This three-hour walking seminar focuses on Santa Maria del Fiore, Florence's cathedral which is usually simply referred to as the Duomo. In the company of an art or architectural historian, we will spend our time visiting the major sites in and around the church, tracing the architectural development of what would become, by the end of the Renaissance, the symbolic core of the city.

The Baptistery.

We start with the Baptistery, an 11th century structure that the Florentines believed was originally a Roman temple. (We will get a glimpse of the ancient structure below the floor, now thought to be a Roman house.) We will spend some time discussing the architectural decoration on the exterior of the building and how this mixture of green and white marble later became the "house style" of Renaissance Florence. Inside, in the shadow of the absolutely stunning Italo-Byzantine mosaics, we will look at the context of the medieval period and how the great architects, like Brunelleschi, were as much inspired by old Florence as they were by Rome, Greece, and classical models. 

The Duomo.

Depending on opening and closing times, we'll move from here to the Duomo itself, dealing with the long, dramatic story of its design and construction. We'll talk about Brunelleschi while standing in front of the facade, on the top step, where many historians believe he set up his "perspective machine" to establish, for the first time since antiquity, a system of mathematical perspective. Inside, we'll discuss Arnolfo di Cambio, Pisano, and Brunelleschi in the context of Florentine politics. We will engage in a short discussion of the dome; its novel construction and how Brunelleschi used the model of the past to invent a radically modern way of building. 

Museo dell'Opera del Duomo.

Finally, we will move to the museum of the Duomo, an often-overlooked collection of masterpieces. Here we will find a wealth of artworks removed from the Duomo and surrounding buildings, including Ghiberti's bronze doors of the Baptistery and Donatello's figures for the facade of the cathedral. We will linger at some of the more important pieces, such as Michelangelo's late-career Pieta' and Donatello's disheveled statue of Mary Magdalene. We will also spend some time among the construction tools and architectural models designed by Brunelleschi and his successors to complete our understanding of the building that has come to represent for so many Florence itself.