Episode 40 – Florence: Statues at Orsanmichele

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. And now here’s your host, Dr. Rocky Ruggiero.

Buongiorno, everyone. This podcast will continue our discussion of the great grain market turned church in Florence called Orsanmichele. You may remember that in my last podcast we discussed the transformation of a 14th century grain market into a church. And that essentially once this transformation took place responsibility for the maintenance of this church, and the decoration as well, was given over to the guilds of the city. Guild, G-U-I-L-D. And you may remember that I defined a guild as a group of men who shared the same or similar professions, who were essentially protecting their economic interests. And so the idea was that they would decorate the inside of this new church with paintings of their patron saints, but more importantly, they would decorate the outside with statues. So as you walk by or around the church of Orsanmichele, every one of those statues that you see on the outside, which are positioned inside of niches, or niches as some people pronounce it, which are those alcoves. The sort of spaces meant to accommodate the sculptures.

Every one of those statues represents a different guild. Now the sculptures that you see today on the outside of the building are copies. All but one of the original statues are housed upstairs in Orsanmichele. And that first floor, the Italian first floor, so technically American second floor, was actually designated to serve as the museum so that people could come and see these extraordinary sculptures in a conserved and a preserved environment. Unfortunately, due to financial issues, that museum was never open. And so today, as of the recording of this podcast, the only times that you can actually access upstairs in Orsanmichele to see the original sculptures is on Mondays. And more recently they’ve actually opened it up on Saturday mornings as well. And the reason they were able to open is because of a volunteer organization called Friends of the Museums in Florence, and volunteers from this organization come and serve as custodians to in fact make sure that things are kept under control. And in fact it’s free admission.

It is a pretty extraordinary experience. Once you discover the upstairs of Orsanmichele, I think you’ll realize it really is one of the sort of unexploited treasures of the city. One, because you actually get to walk up the original staircase, which is tucked away inside of a pier. Two, because the space itself is rather breathtaking with these large brick vaults above your heads. Three, because you are looking at some of the most important statues in the history of art. I mentioned all but one of the originals are upstairs, and that one that’s not in Orsanmichele is a doozy. It is the Saint George statue by Donatello. The statue and its niche are both located in a museum called the Bargello. And we’ll be discussing these statues in the Bargello in a later podcast. So for now, let’s focus on the statues and their meaning.

I want to discuss the styles of the statues, because there is no better place to map out or to trace the transformation from what we call this late or international Gothic style into what we call the early Renaissance. And still, but at the same time, I also want to play my favorite game as I described it to you in my last podcast, which is, Guess the Guild. There are symbols on many of these niches, which in fact would give away the identity of the patrons. Now, like everything else I do, when possible I will discuss these statues in chronological order. Those of you who know me know that I am OCD about chronology. And then if you don’t know that so-and-so came before so and so, it’s almost all for not right this idea of moving forward and watching evolution. So if you are standing in front of Orsanmichele and you are standing on that really crowded street called Via Calzaiuoli, very good example of Tuscan vocabulary.

Calzaiuoli has something like four consecutive vowels in that word. If you can manage Calzaiuoli, you are well on your way to developing a Tuscan… Actually, Via Calzaiuoli, again, is that main thoroughfare that connects the Piazza della Signoria to the Duomo. And if you’re standing on it and you’re standing directly in front of one of the short sides of this rectangular brownstone building known Orsanmichele, what I want you to do is walk around the left hand-side of the building until you get to a niche that’s pretty easy to spot. Because it’s the only one of the 14 niches on the outside to have a dome above it. This projecting sort of cover to the structure.

Now you’re trying to figure out which of the guilds sponsored the niche and the statue, and again, I’m always encouraging people that I show Florence to, or my students, to try to read inscriptions. Because most people refrain from even attempting to read inscriptions on paintings or sculptures because they are presuming that it is all Greek to them. When in reality there’s a greater likelihood that it is Latin, but that’s a separate discussion. If you were to try to read the inscription at the base of this niche, what you would see is the word Opus, which is Latin for work, and then Armis, A-R-M-I-S. Armis is Latin for Arte, and Arte is the Italian word for guild. And then the word Medico and Speziatori. So it is the guild of Medico, which means doctor, and Speziatori, which would literally translate as spicists. But what they mean by spicist is what we would call a pharmacist, what they instead called an apothecary.

And the statue that represents this particular guild, to whom by the way painters belonged. Right, just to give you some insight into the bureaucracy here, painters were members of the doctors and pharmacists guild because, of course, that is where they purchased their pigments. And so they spent so much time in these pharmacies buying materials that they were simply thrown in with the doctors and pharmacists. And the statue that represents the guild is the so-called Madonna of the Rose. Because if you look carefully, you’ll see she’s holding a rose in her hand with which Jesus is playing. The artist who is responsible for it was named Piero Tedesco. Who? Exactly, you’ve never heard of this guy and you’ll probably never hear of him again after this podcast. And the year is 1399.

Now if we don’t care about the artist, why am I talking about the statue? Well, because it’s a very good example of this kind of transitional period between the Gothic and the Renaissance. Because that statue of the Madonna of the Rose is actually more Gothic, much more Gothic than it is Renaissance. It’s this elongated figure of the Virgin Mary who possesses all of the necessary facial features. She has eyes, nose, ears, but there’s nothing naturalistic. There’s no real attention to detail or physionomy, human physionomy in the rendering. It’s almost an abstract impression of this elongated.

She kind of looks like a Modigliani painting. If any of you were fans of the Livornese artist. And when you look at the sculpture of Mary from the side, what you see is there’s really no attempt to make the viewer forget that it was carved from a block of stone. You get that blocking quality very evident in the piece. There is no attention to anatomy, her breasts, her legs, or what have you either. The Christ child is perhaps the more innovative of the two. One, because he’s smiling. He has this huge grin on his face and that’s not a characteristic typical of the Christ child. And he’s grinning, because again, he’s playing with the flower with one hand and then with a sparrow, which looks like it’s actually being tortured by the Christ child, in the other. But curiously, you’ll see this Christ child with this freshly permanented hairdo, looks like he just took out rollers.

It’s this perfect hair, and that tendency to stylize, to over beautify natural elements is something typical of this late Gothic style. But consider that around the year 1400 this was in fact the style that was essentially dominating artistic circles. Okay. Now I’m going to have you zigzag, and what I want you to do, you’re looking at that sculpture, I want you to go back to the front and to the first sculpture that you see at the corner. In other words, you’re back on Via Calzaiuoli, You’re looking at a large bronze statue of Saint John the Baptist. Okay? So looking at the front of Orsanmichele back on this crowded road, it is the first of the statutes on the left-hand side. The artist who produced it was named Lorenzo Ghiberti, who will be a recurring leitmotif in these podcasts because he was one of the most important artists of the first half of the 15th century.

The date of the statue is 1412, and the patron was the Arte de la Calimala, I love that word. Calimala, it sounds again like some sinister Asian organized crime group. Calimala was the wool merchants guild. And in fact, if you’re looking at the niche in the lower left and right you’ll see shield, which is the standard mount for a coat of arms, upon which is a falcon carrying a bundle of cloth. The wool merchants were the brokers. Their job was to distribute the material, hence the symbol of the falcon carrying the bundle of wool that you see. Now the statue is perhaps the most important statuary example of the international Gothic style in Florence. Again, this international or late Gothic style, meaning essentially this kind of crossover period where people look a hell of a more a lot like people in space looks more convincingly real, but they’re still embellishing the statues.

In other words, when you look at Saint John the Baptist, there’s something almost impossibly elegant about that statue. You see that kind of curving of his body. And oftentimes we use alphabetic letters to describe these exaggerated curves, and so his kind of bowing reminds us of the letter C. Not very realistic, but almost impossibly, again, elegant in its rendering of the piece. His body, I mean clearly has arms, legs and what have you, but there’s no attention to. In fact, if you look at those shoulders, you’ll see just how narrow they are. Again, trying to render the figure more stylized as the expression goes. Now how do we know that it’s Saint John the Baptist? Because under all those robes you’ll see the fur, right? That camel hair shirt, that is a characteristic of his imagery and his geography, as well as the bronze cross.

All right, John the Baptist always shown holding a reed cross in his hand. And in fact, these are the attributes by which we could identify the figure as Saint John. But if you look, oftentimes people overlook the camel hair shirt, because it is so perfect that people think it’s groomed chest hair on John the Baptist. It’s not, it’s supposed to be the camel hair shirt. But obviously because this is a guild dealing in the distribution of wool, it looks more like a wool shirt than it does a camel hair shirt instead. And if you look at face of John the Baptist, right, it’s very beautiful, handsome, chiseled face. Which is just a little too perfect. And more importantly the coif, the hairstyle, you know John the Baptist having a perfect hairstyle every day of his life. And that beard, which is perfectly symmetrical as well, every curl on one side of it has its mirror reflection on the other.

And so the idea now, you know, we’re moving away from abstraction. Yes, because it looks more real. But we’re moving in that direction of what we call stylization, where we’re adding essentially this almost impossible elegance to the figures. And this is the style which made Ghiberti the preeminent sculptor in the beginning of the 15th century, at least at a local level. All of the major guilds represented Orsanmichele, would in fact hire Ghiberti to create their statutes. And would also do so in bronze. In my next podcast we’ll actually talk about the different materials involved in these statutes and why bronze essentially showed the status of the guild as being superior because they could afford it.

Okay, so the second statue is that Saint John the Baptist. By the way, Ghiberti actually signed the sculpture. If you’re looking at the hem of the robe, there are these circles inside of which are letters. And if you start in the left right by his right leg and look down you’ll see L-A-U-R-E-N-T-I-I, Laurentii, or Lorenzo. Actually signing the work with his name, which is something that Ghiberti did over and over. Now I want to compare this particular statue to the next. And you’re going to go back to the side of the church, on your left-hand side, past the doctors and pharmacists guild niche, all the way to the corner.

And the first sculpture at the far end you see down there is a marble sculpture, it is a copy again, I keep repeating this just so you know we’re not talking about the originals. And by the way, upstairs inside of Orsanmichele, the statues are arranged to reflect their actual location on the outside of the building. In other words, in the museum, they’re arranged such that they reflect the way they are arranged on the outside of building. Okay, that statue is of the evangelist Saint Mark. We know this because underneath you’ll see a relief sculpture of a winged lion. And the winged line is the symbol of Saint Mark, the evangelist. For any of you who have been to Venice, that winged lion symbol isn’t ubiquitous because he is the patron Saint, Mark is, of the city of Venice. And so hence the distribution of that symbol.

The artist who carved the statue of Saint Mark was Donatello. The year is 1411, and the guild, this one’s tough. The symbol of this guild is a shield that is divided in half vertically, one half red, one half white. And the name of the guild was the Arte de Linaiuoli, try that one. Linaiuoli. LINAIUOLI, it’s another one of those consecutive four vowel words, Linaiuoli, which simply translates as the linen draper guild. This was the guild responsible for making cloth in linen, or from linen technically. And it’s really one of the minor guilds of the city. And this is important, because believe it or not, this statue of Saint Mark is by far the most important of all the statues on the outside of Orsanmichele. One of the most important statues in the history of art.

Because it is generally accepted to be the first fully Renaissance style work of art in history. And this is important because before the Renaissance happens in architecture, before it happens in painting, in other words, before those particular disciplines pick up on a distinct style that is influenced by classicism, it happens in sculpture. Which makes perfect sense if you actually stop and think about it, because if you’re looking to make your statutes look like ancient Roman statues, well then you need to know what ancient Roman statues look like. And I think for any of you who’ve traveled to Europe, or even to American museums containing antiquities, you get a general idea of just how many ancient statues survived. And so the idea that it was almost easier in a way for a sculpture to adopt a classical style simply because of the plethora of classical examples that existed. More difficult to a certain extent in architecture, because not all of the monuments that we see today in Rome or Sicily, or what have you, were visible to Renaissance artists.

Painting, as we’ll discover later on, was the most difficult of all because there was very little ancient Greek and Roman painting that survives. So how does Donatello then introduce the Renaissance in this statue on the back corner of Orsanmichele? We look at the figure of Saint Mark, and first and foremost, it was Donatello who first revived this stance in statuary called contrapposto, or as we mutilate that word in English contrappasto, right? Try it in the Italian, contrapposto, which literally translates as counter position. You’re all familiar with this stance. And if you were a John Wayne fan, every time you see John Wayne standing with all of his weight on one leg and the other relaxed in that sort of shoulder dropping back, and one coming forward, that is contrapposto. If you could see me now, I’m actually doing that stance, that hieratic stance that was typical of Egyptian statues. Where essentially all the limbs were very close to the body, hieratic, stiff, making it look other worldly.

And the archaic Greeks first introduced this mechanical stance that’s typical in what we call the Kore and Kouros statues, where one arm and one leg extend rather mechanically though. And that eventually evolves in a single sculpture in the history of art, known as the Kritios Boy in ancient Greece. Where essentially all the weight on one leg, which is the engaged leg, the other instead relaxed. And then the shoulder above the engaged leg dropping back, and the shoulder above the relaxed leg pushing forward. So the parts of the body are counter positioned, contrapposto is the word, to each other. And Donatello was the first to revive this particular stance.

What does contrapposto mean? Well, it suggests that the statue can move. Because all of the limbs are arranged around a central axis, the idea is that they are free to move. So when you’re looking at a sculpture in contrapposto, you’re supposed to infer that technically that sculpture could shift its weight to the other side. It suggests mobility in a medium that is inherently immobile. Stone, bronze, what have you, and Donatello was the first to revive it. Now, those of you who are even vaguely familiar with ancient statuary, know that 90% of ancient statues are nude. And this is going to be a pretty important obstacle for Renaissance artists, sculptors in particular, to overcome. Because how do we include that nudity if 90% of our subject matter is still Christian? You can’t have nude saints running around. You can’t have a nude Virgin Mary in a painting or a statue.

This is the stuff of barbecue if you get my drift. So you got to figure out a way to get that anatomy out via the drapery. And Donatello was perhaps the greatest of all time in doing this. Giorgio Vasari, I told you that once I introduced him, and I did in my last podcast, that I would say to the point of annoying you, Vasari says, Vasari says. Well , Vasari says that what Donatello used to do was to create models of the statues on a small scale, in clay, and in the nude, more importantly. In other words, it is small scale nude statues.

Then he would cut cloth to scale, dip the cloth in liquid clay and then lay it over that small model. In other words, that the drapery became a function of the movement of the body underneath. That they were not one in the same thing. You go back to look at the Madonna of the Rose, you go back even to look at John the Baptist, and there’s no real sense that that drapery is obeying the movements of the body until you get to this Saint Mark statue by Donatello. Look at the bunching at the right hip of Saint Mark. Look at the fluting of the drapery over his engaged leg, almost as if it were architectural, like a column. And you get this sense of a very athletic muscular figure. This isn’t that dainty wimpy figure of John with those narrow shoulders that we saw before.

This man is the Italian where he’s piazzato, he’s placed, he occupies a real amount of space. And so what that means is that essentially all that’s left to see are the face, the hands and the feet. Right? Now the feet, you know, I’m not a foot guy, but he’s wearing Roman sandals, right? Which in a way classicizes. But the feet and the hands really are the most expressive parts of the body. We’ll start with that face, look at that receding hairline on Saint Mark. Right? We’re not pulling any punches, this isn’t the coif perfect hairdo of Saint John the Baptist. Instead you see this very realistic looking figure who’s losing his hair. He has these big bushy eyebrows, these big expressive eyes, this creeping beard, you see it going real high up on his cheeks. The guy’s an evangelist, probably doesn’t have very much time to dedicate to his personal appearance.

Michelangelo’s comment about Saint Mark is that when he looked at Donatello’s statue, he appeared to be such an honest man that if in fact Mark were as honest as Donatello made him out to be, that Michelangelo would believe everything that Mark said in his gospel. Okay, the face is expressive, but I think even more romantically, look at those hands, those paws, these big, powerful expressive heads on Saint Mark. Where you can clearly see the wrinkles over the knuckles and the joints, the fingernails, and perhaps most impressively the veins. Now this sculpture was left outside until maybe a decade and a half ago, and it’s worn quite badly. But you can still clearly see this impression of veins under the skin on the hand. Veins that are as anatomically correct as the ones on Michelangelo’s David, that we’ll be discussing in a later podcast. But we go to the academia, we look at Michelangelo’s David, we all ooh and ah over the anatomical detail. But consider that Michelangelo had the luxury of anatomical dissection, which is a luxury not available to Donatello.

Donatello was doing it with his naked eye, and rendered the anatomical detail of the veining in the hands in extraordinary successful way. He is just off the charts for the beginning of the 15th century. All right, last thing about Saint Mark, and my favorite thing, notice that he’s standing on a cushion. And if you look, that right leg that’s bearing all the weight is actually pushing down into the cushion. So the implication is that gravity is pulling down on Saint Mark, the same way it pulls down on all of us. Pretty extraordinary implication here on the part of Donatello. Essentially the only difference between Mark and ourselves is that he’s made of stone and we are made of flesh and blood. And that is this naturalism that Donatello was introduced. Now, curiously, when most of us imagine the Renaissance beginning, we imagine the earth shaking in Florence and the clouds parting and God crying out in this Barry white voice, you know, let the Renaissance begin.

But in reality it begins in an almost anticlimactic way, at least in sculpture, on the back corner of this grain market turned church for a minor guild. Now consider that, Ghiberti getting all the big contracts from big corporations, and Donatello quietly changing the course of history working for this minor guild making cloth from linen. All right, at this point, turn the corner. In other words, you’re looking at Mark, turn the corner to your left-hand side. This first statue you see, you see the symbol on the shield on the predella level, the bottom, but also inside, those pincers. Because this was the niche of the Maneschalchi, the blacksmiths. And their patron saint is Saint Eligius. Now I’m not going to talk about the sculpture so much, although we will get to the artist who produced in just a sec. I do want you to note the relief sculpture at the base. Saint Eligius was the patron saint of blacksmiths because one of the miracles attributed to him was shoeing the horse that could not, or refused, put it that way, to be shoed.

And the way he did this was by miraculously removing its hoof its leg, taking it over to the anvil, shoeing the hoof, and then miraculously reattaching it to the leg. Just want to point that out, it’s a rather interesting scene. Okay, so you move to the left and the next niche you see contains the sculpture of Saint Stephen, this sort of young man in this kind of number nine configuration. In other words, his body resembles the number nine. And if you look in the niche, in particular, above the niche there’s a triangular gable inside of which is a circle, inside of which is a relief sculpture of a lamb.

If you remember from my last podcast, that lamb is the symbol of the wool guild. And if you turn around, that building behind you is the corporate headquarters, the palace of the wool guild. Now I’m not going to linger on Saint Stephen, on the statue, even though it was produced by Lorenzo Ghiberti in his workshop. Because it’s considered to be one of his least successful statutes. Ghiberti was about neck deep in work on the Gates of Paradise at this point in his career, gave very little attention to this sculpture. And in fact, is believed that he took some of the bronze intended for Saint Stephen and used it in the doors instead.

Okay, and move over one niche to your left. You pass the door that you use to go inside, and the niche contains a bronze statute. But let’s try to figure out which guild is represented here. If you look up at the top in the gable, there is a shield with two dimensional circular discs on the shield. And those discs are meant to represent something made of metal, usually of silver and gold. They’re coins. And the coins symbolize the Arte del Cambio, the money changers guild. Today we would call them the bankers guild instead, and their patron saint is Saint Matthew. If you look at the base of the statue, you can actually see the inscription which reads, Sanctus Matthaeus Evangelista et Apostolus, say Matthew, the evangelists and the apostle, right, both things. And why is Saint Matthew the patron saint the bankers? Well because before he became a follower of Jesus, he was a tax collector.

So if you’re wondering how these saints are associated with different guilds, in this particular case, it had to do with the profession of the figure. Saint Matthew, kind of a crossover piece for Ghiberti. Looking more Renaissance in the physical proportions of the figure, much more muscular, broad face, than what we saw at the Saint John. But the drapery still characterized by this international style. And I didn’t mention this in the Saint John, but those swinging curves that you see, typical of this international style called pendulum curves, because they look like the rhythmic swinging of a pendulum. Very typical, very affected manner in which to treat drape. Okay, so let’s turn the corner again, and the sculpture you see there is in fact the one that is not present at Orsanmichele, that is the sculpture of Saint George by Donatello, which we will address at length when we talk about the sculptures in the Bargello Museum in Florence.

One thing I want you to remember, if you look at the niche, you’ll actually notice that it’s not as deep as the other niches we’ve seen so far. And the reason is because that niche is positioned on pier, which has an internal staircase running up to the first floor. If you get up into Orsanmichele, you’re walking up that staircase. So Donatello had to figure out a way to overcome this physical limitation of this shallow niche for his sculpture of Saint George. But again, we’ll address that at another time. Move over one, and this is an interesting one. Now you have a niche with four sculptures inside, and those four sculptures are the four crown martyrs carved by an artist named Nanni di Banco around the year 1411. Nanni di Banco, who surprisingly received the contract from the stone and woodcutters guild, the Maestri di Pietra e di Legname, the masters of stone and wood, that was the name of the guild.

And he got the contract from the guild to which sculptures belong. And now this is kind of surprising because you would imagine that Donatello was big dog and would be getting the big contracts from his own people, right? He was the most famous and important sculptor in the beginning of the 15th century. Yet Nanni di Banco got the contract to carve these four crown martyrs. It’s so unnerving that Vasari tells an interesting story about these particular sculptures. And that was that when Nanni di Banco finished carving the four crown martyrs, he couldn’t figure out how to arrange them inside of the niche. Fortunately for Nanni, his good friend Donatello was working next door on Saint George. And so Nanni went over and said, hey, Donnie, can give me a hand? And Donatello got up there, arranged his four statutes for him, and then got back to work on his own piece.

Now did this actually happen? No. One, because the sculptures obviously were not carved on site, they would have been carved in the studios of the respective sculptors and then brought and arranged inside the niche. But more importantly, if you look at the four statues of the crown martyrs, the two on the right-hand side are carved from the same piece itself. Which means that Nanni knew from the very beginning that he was going to arrange these inside of a particular space, because he would carve those two fingers from one piece to do just that. So why does Vasari tell us this fake news, right? As we describe it today. Well, the fake news, because Vasari’s making sure that posterity knows that Donatello was the greater sculptor. More important than Nanni, even if Nanni got the contract with the stone and wood cutters guild.

Right? It’s interesting how Vasari is actually writing history for us. Now more importantly, if you look at the Predella, the base of the niche itself, you’ll see this incredibly vivid image of what a stonecutters workshop looked like at the beginning of the 15th century. And the figures are arranged hierarchically. In other words, if you start at the left, you see this guy putting block upon block building a wall, or he is the Mud Artori, he is the waller, technically. There’s a trowel on the wall, he has a straight edge behind it, and a plumb bob level hanging on the wall just to your right of him. So you can get a vivid image of the tools used by these fingers.

Okay, next to him you have these two wooden horses supporting a table upon which is a column, and the gentleman working the column is holding this tool known as a bow drill. Bow, B-O-W, because it looks like a bow and arrow. And it’s a pumping mechanism drill still used today for jewelry making in certain instances. Very important because it’s the same tool that all sculptures would use including Michelangelo. So in a later podcast when we get into his unfinished statues in the academia known as the Slaves, we’ll talk about how Michelangelo actually employed this exact tool, the bow drill, in his rendering of all of his statues, not just those.

Okay, the next figure, there are four of them in this relief, you see sitting down and carving an upside down column capital. So architectural sculpture is the next step up in terms of skill and he’s using a square and a compass to make sure that detail is precise. And then to the right of him, we have this rather unnerving image of a man taking a hammer to what appears to be a small child. And no, that man is not killing the child, as all my students like to think. But he is carving the human form. And if you can carve the human form even badly, then technically you’ve reached the peak of your profession as a sculptor. You are now a figurative sculpture, which is something very different obviously from simply carving forms or architectural details.

So this is how the stonecutters actually present themselves at the beginning of the 15th century. Okay, we’re going to skip the next sculpture and then off to the far corner. Just a quick honorable mention to the sculpture of Saint Peter, and you recognize him as Peter because he’s holding a set of keys, and because his name Petrus is written underneath. And if you look at the roundel, way up top on the wall above the niche, you’ll see that rearing goat that we discussed in my last podcast, which was the symbol of the Arte de Beccai, or the butchers guild. Why was Peter the patron saint of the butchers guild? Only thing I can come up with is that when they came to arrest Jesus, remember Peter cut off the ear of a servant. So Peter cut flesh, butchers cut flesh.

I think that’s where the connection is. Can’t prove that to you, but I can’t come up with anything better. Turn the corner. You have the judges and notaries guild. We’re not going to talk about the statue because it’s much later, 16th century statue of Saint Luke. And then finally to the central niche. Pretty much back where we started from, where you have two statues in one. Right? Now if you look up at that symbol in the roundel, up high up on the wall there is a purple fleur-de-lis. and the purple fleur-de-lis was the symbol of something called the Parte Guelfa, the Guelph Party. Now I told you that all the statues represented guilds. I lied. Hey, originally that particular niche represented this kind of watch dog political party in Florence, which made sure… Remember the whole Guelph Ghibli discussion we had, this party essentially made sure that no family got too powerful or too wealthy and became a threat to democracy.

Well, a family did become too powerful and wealthy, and that family was named Medici. That essentially had legislation passed to strangle the Parte Guelfa out of existence. And so their niche, which originally contained an incredibly beautiful statue of Saint Louis of Toulouse, made by Donatello in the 1420s. That statue is now in the refectory over at Santa Croce. If you want to see the Saint Louis Toulouse by Donatello, then you got to go back down to Santa Croce in the refectory where it is house. And when the political party was liquidated, or done away with, the niche was sold off to something called the Mercanzia, or to the mercantile court guild. It was one of the first commercial courts in Europe. In fact, oftentimes people came from other countries to Florence so that they could sort of litigate there in front of the Mercanzia. And Mercanzia replaced the original Saint Louis of Toulouse statue with the one that you see today. Which again, is a copy, but the original is upstairs. And it is of Doubting Thomas.

Thomas was the apostle who refused to believe that Christ was back from the dead until he could probe his wound with his fingers. And so what you see is this incredibly beautiful statue of Doubting Thomas that was made by Andrea del Verrocchio, who was the teacher of Leonardo da Vinci in the 1460s. Interesting choice of patron saint, because the idea is of course the judges of this court wouldn’t believe someone just because they were shouting more loudly than someone else. They needed proof, just like Thomas needed proof that Jesus was alive and kicking again. And that’s essentially why they choose this saint. But more importantly, I want you to look at the detailing of the face, the hands. Look how the drapery, you know, it’s almost like we’ve gone full gamut here. We’ve gone through the naturalism of Donatello, and almost as if the drapery is becoming expressive again. As if sculptors are beginning to introduce their own subjective interpretation of drapery.

Because once you’ve mastered the naturalism, then the idea is the next step is sort of away from objective and more towards a subjective interpretation. And perhaps even more importantly, you’re looking at two sculptures sitting inside a space that was intended for one. So that’s how far we’ve advanced technically that sculptors can now use Hocus Pocus illusionism to actually insert two statues into a space meant to accommodate a single statue. And if you’re upstairs, if you have the fortune of going upstairs in Orsanmichele, what I want you to do is walk around the statue of Doubting Thomas and look at it from the back. Because I think you’ll be astonished by how thin the actual shells… In other words, from the front you get this distinct impression of two freestanding statutes of Thomas and Jesus. Right? By the way, I want you to notice the uncanny resemblance of Jesus’s face to the rapper Snoop Doggy Dogg.

It’s uncanny. And I’m not the first person to notice, it was a student who pointed it out about 20 years ago. Until this day, I still can’t get over the resemblance, but that’s not the point. The point is, when you’re looking at it from the back, you’ll see that what appear to be full freestanding statues are pretty much less than a third of the human form. When seen from the front, they seem intact. But from the back you see just how shallow they actually are. And that is part of the craftsmanship and the mastery, of course, of this artist Verrocchio in creating this illusion. Right?

So it’s a real showcase. It’s an outdoor museum, or gallery technically, is Orsanmichele with these great statutes marking the transition all the way from about 1399 with that Madonna of the Rose, through Verrocchio’s mastery now of illusionism. And almost expressive type of sculpture in the middle of the 1460s. This is what, Orsanmichele was. I mean there’s simple building that thousands of people walk past every day, not realizing how rich it is both historically and artistically.

Okay, now in my next podcast what we’ll do is actually talk about the techniques. We’ve been talking about sculpture for quite a bit of time now. What I want to do next is talk about the different materials that were employed, but also the different techniques in working that material into finished statues. So 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.