Battistero di San Giovanni

Across from the cathedral steps stands the octagonal white-and-green marble Baptistery of San Giovanni, one of Florence's oldest buildings and the stage where Dante and generations of Florentines were baptised. Its gilded bronze doors are milestones of sculpture, and the mosaic ceiling above the font burns with scenes of the Last Judgment.

Why it matters

Dedicated to John the Baptist, the city's patron, this building has faced the cathedral as its ceremonial counterpart for centuries; the regional tourism board ranks it among Florence's oldest places of worship and preserves the medieval half-legend that it began life as a Roman temple of Mars before conversion to the church. Its plan is a perfect octagon, wrapped entirely in white marble veined with green Prato stone. The interior dome carries one of the largest medieval mosaic fields in existence, its gold background supporting a colossal Christ of the Last Judgment, executed during the thirteenth and early fourteenth centuries by artists formed in the Byzantine manner of Venice alongside Tuscan masters such as Coppo di Marcovaldo and Cimabue. Ghiberti's east door — the Gates of Paradise, as Michelangelo's nickname has it — turned bronze casting into the language of the Renaissance. UNESCO's citation of the historic centre places the Baptistery beside the cathedral and Giotto's campanile among the works of art that anchor the city's outstanding universal value.

What to notice

Walk the outside first, door by door. The south portal, the oldest, was sculpted by Andrea Pisano between 1330 and 1336 with scenes from the life of St John the Baptist and personified Virtues. The north door, Lorenzo Ghiberti's first commission, retells the New Testament and the Evangelists in twenty-eight panels. The east door — facing the cathedral — is the one Michelangelo reportedly called worthy of Paradise: entirely gilded, completed in 1452, with ten large panels of Old Testament scenes. What you see on the building are copies; the restored originals, damaged in the 1966 flood, are displayed in the Museo dell'Opera del Duomo together with the other original doors. Inside, tilt your head back for the mosaic ceiling's judgement of souls, then look down for the tomb monument of the antipope John XXIII, who died in Florence in 1419, designed by Donatello with Michelozzo. Donatello's wooden Mary Magdalene once stood here and now belongs to the museum circuit too.

Context and history

The Baptistery belongs to the complex administered by the Opera di Santa Maria del Fiore, an institution that has overseen the cathedral's building works since the Middle Ages. Its art-historical weight comes from a chain of commissions that reads like a syllabus of Italian sculpture: Pisano's door established the bronze narrative panel, Ghiberti's competition-winning north door decided the direction of early Renaissance relief, and the Gates of Paradise carried linear perspective into metal. The mosaics also made it a workshop of painting, with Venetian-trained craftsmen and Tuscan painters sharing a gold ground. The 1966 flood dealt the east door its gravest injury and its longest restoration, a campaign whose completion returned the original panels to public view inside the museum rather than on the building.