Art Notes: Mosaics of the Florence Baptistery of Art, Culture, and Faith

Art NotesMosaics of the Florence Baptistery of Art, Culture, and Faith Kathryn Wehr, Managing Editor Museums around the world are filled with masterpieces of sacred art, enabling visitors to see art in a wide range of styles, in good lighting, and preserved for posterity. It can be helpful to remind ourselves, though, that most sacred statues and paintings were created for sacred spaces; museums are not their natural habitat. The same can be said of sacred spaces that have become tourist destinations. They were built for prayer and their art reflects their purpose, though too often a quick selfie inside St. Peter's or Notre Dame de Paris satisfies most visitors today. Surely medieval pilgrims had their own version of such behavior too, and builders and artists had their own thirst for glory, yet awe-inspiring treasures await those of any century who take the time to visit an old church with careful attention and prayer. Click for larger view View full resolution The San Giovanni Baptistery is a favorite site for travelers to Florence and has long served as a central symbol of civic and religious life for Florentines, though its exact origin and earliest form are debated. One legend said it was built on an old Roman temple of Mars, though End Page 135 Click for larger view View full resolution Florence and Her Treasures, Herbert M. Vaughan, 1911. Image: Wikimedia Commons. Public Domain. archeology has shown it more likely to be the site of a Roman garrison near the ancient walls1 and then a barbarian burial ground.2 An older and smaller octagonal church on the site could also be the one said to have been built by Bishop Zenobius in the late fourth century.3 The baptistery owes its current size and splendor to structural and decorative changes begun in the eleventh century. Pope Nicholas II, himself a Florentine, is associated with this renewal and attended a blessing of the church in 1059 that could have been either for the commencement of work or a consecration of either a stage or the finished church structure.4 The church was at that time enlarged and crowned with an eight-sided vault, followed by the decorative additions that still amaze today's visitors: the ceiling mosaics and the later bronze doors. The church interior is covered with mosaics of various types and represents "the largest pictorial cycle of the thirteenth century in Tuscany."5 The mosaics themselves include an inscription that the work was commenced on May 12, 1225, by "Jacopo, friar of Saint Francis," though the artists' names and the dates of the various portions of the End Page 136 mosaics are greatly debated by art historians. They look for the stylistic fingerprints of various artists known to be a part of the works or in the area during thirteenth and early fourteenth centuries, as well as decipher who was responsible for the repair of various portions throughout the centuries. Water damage, cracks, falling tesserae, collapse, and lack of funds all led to mixed success with repairing the mosaics over the centuries. A full-scale six-year renovation is currently underway, and though the whole vault is covered when viewed from below, a central scaffold allows limited numbers of visitors to view parts of the mosaics at eye level and observe the restorers at work.6 Our cover shows the largest feature of the whole cycle, which sits above the ambo: Christ the Pantocrator within a large scene of The Final Judgment. The size and orientation of our cover cannot do justice to the whole octagon vault or even the whole of the scene of judgment around Christ. He is flanked above by rows of angels and apostles, and below with those on his right (notice his thumb up) being led from their graves into paradise in the laps of the patriarchs and those on his left (notice his thumb down) being led to torment by demons or being eaten by the devil himself. It is this scene that our lead article by Mark Sandona suggests would surely have inspired and frightened the young Florentines Dante and Giotto. Irene Hueck agrees: "As children, Giotto...