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May 2016

Vol. 158 / No. 1358

The new Museo dell’Opera del Duomo in Florence

By JEREMY WARREN

One of the first new museums to be created in Florence after the unification of Italy, the Museo dell’Opera del Duomo houses an exceptional series of sculptures and other works of art reflecting and documenting the history of the complex of buildings that comprise the religious heart of the city of Florence; the Cathedral of S. Maria del Fiore, the free-standing bell tower designed by Giotto, and the Baptistery. Along with the Bargello, the Museum is the most important repository in Florence of sculptures by some of the greatest of the city’s sculptors, including Donatello, Luca della Robbia and Michelangelo, whose intensely moving Pietà, conceived by the sculptor for his own tomb, is one of the very few works in the collection not originally made for the Cathedral complex. Like any church or cathedral museum, the Museo dell’Opera del Duomo has always faced the particular challenge of how to relate to, indeed not be overwhelmed by, the biggest exhibit of all, the venerable and imposing buildings whose histories it exists to tell. The importance of its collections has meant that the Museo dell’Opera del Duomo has always had to form part of the itinerary of any serious visitor to Florence, but in the old Museum the displays were rather cramped, not especially logical in their sequence and not easily navigable for the general visitor. 

 

The new Museo dell’Opera del Duomo, which opened late in 2015, is a masterpiece of content, planning and design, which succeeds triumphantly in being visually attractive and accessible, but also intellectually rigorous and coherent. It will surely come to be seen as one of the most important and successful museum projects of the early twenty-first century. The need to improve the Museum was made more urgent because of the decision to conserve and then house indoors several enormous works from the Baptistery, the three great doors by Andrea Pisano and Lorenzo Ghiberti, and the large-scale figure groups that surmount them by Andrea Sansovino, Giovan Francesco Rustici and Vincenzo Danti, all now replaced with copies. The opportunity radically to rethink the presentation of the collections came when the Cathedral authorities were able in 1997 to buy a property that had in fact once belonged to the Opera, but had been sold as long ago as 1778, to become the Teatro degli  Intrepidi. In the early twentieth century the former theatre, stripped of its eighteenth-century fittings, was used as a warehouse and, latterly, a cavernous garage. Its repurchase doubled the space available for the Museum, allowing the vast former auditorium to become the main gallery and focal point of the new Museum. 

 

The entrance to the Museum on the Piazza del Duomo is flanked by a well-designed modern café, cleverly providing a link with life in the public urban space and hinting at the successful blending of modern materials and design with a respect for the old, which may be found throughout the Museum – Italian urbanismo at its best. Likewise, a certain theatrical spirit (perhaps the ghost of the old Teatro degli Intrepidi) informs many of the displays, starting with the spacious entrance hall, which is used to display a large and important Baroque sculpture, Girolamo Ticciati’s St John raised to heaven, formerly in the Baptistery. On entering the Museum proper, the visitor first passes down a long corridor, once part of the route into the Teatro degli Intrepidi, the walls of which are embellished with the carved names of some of the hundreds of artists of every description who have over the centuries worked on the Cathedral and its satellite buildings. This leads into the first introductory gallery, along one side of which are the backs of the towering display cases housing the three doors from the Baptistery. At present only the cases for Ghiberti’s two doors are occupied, but Pisano’s south door will be placed on display once its conservation at the Opificio delle Pietre Dure is completed. The backs of the doors are impressive enough in themselves, especially the panels of Ghiberti’s north door, with its remarkable depictions of lion heads. Thus they make a suitable taster for the astonishing main room of the new Museum, the Sala del Paradiso, which must henceforth take its place as one of the world’s great museum spaces (Fig.I). The vast space of the former auditorium of the Teatro degli Intrepidi is occupied along one side by a full-scale reproduction of all but the outer edges of the first façade of the Cathedral, which was conceived by Arnolfo di Cambio in the early fourteenth century and originally embellished with sculpted figures by Arnolfo and his workshop as well as by successive generations of sculptors, among them Donatello. Every surviving statue from the façade, which was dismantled in 1587, is placed in its proper position, either the original or a cast, while the most important original sculptures, such as Arnolfo’s serene Virgin and Child, are placed at or near ground level, in the façade’s empty door spaces. The effect is overwhelming, as if a great trecento polyptych had been reassembled from its scattered fragments. Facing the façade is, however, an even greater spectacle; the doors from the Baptistery, superbly lit within their cases (made by Goppion of Milan), the non-reflective glazing of which allows every detail of Ghiberti’s Old and New Testament scenes to be studied and appreciated (Fig.III). Standing in this great room amid an assemblage that has not been seen in anything like this form since 1587, one can feel almost as if a piazza of Renaissance Florence has come to life again. 

 

The great care taken in placing, lighting and explaining works of art, not only in the Sala del Paradiso but throughout the Museum, owes much to the vision of the Museum’s director, Monsignor Timothy Verdon, who masterminded the displays, and whose profound knowledge of the Cathedral, its works of art and their purpose is evident. In an age when larger gallery projects are too often curated essentially by committee, with all the compromises that this approach necessarily entails, it is refreshing to find a museum with such a clear sense of purpose. As a result, the outstanding architectural contribution, by Adolfo Natalini, Piero Guicciardini and Marco Magni, serves rather than dominates the works of art (this is admittedly perhaps easier to achieve than in other museums, since most of the sculptures and works of art were made for architectonic contexts), allowing many to be appreciated as never before.

 

The great sensitivity shown in the placement of works of art can also be seen further along on the ground floor, in a room devoted to the city’s principal saint, John the Baptist, and his female equivalent, Mary Magdalene. Donatello’s haunting wooden sculpture of the penitent Magdalene, haggard and clad in animal skins, is placed in the centre of the room, where it subtly relates to other works of art: Giovanni Bandini’s beautiful polychromed terracotta bust of the young Magdalene; a fine relief by Benedetto Buglioni depicting the penitent Magdalene in the wilderness; and several gold-ground paintings depicting Florentine saints and penitent donors (Fig.II). The Magdalene is positioned to provide a sightline through to Michelangelo’s Pietà (in fact a Deposition), formerly housed in a somewhat cramped room leading off the main staircase. It is now sited in a large, soaring space, with plenty of room for the visitor to walk round the sculpture, placed on a tall wide plinth. The profoundly moving effect of this installation, which successfully evokes the chapel-like space originally envisaged by Michelangelo for the sculpture, is further enhanced by the display on large panels of his  late sonnet ‘Giunto è già ‘l corso della vita mia’, in which the aged sculptor, lamenting having placed his art before all else, finds consolation in God at the end of his life.

 

After enjoying these highlights, visitors can leave the Museum at this point, or else ascend by one of two staircases to the upper floors. A long gallery on the first floor displays, for the first time in their correct order, the fifty-four reliefs from the bell tower originating from the workshops of Andrea Pisano and Luca della Robbia, as well as the sixteen over life-size statues, among them Donatello’s Habbakuk. The statues alternate with openings in the wall, which give onto the Sala del Paradiso, allowing light to filter through and for the backs of the sculptural groups from the Baptistery by Danti, Rustici and Sansovino to be seen from relatively close to. These sculptures, correctly enough placed above the Baptistery doors in the Sala del Paradiso, are the only really important sculptures in the museum that are, regrettably, not easy to study.

 

The next room focuses on Filippo Brunelleschi’s great cupola, with his original models shown alongside modern models that help to explain, as does a video presentation, this extraordinary feat of design and engineering. Introductory videos are placed at intervals throughout the museum; although there have been complaints of music permeating the whole museum, in reality there is very little seepage beyond the spaces in which they are located. A large case houses an immensely suggestivo display of scaffolding and historic tools from the workshops of the Opera, while around a slightly awkward corner is a small loggia with a huge window, giving a vista onto the Sala del Paradiso below. 

 

On the next floor up, a small room offers another marvellous view, this time onto the cupola itself. Also on the second floor is a gallery that contains some remarkable surviving pieces of the ephemeral decorations for the wedding of Grand-Duke Ferdinando I de’ Medici and Christine of Lorraine in 1589, but above all, the series of seven models for a new façade for the Cathedral commissioned by Grand-Duke Francesco I and his successors in an ultimately abortive attempt to find a replacement for the earlier façade, dismantled in 1587. The attempts in the decades around 1600 to design and build a new façade are the subject of a new book by Mario Bevilacqua,1 in which the tortuous story of this doomed project is related, and illustrated through the publication of the substantial surviving documentation in the Cathedral archives. The models, by Bernardo Buontalenti, Giambologna and others, are well displayed in a sequence of cases that allow the development of ideas to be followed, while in this gallery too, sited above the bell tower gallery, openings onto the Sala del Paradiso both light the space and provide a poignant reminder of what was lost in 1587. The eventual creation, amid the ferment of the Risorgimento and the unification of Italy, of the façade in the Italianate neo-gothic style that we see today, is the principal subject of the final part of the Museum, dealing with the Cathedral in the nineteenth century. 

 

However, before reaching this, after offering an even finer view of the Cathedral from a rooftop terrace and yet another window opening onto the Sala del Paradiso, the official itinerary leads back down to the first floor and what was the heart of the old Museum, the room housing the celebrated singing galleries (cantorie) by Luca della Robbia and Donatello, and the Treasury room (Fig.IV), which culminates in the magnificent silver altar of St John the Baptist, a summation of the art of the Florentine goldsmith over the 120 years that it took to complete (1367–1483). These rooms remain recognisable from the previous installation but have been thoroughly rethought, with intelligent new juxtapositions. For the first time, the precious vestments of St John the Baptist, designed by Antonio del Pollaiuolo and among the greatest surviving textiles from the Renaissance, are properly displayed, making the Treasury, which also houses Pollaiuolo’s great silver cross as well as his panel of the Birth of St John for the altar of the Baptist, perhaps the best place anywhere to study the artist as a designer. Linking the space of the Cantorie and the Treasury is an octagonal room, in which Baccio Bandinelli’s remarkable relief sculptures of prophets and other male figures from the choir in the Cathedral are beautifully displayed. 

 

Thus in every gallery of the new Museo dell’Opera del Duomo one finds great boldness and imagination in the architecture and design, working hand-in-hand with a clear intellectual vision to produce remarkable results. Although use is made of multi-media and other modern display techniques, it remains essentially a traditional museum, in which the primacy of the works of art is foremost and in which great efforts have been made to ensure that they are well displayed and lit, with clear and authoritative labelling, supplemented by an outstandingly informative new guidebook.2 The evidence of the crowds visiting it and their reactions show that this approach has been triumphantly successful. 

 

It may be noted that the Cathedral authorities made a conscious decision to manage the project entirely independently, funding it without recourse to assistance from the Italian state or the EU. Around the same time as the Museum reopened its doors, twenty ‘superdirectors’, appointed through international competition to revitalise Italy’s top state museums, took up their posts. As they begin to develop their strategies for their new institutions, they could do worse than to look at how the Museo dell’Opera del Duomo has succeeded in transforming itself from a respectable but somewhat worthy institution into a beautiful and exciting experience for visitors, in which the quality of the Museum and its collections is not diminished, indeed has never been clearer.

 

1 I Progetti per la facciata di Santa Maria del Fiore (1585-1645). Architettura a Firenze tra Rinascimento e Barocco. By Mario Bevilacqua (Archivi di Santa Maria del Fiore, Studi e Testi 4). 354 pp. incl. 17 col. + 68 b. & w. ills. (Leo S. Olschki Editore, Florence, 2015), €45. ISBN 978–88–222–6355–1.