinct hands. If you look through all of that frosting, that camouflage of green, white, and pink, you’ll see different architectural hands at play.

Okay, Talenti takes over the cathedral project in 1361, and his first major decision was to enlarge. He was the architect responsible for pushing the length of Florence Cathedral to its present length, which is 152 meters, one-five-two. It’s just over a football field and a half in length. That number is not arbitrary. If you remember back to my Siena Cathedral lecture where they had retaliated in Siena by planning the construction of a Duomo Nuovo, had the Sienese completed it, it would have measured 140 meters in length.

Florence Cathedral, 152. Talenti was giving Florence a 12 meter buffer, making it by far the largest church in the entire Christian world. In fact, for over two centuries, Florence Cathedral was the biggest, until a cathedral in Rome named St. Peter’s was consecrated in 1626, which blew Florence cathedral out of the water. Coming in at 212 meters in length. St. Peter’s is about a half of a football field larger than Florence Cathedral, which is mind boggling. Once you see Florence Cathedral and how large it is, that there is a church somewhere that is an entire half of a football field larger.

Today, Florence Cathedral is the third largest Christian church in the world. The second largest is St. Paul’s Cathedral in London, which is 158 meters. It’s about 20 feet longer than Florence Cathedral, but more importantly, was built in the 17 and 1800s, which is essentially yesterday.

What I want you to remember is when these churches were built. The largest Christian church in the 15 and 1600s, St. Paul’s the second largest in the 17 and 1800s, but Florence Cathedral, the third largest, built in the 13 and 1400s instead. It was the first true mammoth size or scale church in Europe.

Consider too that you’ll also hear it today that Milan Cathedral claims to have the third largest, because they claim that their church actually has a greater volumetric capacity. You could fill Milan Cathedral with more water than you could Florence, but who really cares about that. Seville Cathedral in Spain claims to cover more surface area, more square meterage.

That’s not what we care about. What we care about is length. Today it’s the height of a skyscraper, in the Middle Ages and Renaissance, it was the length of a church that really mattered.

Talenti was also the man responsible for the Decorum, the inside of the … Consider that when he took over in 1361, the old church Santa Reparata was still standing. He was the guy responsible for knocking it down, and also then of articulating the interior walls. Arnolfo could not have done this, because the church was in the way. When Arnolfo was building in the early 1300s, he could only work on the outside, because the interior of the new cathedral was essentially obstructed, it was impossible to reach because of the preexisting church.

When people walk into Florence Cathedral, especially after waiting hours in that line, which by the way is insurmountable, you can’t get around it. Even professors or tour guides no longer have the privilege of priority access because of security or what have you. After waiting hours in line and they walk in and they see people’s faces just drop to the floor, in disappointment because there’s so much frosting on the outside of Florence Cathedral, that you expect to see the same kind of great quantity of decoration on the inside. Instead, it’s extraordinarily austere on the inside.

I hear adjectives like somber and sober and austere, tonic. I get boring thrown in there every once in a while. Occasionally I’ll get the question, is it finished? Did they just forget to decorate the inside of Florence Cathedral? The answer is no. The interior of that church was the result of the design intervention of this Francesco Talenti, who is what we call in the business an architect’s architect. That minimalism is the result of architecture serving as function and decoration at the same time. In other words, if I cover a wall with a fresco, I’m not looking at the wall any longer. I’m looking at the fresco on the wall.

Talenti was aware of this. For him, the wall should stand, we call it the dignity. I know this sounds a little exaggerated, but there is a certain dignity to the sheer mass and substance of a wall, and so to leave it simple.

What you get in the inside is this play of two colors, and that’s that off-white of the actual stucco on the walls. Then of course, of the exposed brownstone. That kind of bichroming inside of the church, not that different from what Brunelleschi would do some half century later, when he designs his Renaissance churches. It’s just that Brunelleschi would use graystone instead of brown.

Two, if you were to measure the distance between the piers moving down, they’re those giant vertical column-like structures, you would find that the distance from one pier to another is 17.15 meters. About 60 feet from one to the other. They’re the largest architectural bays in the world. If you were then to measure across the nave, you discover that the distance between piers is also 17.15 meters or 60 feet.

In other words, if you were looking down on Florence Cathedral, each nave bay, each footprint through the main central aisle between the four piers would essentially be a square. Whereas, the bays to either side of them in the side house are rectangles that are one half the area of the central square.

We have geometric forms that are related to each other proportionally. We have general lack of decoration. Now, look at those arches resting on top of the piers. They are pointed arches, so technically they are gothic arches. Pardon the series of cheesy puns and I’m going to make here, but we talked about the structural advantage of a pointed arch where theoretically, you can make buildings taller without making them wider, and how pointed arches essentially send most of their load vertically as opposed to horizontally.

What is the point of a pointed arch whose diameter is so vast? In other words, you look at these pointed arches and it almost looks like they’re trying to bend themselves into semicircular form. In other words, it’s pointless to use a pointed arch. In fact, it’s as broad as the one that you’re looking at there. It’s almost like they’re schizophrenic or having an identity crisis.

Lack of decoration, geometric shapes that are proportionately related to each other, and pointed arches that are tending towards semicircular in shape. In other words, Florence Cathedral might not be the most successful gothic-style church on the interior, but it is perhaps the seminal proto-Renaissance-style church, because these same concepts and ideas are the ones that Brunelleschi would employ when he introduces renaissance architecture at places like San Lorenzo and Santo Spirito, again, in the first quarter or so of the 15th century.

That lack of decoration, moving you down, and then eventually leading us into the crossing space. Now, Florence Cathedral has a Latin cross plan. That is a lowercase letter T. The long arm leading from the Baptistry in the western side, towards the crossing space where the two arms crossover. Because that octagonal space is so vast, there really is no true transit.

What you get instead are what we call these tribunes, these semi-octagonal structures that are attached to the northern, southern and eastern side. What you have on the inside are a series of five radiating chapels, and then above them, you have fenestrated wall, wall with window, and then above that, you have that sort of half dome that you see.

That octagonal space between them has an interior diameter of 143 feet, six inches. Talenti not only made the church longer, he also technically widened that crossing space. 143 feet, six inches.

Now, why do you care that it’s 143 feet, six inches across? Because up to this point in history, we’re in the early 1400s now, the church being built according to Talenti’s specifications, although Talenti is dead. The largest dome covering in the world sat on a building in Rome called the Pantheon, and the Dome of the Pantheon, you may remember from one of my previous podcasts, is the mother of all domes. It is the single largest piece of concrete in the world.

The Romans had the technology to build a dome like that, but that technology was lost and did not exist in the 15th century. As I mentioned over and over again, my favorite thing about the construction history of Florence Cathedral, is that they clearly undertook the construction of a building they knew they did not have the technology to complete. In other words, they went ahead and built such a massive crossing space, and as they built up, and you can tell by the architecture, if you look at those radiating chapels on the ground level, that’s solid masonry between them. On the outside of the wall with the windows above the chapels, there are actually radiating buttresses. When you go to back to the outside of the church, you can see these, in fact, those buttresses were meant to have sculptures standing on top of them, including Michelangelo’s David.

We’ll save that for another podcast. Then those half domes, which are taking the weight of the wall and pushing it down into those radiating buttresses, and those buttresses pushing it down into the corners between the chapels. Of course, the earth can pretty much take any kind of weight that we can throw at. In other words, all that architecture is suggesting that from the very beginning, they were planning on putting a massive load or weight in the form of a dome directly above the crossing area.

For whatever reason, in the early 1400s, they decided to make one important modification and that is to introduce the drum or the Tamburo, T-A-M-B-U-R-O, which is simply the Italian word for drum. That is that freestanding section of wall with the big circular windows that you see just below the dome, that you see today, and just above those half domes that you see as well.

That drum will be the single greatest problem faced by whoever the architect will be, who needs to build that dome. We’ll talk about that of course, when we talk about Brunelleschi’s Great Cupola, that surmounts Florence Cathedral, its true architectural gem sitting on top. I want you to keep that in mind.

When they built it, and when all of this was being built in the early 15th century, they actually had constructed a temporary wooden altar at the very end of the nave, where they would celebrate mass, because remember we have a giant hole in the ceiling of Florence Cathedral, and it’s raining in there and birds are flying around, and it’s snowing. If you consider that at this point, we’re at a very critical stage of Florence’s history, because the city could have potentially become the laughingstock of Europe.

You built it that large, but you can’t finish the thing. Referring to the cathedral proper. The idea that we’re saying mass inside of the nave, because obviously, the crossing areas not yet operative, and will not be until someone comes along who can figure out how to build that dome. We’ll get to that again in a different podcast.

Okay, one last thing. The outside of Florence Cathedral. If you’re standing on either the southern or northern side, you can actually see the different architectural hands at play in the window types. Because the first three windows on the sides of the church, north and south, are of a particular type. Those are the ones that were designed by Arnolfo di Cambio. They’re closer together and they’re small, because then all of a sudden, what you’ll see is that the windows in turn, become much larger and higher up and spaced further apart.

Those are the windows that were designed by Talenti. In fact, inside of Florence Cathedral, a architectural booboo that very few people notice, the first two windows on either side of you are blind windows. There’s no light coming through. The reason is very simply because the interior windows were the ones designed by Talenti, the exterior at that point, at the western end of the church, were designed by Arnolfo and they simply do not line up.

No one notices this because Talenti took an interesting gamble as a designer, that he knows that when you walk into a space, your inclination is never to look at your immediate surroundings. You always look down and into a space, and he was betting on that. He decided to take the risk for the sake of architectural unity inside the building, keep it all the same, going through and sacrificing light in the first two window bays, but then in the next two window bays, you’ll actually see that they are windows which allow light to come through.

Just a bunch of different architectural details that most people notice when they’re inside of Florence Cathedral. The Great Cathedral.

Okay. Stay tuned for more. We’ll continue on with our gothic art and architecture, particularly Florentine art and architecture, although we’ll be talking about the great Florentine artists, Giotto, creating his masterpiece, not in Florence, but in another city called Padua, and in the Scrovegni Chapel in my next podcast. Stay tuned for more.

For more information on lectures and programs in the United States, art history tours in Italy, and for online video lectures, visit rockyruggiero.com.