Opera magazine
2026-02-02
The Bestiary of Florence Cathedral
Animals and the Opera di Santa Maria del Fiore: Art, Anecdotes, and History
Our friends, the animals: throughout the centuries, they have silently accompanied the work, achievements, and daily lives of the men engaged in the service of the monuments of the Opera di Santa Maria del Fiore. Once, our relationship with them was far more intense than it is today: in a place like the nave of the Cathedral—which functioned as a kind of monumental indoor square—it was not unusual to see people strolling with dogs on leashes.
As a result, depictions of animals abound in works of art. This intimate bond between humankind and nature is splendidly celebrated in the 13th-century mosaics of the Baptistery, in the oldest ring surrounding the oculus, where pairs of animals drink at the fountain or the Tree of Life. Below, in the first panel of the Stories of Genesis depicting the Creation of the World, Adam and Eve are accompanied by curious fish, birds, and animals both wild and domestic. A few panels later, an entire zoological encyclopedia comes to life as animals march in orderly pairs toward the entrance of Noah’s Ark. During those same years, an unknown hand painted bichrome silhouettes of fish, roosters, cranes, and other creatures in the matronei—the women’s galleries—of the Baptistery.
Toward the end of the same century, on the ancient façade of the Cathedral, Arnolfo di Cambio sculpted, with remarkable naturalistic attention, the flocks of shepherds announced by the angel beside the lunette of the Nativity of Mary.
In the 14th century, this artistic love for the natural world truly flourished: a lion and lioness with their cubs stand guard at the Porta di Balla of the Cathedral; and what a marvel is the faithful little dog of Jabal, sculpted by Andrea Pisano, watching over sheep and goats in a panel of Giotto’s Bell Tower, or the wild beasts carved in marble by Luca della Robbia a century later in the same cycle, listening enchantingly to the lyre and song of Orpheus.
More mysterious, due to the uncertainty of their symbolic meaning, are the figures on the Porta della Mandorla: the amusing putto wrestling a giant snail on the portal frame, and the female bear climbing a tree beside the Assumption of the Virgin sculpted by Nanni di Banco in the 15th century.
Also in the 15th century, on the frames of the North Door of the Baptistery, Ghiberti modeled ivy inhabited by insects, mollusks, and amphibians, rendered life-size with astonishing mimesis—so real they seem like living creatures magically transformed into metal. Other animals appear in the background of the Gates of Paradise panel dedicated to Noah, where the flight of birds around the pyramidal tip of the Ark is particularly striking. The masterful hands of Lorenzo Ghiberti and his son Vittorio also shaped the frames of all three doors of San Giovanni, inventing garlands of foliage populated by countless bird species, joined by a curious outsider: a squirrel.
But it does not end there. Small fish can be discovered swimming in a marble holy water font inside the Cathedral, and if one looks up while walking around the Duomo, marble gargoyles emerge in the form of a dog, a wolf, a lion, and a bull. The latter is the protagonist of a famous anecdote, said to be an irreverent sign left by a master builder against his lover’s husband.
Animals, however, were far more than mere models for the artists working on the Cathedral’s construction sites. Rarely do we consider how much they contributed to the creation of these masterpieces. How else, if not through the strength of mules, oxen, and horses, could the stones and timber needed to erect these buildings and their ornaments have been transported? Brunelleschi himself could not have raised the Dome without the help of animals powering the ingenious cranes, winches, and construction machinery he devised.
By contrast—almost mischievously—a cat and a few birds left their footprints six centuries ago on the ancient tiles of the Dome, walking across them while they were still soft, laid out to dry in the sun before being fired in the kilns of Impruneta.
In the 19th century, Piazza del Duomo—like many major Italian monumental squares—saw the spread of pigeons. Once hunted as prey, they became elements of the urban landscape in keeping with Romantic taste, but also the source of a serious guano problem, which particularly affected the sculptures of the façade and the bell tower. As early as the beginning of the 20th century, the administrators of the Opera del Duomo debated how to drive away these birds that soiled the monuments’ marble. Records tell of the forced removal of a man who sold grain to attract pigeons between the Cathedral façade and the Bell Tower, concentrating them in an area where original marbles by Donatello and Andrea Pisano were still in place.
Yet the Opera has found an ally. Looking up toward Brunelleschi’s Dome, one might glimpse the lightning-fast flight of the peregrine falcon. For over thirty years, a pair of these predators—the fastest animals on the planet—has chosen Florence Cathedral as its home. To them, the Dome and the Bell Tower are the ecological equivalent of natural rock faces, offering safety, an elevated vantage point for hunting, and the inaccessible putlog holes (buche pontaie) provide ideal nesting sites. These extraordinary predators, now long-standing allies of the Opera, keep pigeons away from the marble and, on mild mornings, perform majestic aerial hunts above the square. The return of the peregrine, which faced near extinction in the 1960s due to pesticides, is today a symbol of environmental renewal.
Art and nature have always gone hand in hand, teaching us the value of beauty and collaboration.
