Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
- currently being massively reorganised and enlarged to embrace another 2000 sq m in a
former theatre-turned-garage next door - safeguards sacred and liturgical treasures that
once adorned the
duomo,
baptistry and
campanile.
Make a beeline for the glass-topped
courtyard with its awe-inspiring showpiece encased in glas s - Ghiberti's original 15th-
century masterpiece, the
Porta del Paradiso
(Gate of Paradise), designed for the eastern
entrance to the Baptistry.
After 27 years secreted away in restoration workshops, the gloriously golden, 16m-tall
gilded brass doors that took almost three decades to restore were unveiled with much
pomp and ceremony in 2012.
In a small room just off the stair landing is the museum's best-known piece, Michelan-
gelo's
La Pietà ,
a work he sculpted when he was almost 80 and intended for his own
tomb. Vasari recorded in his
Lives of the Artists
that, dissatisfied with both the quality of
the marble and of his own work, Michelangelo broke up the unfinished sculpture, destroy-
ing the arm and left leg of the figure of Christ. A student of Michelangelo's later restored
the arm and completed the figure.
Continue upstairs, where a pair of exquisitely carved
cantorie
(singing galleries) or or-
gan lofts - one by Donatello, the other by Luca della Robbia - face each other. Originally
in the cathedral's sacristy, their scenes of musicians and children at play add a refreshingly
frivolous touch amid so much sombre piety. Don't miss the same sculptor's wooden rep-
resentation of a gaunt, desperately desolate Mary Magdalene in the same room, a work
completed late in his career.
End on a giddy high with a masterpiece of medieval and Renaissance metalwork: the
Altar of St John, crafted by three generations of Florentine silversmiths between 1367 and
1480, was created for the Baptistry. More than 250kg of silver was used to make the altar
panels, sculpted to illustrate the life of John the Baptist in the most extraordinary detail.
The accompanying cross, also hung originally in the Baptistry, is the work of Antonio del
Pollaiolo.
Expansion and restoration work at the musem will continue until the end of 2015; once
complete, the museum will double in space and stash away hundreds more treasures (in-
cluding, for example, Ghiberti's northern Baptistry doors, removed from the Baptistry in
2013 to be restored like their eastern counterparts).
Battistero di San Giovanni
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