Opera magazine
2015-10-23
Welcome to the Opera Duomo Museum
More than 750 Renaissance masterpieces reunited in one grand space that values and gives life to masterpieces seen for the first time after tedious restorations. It will be open for the public to see on October 29th.
The new Opera Duomo Museum unveils itself to the world in all of its magnificence, and after giving its press release, it now gets ready for the grand opening to the public. Whoever is familiar with the old set up will be in awe on October the 29th when the doors open with one of the world’s biggest collection of Monumental Florentine Sculptures of the Renaissance. Over 750 pieces of artwork from the greatest artist of that time will be presented, such as Donatello’s Penitent Magdalene, Lorenzo Ghiberti’s original Gate of Paradise and Northern Gate, Michelangelo’s Pietà, The Silver Altar and 27 embroidered in gold panels from Saint John’s Baptistery drawn by Antonio del Pollaiolo.
Inside of the Museum you can also find many pieces that have been in storage for decades such as the fifteen statues from the fourteenth and almost seventy fragments from the façade of the Medieval Duomo. Founded in 1881, The Opera Duomo Museum did not had a large enough space back then to be able to host all of the artworks completed for the Cathedral monuments. So in 1997 The Opera of Santa Maria del Fiore bought a big building next to the museum and from the union of both these buildings came the new museum, which has doubled its size with almost 6,000 square meters with 25 rooms divided onto three floors.
Innovate, value and educate are the keywords at the base of this great Museum’s construction project thought out and planned by its artistic director Timothy Verdon and architects Adolfo Natalini, Piero Guicciardini and Marco Magni. “These unusual dimensions are not a luxury, but a necessity. Verdon says that with this new setting full of paintings and sculptures, along with historical texts on the wall, with historical music playing in each room and educational clips shown along the way you are able to appreciate what these masterpieces wanted to say. Here what is sacred becomes human, thus the origin of Renaissance humanism. This is the Museum’s most important innovation and is why it is set up in a spectacular and mystical way which invites visitors to open up their hearts to the messages conveyed by these artworks”.
