Schedule

– LECTURE 1 – Wednesday, September 6: The Great Cathedral Complex: Florence Baptistry and Cathedral

The Baptistery is one of the oldest monuments in Florence and one of Italy’s most important examples of Tuscan Romanesque architecture. We shall also examine the cathedral of Florence, named Santa Maria del Fiore, which is the religious center of the great medieval city and for two centuries was the largest church in Christendom. We will explore the vast architecture of the great cathedral and analyze the engineering marvels that made both the church and Brunelleschi’s great crowning dome possible.

– LECTURE 2 – Wednesday, September 13: Civic Architecture in Medieval Florence: The Bargello, Palazzo Vecchio and Orsanmichele

Originally called the “Palace of the Captain of the People,” the Bargello, begun in 1255, is the earliest example of civic architecture in the city of Florence. Home to medieval Florence’s highest magistrate, the fortified style of architecture of the Bargello would define civic and domestic architectural trends in Florence for centuries. One of its most immediate imitators was the Palazzo della Signoria (later called the Palazzo Vecchio), commissioned in 1294, which was the seat of communal power in Florence until 1531. Resembling a castle more than a public building, the Palazzo dell Signoria was clearly an attempt on the part of a Republican government to appropriate feudal architecture for its own purpose. We will then conclude our discussion with the medieval-grain-market-turned-guild church of Orsanmichele. The tall rectangular building came to represent the financial heart to the medieval city by both unifying all the guilds in a single building, but also through the arrangement of the various guild halls around the church.

– LECTURE 3 – Wednesday, September 20: The Mendicant Order Churches: Santa Maria Novella and Santa Croce

The first part of this lecture will examine the great Dominican church and convent of Santa Maria Novella. From the 13th-century Gothic-style architecture of its interior, to its early Renaissance façade, the great basilica reflects the changing artistic, religious, and social trends of the late medieval world. We shall also examine the largest Franciscan church in the world, the Basilica of Santa Croce. Celebrated as Florence’s most Gothic of churches, Santa Croce was the product of a perfect historical storm of patronage, dedication, and location that resulted in a church rivaled locally only by the great cathedral of Florence.

– LECTURE 4 – Wednesday, September 27: Brunelleschi’s Basilicas: San Lorenzo and Santo Spirito

Celebrated as the first-ever Renaissance-style church, the Basilica of San Lorenzo was a milestone in the history of architecture. Although largely completed after the death of its revolutionary architect, Filippo Brunelleschi, the design of the church resurrected an architectural language that had been dead for a millennium and re-established that language as the foundation of Italian architecture for the next two and a half centuries. And while some scholars have interpreted Brunelleschi’s intervention at the later church of Santo Spirito as a potential fulfillment of his abandoned intentions at the more famous, Medici-sponsored church of San Lorenzo, Santo Spirito was instead a church that, in many ways, anticipated the architectural trends of the later High Renaissance period. In the words of Brunelleschi’s earliest biographer, the Basilica of Santo Spirito was a church “without peer in Christendom.”