Opera magazine
2026-04-05
Michelangelo and the Dome of Florence: a legacy sculpted in time
From the David to the Bandini Pietà: Michelangelo’s heritage at the core of Renaissance
Michelangelo Buonarroti: one of the greatest artists of all time and a giant in the history of art and thought.
Within the rooms of our museum are at least two works connected to the name of the “Divine One,” as his contemporaries called him: the celebrated Pietà, known as the “Bandini,” at the center of the ground-floor tribune, and a wooden model for the completion of the decoration of the dome’s drum, attributed to him.
However, there are other works that Michelangelo created to adorn the Cathedral, later removed from the holdings of the Opera, which also testify to how much deeper his connection with the Opera del Duomo truly was.
To begin with, it can be said that Michelangelo trained by studying with admiration the fifteenth-century sculptures of the Cathedral façade and the Campanile, particularly those by Donatello.
The clearest example is Donato’s Saint John the Evangelist, once placed in the large niche to the right of the Cathedral’s central portal, which would serve as a model for the famous Moses in the tomb of Pope Julius II at San Pietro in Vincoli in Rome.
But the Jeremiah of the Campanile as well, with the grave bearing of a Roman orator, would become the starting point for the conception of the David.
Michelangelo Buonarroti: uno dei più grandi artisti di tutti i tempi e un gigante della storia dell’arte e del pensiero.
Nelle sale del nostro museo trovano posto almeno due opere legate al nome del “Divino”, come lo chiamarono i suoi contemporanei: la celeberrima Pietà, detta “Bandini”al centro della tribuna al piano terreno, e un modello ligneo per il completamento della decorazione del tamburo della cupola, che gli è attribuito.
Ma esistono altre opere che Michelangelo lavorò per ornare la Cattedrale, poi alienate dal patrimonio dell’Opera e, anche testimoniano come il legame tra Michelangelo e l’Opera del Duomo sia stato ben più radicato.
Per cominciare, possiamo dire che Michelangelo si formò studiando con ammirazione le sculture quattrocentesche della facciata della Cattedrale e del Campanile, in particolare quelle di Donatello.
L’esempio più chiaro è il San Giovanni Evangelista di Donato, già nel nicchione a destra della porta centrale del Duomo, che sarà il modello per il celebre Mosè nella tomba di Giulio II a San Pietro in Vincoli a Roma. Ma anche il Geremia del Campanile, dall'aspetto grave di un oratore romano, sarà la figura di partenza per l’elaborazione del David.
Michelangelo, David
Another marble owned by the Opera would truly capture the attention of the young Michelangelo Buonarroti: the Giant. So called because it was an enormous block, stored in the workshops of the Cathedral site—where the Museum now stands—roughly hewn into the shape of a man with legs apart by two major fifteenth-century sculptors: first Agostino di Duccio and then Antonio Rossellino, both of whom abandoned it in that state.
The Giant was intended to adorn one of the արտաքին buttresses of the Cathedral’s tribunes; its dimensions were proportioned to the height for which it was destined and to the mass of the Cathedral and its Dome.
Michelangelo obtained the commission and, between 1501 and 1504, from that very block—working in the same spaces where the Museum now stands, then arranged as a closed workshop—he brought forth what was immediately recognized as an absolute masterpiece, without precedent since classical antiquity: the David.
Of it, Giorgio Vasari wrote:
“When it was built up, and all was finished, he uncovered it, and it cannot be denied that this work has carried off the palm from all other statues, modern or ancient, Greek or Latin; [...] with such just proportion, beauty and excellence did Michelagnolo finish it. For in it may be seen most beautiful contours of legs, with attachments of limbs and slender outlines of flanks that are divine; nor has there ever been seen a pose so easy, or any grace to equal that in this work, or feet, hands and head so well in accord, one member with another, in harmony, design, and excellence of artistry. And, of a truth, whoever has seen this work need not trouble to see any other work executed in sculpture, either in our own or in other times, by no matter what craftsman.”
Michelangelo’s David is not simply a sculpture; it is the plastic manifesto in which Christian Humanism, nourished by Neoplatonic philosophy, finds its definitive political synthesis. In this work, the young shepherd of Israel ceases to be the unarmed boy who confronts the giant with the sole strength of a miracle: he himself becomes a Giant, made so by the divine Grace that dwells within human intellect.
His famous nudity is not a condition of fragility or lack of arms, but the revelation of an absolute beauty—certainly corporeal, yet capable of expressing an inner perfection. In a Platonic key, the David is not a man aspiring to become God, but rather God the creator manifesting Himself in the perfection of His noblest creation: the physical form becomes the necessary mirror of a higher spiritual and moral nobility.
Placed within history, he becomes the defender of republican ideals: a human being who needs no external armor, because his true armor is spiritual dignity and moral integrity, and whose strength lies not in the sword but in an enlightened intellect that stands in defense of freedom against every tyranny, moral and real.
Charged with these meanings, this David, which bears the appearance of Hercules (an ancient symbol of the strength of the Florentine Republic), was never installed to guard the northern side of the Cathedral. Our archives preserve a highly interesting record of a meeting held on January 25, 1504, requested by the officials of the Opera just weeks before the statue’s completion, to gather the opinions of many great artists of the time—including Leonardo da Vinci, Sandro Botticelli, Filippino Lippi, Andrea della Robbia, and others—on the most suitable location for this marvelous colossus.
The David thus made its way to Piazza della Signoria, where it would symbolically defend the government of the city.
Michelangelo, Saint Matthew
Already a few months earlier, the Opera had entrusted Michelangelo Buonarroti with another major commission: to sculpt in marble the Twelve Apostles, larger than life, to be placed against the pillars beneath the Cathedral’s dome.
Michelangelo began work on the first of these, Saint Matthew, but the statue remained unfinished due to the artist’s departure for Rome, summoned by an important patron: Pope Julius II.
This imposing figure thus remained embedded in the unshaped marble that still imprisons it, within which it seems to struggle eternally to free its unfinished beauty. Here, the non-finito is not a mere historical accident, but the sculptural representation of a conflict: the soul striving laboriously to liberate itself from the prison of raw matter. For Michelangelo, the unfinished work becomes the only possible one. Saint Matthew is the first of his “prisoner giants”: it tells us that the idea in the artist’s mind is so lofty and divine that the hand—burdened by sin and by matter—can never translate it perfectly.
Kept for centuries in the Opera’s storerooms, where it served as a model for generations of sculptors working in the manner of the great master, in 1831 it was moved to the Galleria dell'Accademia, where it can still be admired today. Here it would later be joined by the David in 1873 and, in 1909, by the unfinished Prisoners for the tomb of Pope Julius II.
Michelangelo, Pietà Bandini
Two masterpieces for the Cathedral thus ended up elsewhere; another arrived unexpectedly. The moving Pietà Bandini—that is, Christ laid down by Nicodemus, between the Virgin Mary and Mary Magdalene—which you admire today in the Museum, was in fact not commissioned by the Opera del Duomo!
Michelangelo sculpted it in his old age, between roughly 1547 and 1555, but in Rome, where he had resided for years, imagining it for his own tomb, in a chapel of a basilica in the Urbe—perhaps Santa Maria Maggiore. For this reason, he depicted his own face in the figure of Nicodemus.
He abandoned it when he discovered flaws in the marble and, in fact, after attempting to destroy it, this moving work was rescued by a pupil, partially restored, and passed through various Roman collections, until at the end of the seventeenth century it was purchased by the Grand Duke of Tuscany Cosimo III de' Medici. He brought it to Florence and first placed it in the Grand Ducal mausoleum in San Lorenzo, and later in the Cathedral, behind the high altar (where it replaced the Adam and Eve by Baccio Bandinelli, now in the Bargello Museum), thus making it Michelangelo’s “Florentine Pietà,” alongside the youthful Vatican Pietà and the Rondanini in Milan.
Saint Peter's Dome, Rome
But Michelangelo’s greatest debt to the Florence Cathedral concerns Brunelleschi’s dome: without it, Michelangelo could never have designed the one for St. Peter’s. The dome of St. Peter’s is taller, but Brunelleschi’s is wider; the Roman one has a circular base, while the Florentine one is octagonal.
To build the Roman dome, Michelangelo had to reuse Brunelleschi’s technical solution, namely the construction of a double shell dome topped by a lantern. In order to realize it, he asked his Florentine relatives to send him to Rome studies and observations of Santa Maria del Fiore’s dome.
According to an anecdote, when leaving for Rome, he is said to have addressed Brunelleschi’s masterpiece with these words: “I am going to Rome to make your sister, bigger, but not more beautiful.”
Michelangelo, Pietà Bandini, detail
To conclude, it should be noted that the shadow of Michelangelo Buonarroti is present elsewhere as well.
In our Dome Gallery, you can admire a model attributed to him for the completion of Brunelleschi’s dome drum.
This recalls the anecdote that his caustic judgment on the construction of the gallery by Baccio d’Agnolo—who had won the commission to complete Brunelleschi’s masterpiece—permanently halted its execution. To illustrate its proportional inadequacy compared to the majestic and severe grandeur of the architecture it was meant to adorn, Michelangelo called it a “cricket cage,” and even after five centuries, that portion on the southeast face of the drum is still known by this name.
Much happier, according to Vasari’s anecdote, was his comment on the East Door of the Baptistery, a masterpiece by Lorenzo Ghiberti:
"They are so beautiful that they might fittingly stand at the gates of Paradise."
...and so even today we use this name: the “Gates of Paradise.”
