By MENACHEM WECKER FLORENCE, ITALY . Like many other halls of fame, the collection of Florence’s ca- thedral museum, the Museo dell’Opera del Duomo, assembles such staggering luminary power that it’s hard not to walk through the building starstruck, with the aesthetic v ersion of a brain freeze headache from consuming too much ice cream too quickly. Here, near the entry, are Lorenzo Ghiberti’s renowned bronze “Gates of Paradise” — the actual 1425-52, nearly 5,000-pound doors that had adorned the Baptistery, opposite the Duomo, until they were replaced (for safekeep- ing) by copies. Around a corner, one discovers Michelangelo’s “Pietà,” the artist’s penultimate work, which he sought to destroy, having intended the highly personal sculpture to adorn his own tomb. Italian painter Vasari reported that Michelangelo sculpted it at night by the light of a single candle, and on one such occasion, when he saw Vasari, Michelangelo extinguished the candle, so the former wouldn’t get a glimpse of the sculpture. En route, one is liable to lose one’s breath over any number of Donatello sculptures, perhaps most notably “Penitent Magdalene” (1454-55), which is arranged along one sightline with the Pietà, and another with an octago- nal chapel with lavish reliquaries. Be- hind her is a crucifixion on the wall. She is, after all, praying; what better props and inspirations to surround oneself with than the cross, a pietà, and saintly remains? Sightlines upon which renowned artworks dialogue with predecessors is the stuff of which Florence has been made for centuries. The new museum, which reopened to the public Oct. 29 following a two-and-a-half-year redesign and expansion (which more than doubled its floor space), inserts itself into that historic framework. Somewhere in between the dizzying array of monumental works in the museum’s collection blending togeth- er, one becomes aware of the complex- ity of the enterprise, and its layering. The cornerstone of the Cathedral of Santa Maria del Fiore (“Virgin of the Flower”) was laid in 1296, and the building, designed by Arnolfo di Cambio, was completed in the 15th century, although only one-third of Cambio’s design was actually realized. (Chalk the nearly two-century delay up to Italian bureaucracy, financial hurdles, and changes in governmental structures.) The cathedral’s façade, with sculp- tures of Mary and of the city’s patron saints, was intended to contrast the ideal population (rendered in stone) with Florence’s real population, the church triumphant with the church militant, explains Msgr. Timothy Ver- don, director of the museum. The so-called “Madonna With the Glass Eyes,” which appears promi- nently at eye level and (in copy) above on the modeled façade (as well as in copy on the actual Duomo façade) also stresses the significance of the real and ideal. Di Cambio stressed the negative space between Mary’s arm and Roman toga to impress upon view- ers that she has a physical, three-di- mensional body, according to Verdon. “If Christ is true God, he’s also true man. So he has to be born from true woman with a body. That’s the whole story,” he said. And the glass eyes — typical in polychrome wood sculptures, but quite rare in white marble — would have caught the light at certain times of day and gleamed. “The idea of these living eyes in the eternal stone is very strange,” Verdon said. “It’s almost frightening in a way.” “The sculptures cannot but have reminded people that the New Tes- tament tells believers that they are living stones aligned with the cor- nerstone, who is Christ, to create a new structure,” he added. “To see the saints as these stone personalities said something to Florentines.” Here’s where it gets complicated. The actual stone sculptures, which Continued on Page 2a NATIONAL CATHOLIC REPORTER NOVEMBER 20-DECEMBER 3, 2015 NCRonline.org Travel QUEST Wilderness Seeds of new beginnings found in 10-day desert stay Page 6a —Photos by Newscom/EPA/Maurizio Degl’Innocenti A woman looks at the “Gates of Paradise,” 15th-century bronze doors by Lorenzo Ghiberti. Luminaries dialogue in Florence’s redesigned cathedral museum STARSTRUCK A visitor takes a photo in the gallery of the bell tower in the redesigned Museo dell’Opera del Duomo in Florence, Italy, on Oct 21. ‘They wanted to be spectacular. To take people’s breath away.’ —Msgr. Timothy Verdon
Transcript
By MENACHEM WECKER
FLORENCE, ITALY . Like many other halls of fame, the collection of Florence’s ca-thedral museum, the Museo dell’Opera del Duomo, assembles such staggering luminary power that it’s hard not to walk through the building starstruck, with the aesthetic v ersion of a brain freeze headache from consuming too much ice cream too quickly.
Here, near the entry, are Lorenzo Ghiberti’s renowned bronze “Gates of Paradise” — the actual 1425-52, nearly 5,000-pound doors that had adorned the Baptistery, opposite the Duomo, until they were replaced (for safekeep-ing) by copies.
Around a corner, one discovers Michelangelo’s “Pietà,” the artist’s penultimate work, which he sought to destroy, having intended the highly personal sculpture to adorn his own tomb. Italian painter Vasari reported that Michelangelo sculpted it at night by the light of a single candle, and on one such occasion, when he saw Vasari, Michelangelo extinguished the candle, so the former wouldn’t get a
glimpse of the sculpture.En route, one is liable to lose one’s
breath over any number of Donatello sculptures, perhaps most notably “Penitent Magdalene” (1454-55), which is arranged along one sightline with the Pietà, and another with an octago-nal chapel with lavish reliquaries. Be-hind her is a crucifixion on the wall. She is, after all, praying; what better props and inspirations to surround oneself with than the cross, a pietà, and saintly remains?
Sightlines upon which renowned artworks dialogue with predecessors is the stuff of which Florence has been made for centuries. The new museum, which reopened to the public Oct. 29 following a two-and-a-half-year redesign and expansion (which more than doubled its floor space), inserts itself into that historic framework. Somewhere in between the dizzying array of monumental works in the museum’s collection blending togeth-er, one becomes aware of the complex-ity of the enterprise, and its layering.
The cornerstone of the Cathedral of Santa Maria del Fiore (“Virgin
of the Flower”) was laid in 1296, and the building, designed by Arnolfo di Cambio, was completed in the 15th century, although only one-third of Cambio’s design was actually realized.
(Chalk the nearly two-century delay up to Italian bureaucracy, financial hurdles, and changes in governmental structures.)
The cathedral’s façade, with sculp-tures of Mary and of the city’s patron saints, was intended to contrast the ideal population (rendered in stone) with Florence’s real population, the church triumphant with the church militant, explains Msgr. Timothy Ver-don, director of the museum.
The so-called “Madonna With the Glass Eyes,” which appears promi-nently at eye level and (in copy) above on the modeled façade (as well as in
copy on the actual Duomo façade) also stresses the significance of the real and ideal. Di Cambio stressed the negative space between Mary’s arm and Roman toga to impress upon view-ers that she has a physical, three-di-mensional body, according to Verdon.
“If Christ is true God, he’s also true man. So he has to be born from true woman with a body. That’s the whole story,” he said. And the glass eyes — typical in polychrome wood sculptures, but quite rare in white marble — would have caught the light at certain times of day and gleamed.
“The idea of these living eyes in the eternal stone is very strange,” Verdon said. “It’s almost frightening in a way.”
“The sculptures cannot but have reminded people that the New Tes-tament tells believers that they are living stones aligned with the cor-nerstone, who is Christ, to create a new structure,” he added. “To see the saints as these stone personalities said something to Florentines.”
Here’s where it gets complicated. The actual stone sculptures, which
A woman looks at the “Gates of Paradise,” 15th-century bronze doors by Lorenzo Ghiberti.
Luminaries dialogue in Florence’s redesigned cathedral museum
STARSTRUCK
A visitor takes a photo in the gallery of the bell tower in the redesigned Museo dell’Opera del Duomo in Florence, Italy, on Oct 21.
‘They wanted to be spectacular. To take people’s breath away.’
—Msgr. Timothy Verdon
Continued from Page 1a
were intended to represent the heavenly population, were moved to the museum for their protection, and copies were placed on the façade. So the cathedral portal now has copies imitating copies of saints.
The new museum, which builds upon a theater that the cathedral foun-dation reacquired in 1998 (having sold it in 1778), has a great hall of sufficient size to recreate one-third of di Cam-bio’s façade design.
In that tremendous space — which Verdon said is Florence’s largest museum room — some of the actual sculptures are displayed at eye level for visitors to see, while copies have been inserted in their appropriate spaces on the façade, where viewers can view the sculptures from the intended trajectory.
For those keeping score at home: The new museum displays sculptural copies and originals, all installed in a copy of the Duomo façade, across the street from the actual façade, which displays copies of the sculptural originals, which were intended to be representations (copies) of the heav-enly population.
If unpacking the deconstructionist implications of all these originals and copies — signs, signifiers, signifieds and referents, if one wants to get tech-nical — is liable to induce a headache, or at least to require a pen and paper to keep track, the actual installation of the façade model in the new museum is extremely clean and intuitive.
Even viewing the enormous room, which is approximately the size of the Sistine Chapel, a few weeks before the museum opening, with conservators working on the Ghiberti doors and with craftsmen bustling about con-struction platforms and with sparks flying about and the noise of saws fill-ing the space, the façade represented a clean visual oasis.
Verdon did not decorate the model to look like the original marble to avoid a “Disney” effect, and the copies of the sculptures are not colored to mimic the original works. A clear divide sepa-rates the authentic from the modeled, which lends the entire apparatus the feel of a layered archeological excava-tion. Gesturing to a particular spot covered by scaffolding opposite the
modeled façade, Verdon noted he was waiting for a delayed 15-foot column, which would have a carved cross on the top. “I like to put things in people’s ways,” he said.
In the early days of the project, ac-tual excavations had to be done to en-sure that no important remains were hidden beneath the theater. A process that should have taken six months took nine or 10. Some potsherds and a small cylindrical structure with a hemispheric dome were discovered, but nothing threatened to delay con-struction.
“Let’s say that the director, who is also a priest, was praying every day that they would not find anything important,” Verdon said of himself. “If they had found significant remains of a Roman building, for example, the chances were that they would oblige us to suspend all work until they had completely explored that — which could be as long as three, four or five years, if not more.”
Walking through the cathedral museum as it now stands, where one encounters stunning choir lofts, lavish vestments, models of Brunelleschi’s dome, and countless other treasures, one might be inclined to ponder the theological implications of such wealth and artistry. While one is inclined to celebrate Michelangelo and Donatello and the rest for their artistic genius, is the church really supposed to so fearlessly toe the line between glorifying God and idolatry?
The answer, according to Verdon,
lies in an arrangement that seems peculiar to Italy. A visitor cannot walk around Florence without bumping into any number of churches with their own staggering art collections: Santa Croce, Santa Maria Novella, San Marco, Santo Spirito, Santa Maria del Carmine and San Lorenzo, to name a few. But the Florence cathedral, which overshadows all the rest, represented a “kind of initial acknowledgement” between the church and the state that a
grand, landmark cathedral “is some-thing desired most specifically by the state and not by the church. The large cathedral church becomes a represen-tative, emblematic face for the state,” Verdon explained.
At the time, “the state identified itself in the faith and in the rites of the church,” he said. “The bigger your ca-thedral, the more effectively you could say to people, ‘God has given us wealth, and we have given a significant por-tion of this back to him in the form of a great church. Therefore this is a very strong relationship and you shouldn’t screw with us.’ ”
The Duomo certainly broadcasts that message loud and clear to anyone who sees it from up close, or, for exam-ple, watches the sunset over Florence from the incredible perch of the Piazza Michelangelo across the Arno River.
It’s easy to imagine that the new ca-thedral museum will preach a similar message of wealth and of power and of art on the one hand, and of prayer, giving back to God, and religious service on the other. In that sense, the museum both is very new and also promises to become an important thread in the fabric of the city that has been unfolding for centuries.
Standing in front of Donatello sculp-tures of Old Testament prophets in the new museum, Verdon discussed the decision to frame the works in their broader, monumental context. “They wanted to be spectacular,” he said. “To take people’s breath away.”
[Menachem Wecker is a Washington,
D.C.-based reporter and co-author of the
book Consider No Evil: Two Faith Traditions
and the Problem of Academic Freedom in
Religious Higher Education.]
FLORENCE: ‘I LIKE TO PUT THINGS IN PEOPLE’S WAYS’
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TRAVEL2a NOVEMBER 20-DECEMBER 3, 2015 NATIONAL CATHOLIC REPORTER
—Newscom/New Press Photo/Splash News
Members of the press are shown the new layout of the Museo dell’Opera del Duomo in Florence, Italy, on Oct. 21. The cathedral museum reopened to the public Oct. 29.
—Newscom/New Press Photo/Splash News
Msgr. Timothy Verdon
—Newscom/EPA/Maurizio Degl’Innocenti
A woman looks at mod-els displayed in the cathe-dral museum of Florence.
