Opera magazine
2024-03-25
Dante Alighieri, the Divine Comedy, the Cathedral and the Baptistery of Florence
Stories, places and works of art of the monumental complex of the Opera di Santa Maria del Fiore in Florence in the life of the great poet and in the verses of the Divine Comedy
In the right nave of the Florence Cathedral there is the most famous portrait of Dante Alighieri (Florence, 1265 - Ravenna, 1321), commissioned by the city government to Domenico di Michelino to celebrate the great poet on the bicentenary of his birth (1465), it is said in the place where public readings of his great poem, the Divine Comedy, took place at the beginning of the fifteenth century. In fact, in the painting we see Alighieri standing, holding his masterpiece open on the first page. Around him, on the left, we see the otherworldly realms described in the poem and from the pages of that book a light is projected that illuminates Florence on the right, with its walls and its towers and, above all, its Cathedral, dominated by great mass of the Dome.
Those rays of light that from the verses of the Comedy shine on the tiles and marbles of Santa Maria del Fiore are the most eloquent sign of the profound bond that unites Dante to our monuments.
The Baptistery of Florence, the the Cathedral of Santa Maria del Fiore, with the underground remains of the ancient Santa Reparata and Brunelleschi's Dome, Giotto's Bell Tower, the Museum and all the works of art contained therein, they are, perhaps more than any other, “Dantesque” places. Here, in fact, the culture, thought and art of Alighieri still illuminate the marbles, mosaics and paintings and, vice versa, leafing through the pages of Dante's poem we find that the inspiration was mutual. The architecture and works of art of this monumental complex was implanted in the creative imagination of Dante and accompanied him nostalgically even in exile.
By visiting our monuments you therefore travel through the spaces that Dante also traveled and admire the beauties that he also saw, or you experience places and images that were inspired by him and are thus transported to the lyrical peaks of his poem.
In Dante's time the Baptistery was the religious and civil center of Florence and in fact it occurs twice in the Divine Comedy.
The first time is in Canto XIX of the Inferno (verses 16-21) when he recalls the ancient baptisimal font that was in the "beautiful San Giovanni": a Florentine Romanesque masterpiece which was unfortunately demolished in the sixteenth century but whose fragments are today kept in the Museum's lapidary. It is impressive when you look at those inlaid marbles to think back to those verses by Dante where the poet recalls having broken the font in one place to save a child from drowning during a Baptism:
“They did not seem to me less broad or more than those that in my handsome San Giovanni were made to serve as basins for baptizing;and one of these, not many years ago, I broke for someone who was drowning in it: and let this be my seal to set men straight."Again and even more moving is when in the XXV Canto of Paradiso (verses 7-9) Dante reveals his hope of being able one day to return to his hometown and receive the poet's crown in that place where he had been baptized:
“[...] by then with other voice, with other fleece,I shall return as poet and put on,at my baptismal font, the laurel crown;[...]”A dream that would come true six centuries after his death and precisely on November 14 1465 when Pope Paul VI donated a gold crown with the monogram of Christ to Dante to the Baptistery, recognizing Alighieri as supreme poet and supreme theologian (as he reiterated in his Apostolic Letter “Altissimi Cantus”).
That crown is a short distance from the mosaics of the vault and the apse which Dante must have looked at many times, as a direct witness of part of their creation.
The visions of wheels and circles of angels and the flashes of Paradise may have been inspired by the rings of the summit registers with the angelic hierarchies and in the apse the image of the facing thrones of the Madonna with Child and the Baptist seems to quote verses 28-33 of the XXXII of the Paradiso:
“And just as onthis side, to serve as such a great partition, there is the throne in glory of the Lady of Heaven and the seats that range below it,so, opposite, the seat of the great John— who, always saintly, suffered both the desert and martyrdom, and then two years of Hell [...]” .Even more, the various tortures suffered by the damned souls and their devil executioners who populate the north-west segment certainly inspired the circles and pits of his Inferno (Hell) and the gigantic Lucifer who dominates at the center of that kingdom is similar that described by Dante at the end of the same book, wich with three mouths eternally tear three sinners to pieces (verses 55-57):
“Within each mouth—he used it like a grinder—with gnashing teeth he tore to bits a sinner,so that he brought much pain to three at once.”
The other Lucifer, the one painted in the sixteenth century in the western section of the Last Judgment of Brunelleschi's Dome, is in turn directly taken from these Dante's verses. Moreover, the entire iconographic program of the wall painting of dome, developed by Borghini and translated by the brushes of Vasari and Zuccari, is inspired by Dante for that way of ordering as family groups the blessed souls in heavens and the damned in pit circles. It is no coincidence that Dante himself has been portrayed among the blessed souls and even has the honor of being in the company of the Doctors of the Church.
But Dante never saw either these paintings or Brunelleschi's Dome. The cathedral of Florence in Dante's time was still the ancient basilica of Santa Reparata, whose archaeological remains were found last century and can now be visited with an underground route under the floor of the Cathedral. We must imagine Dante participating here in the most important religious ceremonies and, probably, also in some sessions of the “Captaincy of the People”, a government position he held. And just as Dante reached the pinnacle of his "Cursus honorum" (political career) in the governing bodies of Florence in 1396, the Municipality created the Opera di Santa Maria del Fiore, the institution in charge of the construction of the new Cathedral. The stone still preserved on the southern side of Piazza del Duomo is remembered with the name "Dante's stone" because, according to legend, the poet would have sat there to admire the progress of the work on the new Cathedral.
Of this mammoth work, whose construction had been entrusted to Arnolfo di Cambio, who erected it starting from the facade, Dante himself certainly had time before his exile in 1302 to see the project. Furthermore, on September 8 1296 he probably witnessed the blessing of the laying of the first stone. This ceremony was presided over by Cardinal Piperno, close to Pope Boniface VIII, who was Alighieri's great enemy and who in fact we find in the hell of the simoniacs (Inferno XIX , 52-54). Dante, however, almost certainly did not see the pharaonic effigy of this pontiff sculpted by Arnolfo for the façade of Santa Maria del Fiore (today in the Museo dell'Opera), but he would perhaps have been pleased to see it replaced with his own portrait bust, carved by Cesare Fantacchiotti in the new nineteenth-century front, after the demolition of the medieval one at the end of the sixteenth century. Dante did not even see the bell tower of the new Cathedral, based on Giotto's design, built starting from 1334 (13 years after Dante's death).
But Giotto and Dante, Florentine giants of Western culture, met and in his Divine Comedy Dante was the first to celebrate Giotto's greatness and fame together with his master, Cimabue, who in turn had been among the authors of the mosaics of Baptistery (Purgatorio XI, 94-96):
“In painting Cimabue thought he heldthe field, and now it’s Giotto they acclaim-the former only keeps a shadowed fame.”Who knows who influenced whom regarding the three-colour of all the marble coverings of the Bell Tower and the Cathedral. Dante did not see them directly but it is as if he had seen them when he described the steps leading to the entrance to the Door of Purgatory, with their symbolic meaning of theological virtues: green the Hope, white the Faith and red the Charity.
And as the poet will dress Beatrice in the earthly Paradise with these three colors (Purgatorio XXX, 31-33),
“[...]abovea white veil, she was crowned with olive boughs;her cape was green; her dress beneath, flame—red[...]”thus the stonemason masters of the fourteenth century covered the exterior of the Cathedral and the Bell Tower, with marble inlays with floral motifs. A reference to the name of the Cathedral: Santa Maria del Fiore “Holy Mary of the Flower”. A flower that echoes "Fiorenza/Florence” but which is also the flower that sprouted in Mary's womb in Saint Bernard's prayer in Paradiso XXXIII (verses 7-9):
“That love whose warmth allowed this flower to bloomwithin the everlasting peace—was loverekindled in your womb;”
Brunelleschi, as the sources tell us, was a profound connoisseur of Dante's Comedy, and could not fail to have thought of those verses from Paradiso while designing the large Dome of the Cathedral dedicated to the Virgin Mary, which really looks like a belly that swells before generating " the flower". A flower that alludes to Christ and the resurrection and which corresponds to Easter and the advent of spring, therefore with the Florentine New Year, March 24th. It is no coincidence that close to this date, the 25th of 1300, according to scholars, Dante established the beginning of his journey in the Divine Comedy. For this reason this date was therefore chosen as "Dantedì” (“DanteDay”), a national day celebrating the poet established by the Italian government in 2021, on the seven hundredth anniversary of the poet's birth.
