The newly-restored Baptistery of St John may be only small, but it has been a focal point for almost a millennium. Its extraordinary art and architecture, including Ghiberti’s famous ‘Gates of Paradise’, cast a brilliant light on Renaissance Florence’s relationship with Roman and Medieval precedents.
By Stephen Lock
The scaffolding is down, the workers have gone. The baptistery, for 3 years imprisoned in a cage of metal fencing and shrouded by white sheeting, gleams like a freshly-polished jewel at Florence’s heart. While the clean-up crawled along, it yielded pride of place to the 19th-century Duomo facade. Now it has regained its rightful position in the limelight, not only by the recovery of its pristine elegance (which far outstrips that of the cathedral opposite) but also by acting as a visual reminder of how and when Florence won its pride, power and beauty.
The Romanesque baptistery is extremely old. Consecrated in 1059, that puts it almost 250 years before Arnolfo di Cambio started work on the Duomo, and over 350 years before Brunelleschi laid out plans for the magnificent Dome. In generational terms, that gap represents an enormous chasm – so enormous, in fact, that the building was quick to acquire its own mythology.
While we may be amazed by its spectacular age, Florentines of the Renaissance regarded it as something even more special. Having rapidly forgotten the true story of its construction, they were convinced it was a relic of Roman times. It is not hard to imagine why: its huge dome, harmonious octagonal symmetry and sumptuous marble must have seemed so exceptional in a labyrinthine medieval city of stone towers and improvised wooden structures, that surely it could only be the creation of greater minds from a long-lost age. For them it represented an enduring glimpse of that glorious past, but also an opportunity to learn about, imitate and one day resurrect it.
At the same time, deep religious meaning was written into the very structure of the building. Seven of the eight sides of the octagon supposedly refer to the days of Creation, while the inclusion of the eighth nods to the coming day of judgement, and to eternal paradise. The building is an earthly embodiment of that paradise. Its personal significance for every Florentine would have been enhanced by the fact that this was the place where everyone in the city came to be baptised, in a large (but long-since removed) font in the centre of the floor.
This combination of magnificent beauty, (fabled) antiquity, and religious and civic significance therefore gave it a very important status in the mind’s eye of the Renaissance Florentine. It gave them something to boast about – a special relationship with the Roman world – which fuelled their civic pride and admiration for Roman models; but its unusual design also made it an inspiration and a focal point for new and uniquely Florentine artistic and architectural ideas. Not only was it the primogenitor of Florence’s green-and-white marble facades (visible from San Miniato al Monte to Santa Maria Novella), but it cannot be a coincidence that it was also at the epicentre of the event often considered to herald the Renaissance itself: the baptistery doors competition of 1401.
Before considering the doors themselves, take a look at the ceiling decoration inside. This 13th century marvel comes next chronologically after the Romanesque exterior. The scale and ambition of the work is enormous, and brilliantly showcases another major artistic undercurrent of the time, namely the Italo-Byzantine style. This belongs to the world of St Mark’s in Venice, and the ancient tradition of gilded mosaic interiors stretching right back to the beautiful churches and baptisteries of 5th and 6th century Ravenna.
If the scale and adornment of the ceiling offers an overwhelming sensory experience, it is the detail that holds the most fascinating insights. At the time, naturalistic expression and emotion were never as important as symbolism and traditional iconography – just look at the endless stream of animals pouring into Noah’s minuscule ark, or the waters of the Jordan, rising in a convenient pyramid to accommodate Christ as he is baptised. Also of interest, and apparent even from noting the entirely different stylistic representations of water in just these two scenes, is how multiple artists across several generations clearly had a hand in completing this one work. Despite such peculiarities in its composition, the religious message is still clear and powerful. Its fitting centrepiece is the majestic figure of Christ, offering us the choice of salvation’s bliss or the grisly torments of hell.
The overall effect, then, is of an immensely lavish demonstration of civic wealth, prestige and religiosity. However, the style was soon to be displaced by new artistic developments. And few if any objects did more to usher in that coming artistic revolution than the baptistery doors.
Confusingly, there are in fact three sets, adorning the north, south and east sides of the octagon (the west side breaks the mould with a protruding rectangular apse, housing the altar). The earliest set is the south-facing one, designed by Pisano in 1330 and later furnished with a bronze frame of Ghiberti’s design. Showing clear proto-Renaissance influences from Pisano’s near-contemporary Giotto, it depicts scenes from the life of John the Baptist, and the Theological and Cardinal Virtues, set in medieval quatrefoil-shaped gothic panels.
The next set chronologically now looks north, and this is the one that was the end product of that famous competition of 1401. Competitors were required to cast a single panel depicting the sacrifice of Isaac, and the leading entries by Ghiberti and Brunelleschi still survive in the Bargello Museum. The commission eventually went to the 21 year-old Ghiberti, whose scene showed creative use of the quatrefoil frame, ingenuity in separating and emphasising elements of the narrative, and classical influences in the powerful body language of his characters. It took him a further 21 years to craft the 28 door panels depicting the evangelists, church fathers and episodes from the life of Christ.
No sooner had he completed this masterpiece than he was commissioned to make another: the final and most conspicuous set of doors facing east towards the cathedral. If Ghiberti had already shown that Florentine art was ripe for transformation, these doors revealed how revolutionary he could be when given free rein. Gone are the gothic quatrefoils, which confined handfuls of bronze figures into little clusters. In their place are huge gilded rectangular panels, filled with complex stories, ornamented with classically-inspired architecture and populated with naturalistic figures. The whole composition, meanwhile, is rendered in brilliant 3-D perspective – newly rediscovered at that time, and almost immediately mastered by Ghiberti and his contemporaries Donatello and Brunelleschi. It is no wonder that Michelangelo himself thought them fit to be the ‘Gates of Paradise’.
This small building, then, has not one but many remarkable stories to tell. It could be considered a microcosm of Florence: beginning as an esoteric creation from nearly a thousand years ago, it became the navel of the city, a building at the forefront of both the prevalent Romanesque and the Byzantine traditions, while also conjuring up aspirations for a long-lost Roman ideal. As the Florentines embarked on their quest to recapture that golden age, the baptistery would be among the first testing grounds for their artists’ innovation and prodigious talents, and would in turn inspire many of their greatest creations.
Treasures of Florence 