Opera magazine
2024-07-09
Stories from the Arnolfo facade
A Musician Angel attributed to Jacopo di Piero Guidi and the Dormitio Virginis by Arnolfo di Cambio today at the Bode-Museum in Berlin
Article in collaboration with the Bode-Museum in Berlin
The construction of the Cathedral of Santa Maria del Fiore began in 1296 starting from the facade. Usually churches were built from the apse, but here it was decided to keep the old cathedral in operation while the new one was built above and around it. This project lasted almost 80 years, until the definitive demolition of the ancient cathedral of Santa Reparata. However, the façade of the new cathedral (decorated with statues, reliefs, marble coverings, mosaics and Marian-themed depictions and designed to surpass the beauty and modernity of other important Tuscan churches), remained unfinished in the upper part and, in 1587, Francesco I de' Medici had it dismantled to replace it with a more modern one.
Following this operation, many sculptures from the medieval façade of the Cathedral were dispersed, lost, sold to private individuals, some ended up in the gardens and palaces of Florentine houses. Between the 19th century and today, a large part of these works were rediscovered and reacquired, thus allowing their reunification and restoring a complete interpretation of the iconographic program of the facade. Thanks to a drawing by Bernardino Poccetti, created before the dismantling, in 2015 in the "Paradise Room" of our Museum, a resin reproduction of the Arnolfian façade was created, populated with the original sculptures that were part of it. But not all of the originals returned home and some found their way to other museums around the world.
Today's publication takes us to the Bode Museum in Berlin, where some of these dispersed marbles are preserved: the Dormitio Virginis group by Arnolfo di Cambio and a Musitian Angel attributed to Jacopo di Piero Guidi. The group of the Dormitio Virginis (1300-1310), with the reclining Virgin embraced by an apostle and with the heads of two other grieving apostles, was sculpted for the lunette of the right portal of the facade. Arriving at the Kaiser Friedrich Museum in Berlin at the beginning of the 20th century, the group, and above all the face of the Virgin, was seriously damaged in 1945 by the fire that struck the Friedrichshain bunker. Fortunately, a nineteenth-century cast is preserved in the Museo dell'Opera Duomo which has preserved the memory of the original forms, alongside the original fragments with the soul of Mary in the arms of Christ and an Apostle, purchased from the Torrigiani collection in 2016.
The Dormitio group, which has reached the present day incomplete, finds its pictorial counterpart in the Dormitio Virginis by Giotto (1312-1314), now in the Gemäldegalerie, Staatliche Museen zu Berlin. In Arnolfo's depiction, Mary's body is the result of a careful search for the synthesis of forms, without giving up the naturalism of the modelling. In contrast to the rigid frontal vision of the Byzantine tradition of Koimesis (“sleep of death”), or with the gisant model of the funerary monument, which featured the body tilted forward, here the Virgin offers herself to the spectator through a partial twisting of the torso. The expressive intensity and dynamic pose of the two grieving apostles, who watch over the Virgin, and of St. John who afflicted embraces the inert body of the Madonna are typical features of Arnolfo di Cambio's latest production.
With time and changes in taste, some of the scattered works of the medieval façade were dismembered or modified with the addition of pieces from other sculptures, altering their initial meaning. This is the case of the musician angel preserved today in the Bode-Museum attributed to Jacopo di Piero Guidi, who together with Piero di Giovanni Tedesco created a group of angels with musical instruments for some loggias on the facade. The sculpture today in the Bode holds a psalter in its hand, which is why it was later transformed into King David of the Old Testament. It was with this title that the work was purchased in Florence in 1903 by the sculptor Corsi, after having been part of a baroque decoration of a room on the ground floor of Palazzo Giugni (via degli Alfani).
The attribution to Jacopo di Piero Guidi is due to the size and stylistic similarity with the other two angels by this artist for the facade and also finds documentary confirmation in the Historical Archive of the Opera di Santa Maria del Fiore, where dated 23 April 1383 a payment is recorded for the image of an angel with a marble psaltery: “Jacobo Pieri scarpellatori, pro complemento sue mercedis et salarii cuiusdam ymaginis Angeli cum salterio in lapide marmoreo, per eum sculte pro dicta opera, ad rationem fl. XXV au, fl. XIV au. Soldos XIV et denarios VI f.p.” [Delib., XVII, c. 20].
Other works such as the Adoring Angel today at the Harvard University Art Museum in Cambridge (Massachusets) or the protomartyr Saints Stephen and Lawrence, attributed to Piero di Giovanni Tedesco, currently in the Louvre, were part of the Arnolfian façade of the cathedral. The Museo dell'Opera del Duomo has integrated the display with copies of these sculptures. Other fragments of Arnolfo's rich facade remained in Florence, but deposited in museums and other places: some heads of saints or prophets are found in the Bargello National Museum and - finally - Arnolfo's are the headless bodies of a Deacon and an Assistant who flanked Boniface VIII in his aedicule, which are still in a private collection today.
Only after a restoration was the different origin of the head compared to the body discovered and so the parts were separated. The Bunker fire in 1945 damaged the ancient part which still shows a fire damaged appearance today while the head was taken to a basement warehouse. For a long time the head was exhibited at the Bode-Museum as a fragment but now the museological exhibition once again shows the joint parts restored with a view not to restoring the value and original function of the sculpture on the façade, but of the history that over the course of centuries he has brought with him and which is now part of the work itself.