Cattedrale di Santa Maria del Fiore

Two centuries of building and one impossible dome produced the cathedral of Florence, Santa Maria del Fiore. Begun in 1296 on Arnolfo di Cambio's design, expanded by Francesco Talenti and consecrated in 1436, it fills Piazza del Duomo with polychrome marble and treasures within.

Why it matters

Santa Maria del Fiore is the building Florence is judged by. Its name invokes the city itself, Florentia, the city of flowers, and its lily emblem; its scale remains startling at 153 metres in length, 90 metres across the transept and 90 metres from floor to the base of the lantern, as the Opera di Santa Maria del Fiore records. The first stone was laid on 8 September 1296 with Arnolfo di Cambio in charge, and the plan was later enlarged from the mid-fourteenth century by Francesco Talenti, whose vast bays demanded a vault no one yet knew how to raise. That problem produced Brunelleschi's dome, and the cathedral was consecrated by Pope Eugene IV on 25 March 1436, at the dome's completion. Few monuments anywhere carry so much of a city's civic pride, technical ambition and artistic inheritance in one body.

What to notice

Inside, the cool vastness differs from the busy marble outside. The naves are set out by Talenti's immense pillars and broad Gothic arches, while the floor displays marble inlay conceived by the grand-ducal workshops in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Forty-four stained glass windows, from designs by leading Florentine artists of the fourteenth and early fifteenth centuries, filter the light. On the walls look for the monumental clock frescoed by Paolo Uccello, its single hand still telling liturgical hours, and the two gigantic equestrian portraits, of the condottiere John Hawkwood and of Niccolò da Tolentino, painted directly onto the masonry. Domenico di Michelino's painting shows Dante presenting his poem above the city he was exiled from. Twelve aedicules carry life-scale apostles and prophets of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, the two sacristies are fitted with glazed terracotta reliefs by Luca della Robbia, and the marble choir enclosure is what remains of Bandinelli's sixteenth-century choir, once conceived in dialogue with the Last Judgment that Vasari and Zuccari painted in the dome above. In a chapel hangs a polyptych of Santa Reparata by Giotto and his workshop.

Context and history

The cathedral replaced the early Christian church of Santa Reparata, whose remains still lie below the floor and can be visited. Arnolfo di Cambio's project of 1296 was similar in plan but smaller than the building that eventually rose, the result of Talenti's expansion programme begun in the mid-fourteenth century. The eastern end posed the problem that defined the Renaissance: an octagonal drum so wide that traditional timber centering could not carry a dome. Filippo Brunelleschi answered it between 1420 and 1436 with a self-supporting double-shell masonry vault, and the completed cathedral was consecrated on 25 March 1436, the Florentine New Year. The exterior tells a later story: the medieval facade begun under Arnolfo was demolished, replaced by a late-seventeenth-century wall, and finally by the nineteenth-century neo-Gothic facade designed by Emilio De Fabris, adorned by leading Tuscan sculptors. The cathedral thus stacks the city's ambitions in visible strata, medieval, Renaissance and national-era, around one of the world's defining architectural achievements.