Opera magazine
2024-02-26
The floor of Santa Maria del Fiore: the marble carpet for the Grand Duke's Cathedral
One of the lesser-known wonders of the Cathedral of Santa Maria del Fiore is its floor: history, curiosities and reasons for an extraordinary work.
When we think of an important floor decoration in Italy, we usually think of that enormous cycle of stories on stone which is the floor of the Cathedral of Siena, or of the large allegorical mosaic of the Cathedral of Otranto. Few, however, keep in mind that at the beginning of the 16th century in Florence the construction of a new covering with marble inlays began for the Cathedral of Santa Maria del Fiore, based on a design by Cronaca first and by Giuliano di Baccio d'Agnolo and Francesco da Sangallo then, and which constitutes a unique example for the richness and variety of design and materials, as well as for dimensions. The magnificence of this work, in fact, has remained intact after centuries.
In the 16th century the Cathedral became the theater of court ceremonies of the new Medici grand duchy. This new role conferred on it by the changed city government corresponded to a new phase of its artistic decoration. The first Grand Duke, Cosimo I, from the first years of his government and for the entire duration of it, strongly promoted these renovation works, which did not aim at a radical transformation of the building, but at covering it with a new "skin", which would broaden its splendor according to a new taste but maintaining continuity with tradition; the meaning was evident: the new grand duchy wanted to show itself as a continuer and promoter of the values and traditions of the ancient Republic.
The austere appearance of the Cathedral was therefore partially changed into a sumptuous polychromy of marble, wall paintings, plastic decorations and statues. The project involved the creation of an imposing monumental choir, in mixed marble, which would act as a visual and scenographic fulcrum for city and grand ducal ceremonies, replacing Brunelleschi's ancient and deteriorated wooden choir; large altars in Serravezza marble were erected on the walls, with niches intended to contain marble statues; under the grand duchy of Francis I the external marble cladding will be completed: the ancient Arnolfian façade will be demolished for a modern one in post-Tridentine Roman style (which will never see the light) and, above the choir, the Last Judgment will be completed by Vasari and Zuccari.
In this extensive and prolonged construction site, the floor renovation project played a central role, which involved the replacement of the ancient terracotta with a carpet of marble inlays with a geometric design. In reality, the story of the construction of the new pavement had a complex gestation, especially in its launch, which occurred in the last years of the Signoria. The first news that has reached us dates back to May 1500, when a request was made to the master builder of the Opera, Simone del Pollaiolo, known as Il Cronaca, to take care of the maintenance of the ancient paving which was very worn out: here the proposal to repave the entire cathedral in marble started.
The plan designed by Bernardo Sgrilli in the 18th century.
In 1504 the Consuls of the Wool Guild and the workers of the Opera di S. Maria del Fiore agreed to start the floor renovation from the area around the octagon of the choir: Cronaca developed a design reproducing the projection on the plane of those lacunars, which probably should have covered the dome (inspired by the famous ones in the Pantheon), so as to create a mirrored correspondence between the top and bottom of the presbytery space. The first chapel to be repaved, in 1505, was that of San Tommaso: the design of the inlay here is geometric but still of Cosmatesque inspiration, perhaps following an ancient design by Brunelleschi or Ghiberti.
At his death in 1508, Cronaca had completed much of the octagon around the choir, but the work was interrupted due to the considerable amount of economic resources distracted by the installation of Baccio d'Agnolo's drum. Work on the flooring resumed in 1520 under Baccio d'Agnolo and continued without interruptions from then on: in 1524 the floor around the choir was completed, in 1525 that of the tribune of San Zanobi, the following year that of the tribune of the Cross and in 1528 that of Sant'Antonio was also completed. Here Baccio took inspiration for the geometries of the inlays from Turkmen carpets, then circulating in the European luxury market.
Having arrived in the Grand Ducal era, the design and construction of the entire pavement of the cathedral were entirely entrusted to Baccio d'Agnolo, supported by Francesco da Sangallo. Others on the construction site revolved around these artists, including Baccio Bandinelli, with whom d'Agnolo was carrying out the project of the new choir; and in the work on the inlay floor others will follow with the role of executors of the original design, including Baccio's own son: Giuliano.
The new flooring was a cyclopean job in terms of costs, quantity of materials and manpower, as well as time: its completion took place in 1660, a full century and a half after the first works by Cronaca, and its magnificence and richness aroused universal wonder which they soon spread fame throughout Europe, followed by the belief that such a beautiful and perfect design was by Michelangelo. The floor appears today almost unchanged (except for small alterations which occurred in the 19th and 20th centuries in some chapels in the stands): an enormous set of geometric carpets, placed within the orthogonal axes of the naves, and made up of a succession of kaleidoscopic and highly elaborate circular or octagonal "wheels", generating games of perspective illusion.
The floors in cocciopesto, or raw and terracotta tiles, were usual for Florentine buildings of the time; on the contrary, the use of the marble inlay technique is a sign of the transition to the "modern" era. On the one hand this technique recalled and harked back to the tradition of Romanesque marble carpets, which in Florence had its illustrious examples in the Baptistery and San Miniato, but more explicitly the designs by Baccio d'Agnolo and Sangallo wanted to recall the splendors with refined taste floors of the Roman imperial buildings, above all those of the Pantheon.
The white and green duotones of the Tuscan Romanesque and the mosaic-style micro-tesserae of the Cosmatesque examples were surpassed both in the breadth of the range of colors used and in the number and variety of the stones chosen. For the tiles, “Black from Colonnata” and “Green from Prato” were selected: the first was preferred for the darker sections; while the “Green Prato” was preferred for its bluish reflections and for its variation from very dark to bright green. For the red tiles, two different qualities of marble were used: the "Red from Monterantoli" and the "Red ammonite" coming from the central Alps. Finally, white marble is an impure and fragile Apuan marble.
The use of "brecciated" materials, of many different qualities, of both Tuscan and extra-regional origin is also consistent. There are still some "exotic" stone qualities: it would seem possible to find Mysio Marble and the "ancient Green of Thessaly" in some inlays of the central nave. Portions of "African marble" with shades varying from pink to yellow to grey-blue were also recognised. Finally, coming from the Monte Ferrato quarries, the so-called "Impruneta Granite" is also present in the inlay work.
This long list allows us to get an idea of what the expense and dimensions of the construction site were and allows us to understand some meanings in the choice of materials. On the one hand, in fact, we recognize a reference to the architectural splendor of republican Florence in the use of the three colors - white, green, pink - of Giotto's Bell Tower and the cladding of the Cathedral and we glimpse a reference to the Florentine Romanesque style; but this ancient tradition is projected into a "modern" dimension in terms of size and meaning, that is, the extension of Florentine dominion to all of Tuscany and its becoming the capital of a modern state: a kingdom led by a duke. Here the variety of quarries expands, as if to collect in this central place fragments representative of the extension and geological variety of the territory of the Grand Duchy. A political message that qualified the Cathedral as the church of the "capital" and the heart of the religious life of the Tuscans.
Following this meaning, even the use of exotic marbles does not just respond to the taste for variety or the rare, but rather seems to imitate the customs of the ancient Roman emperors, who decorated the buildings of Rome with stones from the four corners of the empire. In this sense, the replacement of pink Maremma marble from fourteenth-century monuments with dark reds, evocative of imperial purple, is significant. The political message is explicit: the Grand Duke, on the one hand, in embellishing the Cathedral, reaffirmed his love for ancient tradition and made himself its guarantor and tutelary deity; on the other hand he assimilated Florence to ancient Rome, capital of the Empire.
We also add that the flood of 1966 was the occasion for a restoration and study of the entire floor. It was discovered that some pieces were fragments from the ancient construction sites of the Cathedral and the Baptistery, reused upside down and reworked on the back. The news of re-use can be disconcerting, if read in the sense of a "saving", given the overall costs of the project; but rather we must recognize a culture that had a cult of magnificence, but not of excess as an end in itself, and which preserved every fragment of its stones as evidence of the greatness of Romanesque and Gothic Florence.
In conclusion, it can be said that this enormous interest in inlay will then lead in Florence to the foundation in 1588 of the famous Opificio delle Pietre Dure, in turn connected to the great Medici construction site of the 17th century: the “Cappella dei Principi” (the (grand ducal mausoleum) in San Lorenzo, the whose interior is entirely covered with marble inlays.
