If loving a building is wrong, Lord don't let me be right

[jere7my]

Thursday, July 2 - Florence

Il Duomo (aka the Florence Cathedral or Santa Maria del Fiore) is the Godzilla of Italian cathedrals: it is gargantuan, it is greenish, and it looks, in certain lights, like it just rose dripping from the sea. I immediately fell in love with it. It has won the coveted Single Building Most Photographed by Me award for 2009 — not because it is beautiful (though an argument can be made in favor of its overdecorated battleship Gormenghastliness) but because any given square yard of it has something interesting going on. Even beyond the gorgeous rose windows and the uncountable sculptures of apostles and saints and artists, there are spiral columns in at least a dozen styles, and hundreds of coats of arms, and all sorts of little crenelations and volutes and badges. And it's all done in three colors of marble, which gives it a vibrancy I didn't see on any other building in Italy. I just posted 126 photos of it, and if I were teleported there tomorrow I would have many more photos to take.

Inside, it is curiously bare. There's a fabulous 24-hour clock above the door, many gorgeous stained glass windows, and a few tombs and trappings, but apart from the frescoed dome overhead (more on that in a moment) most of the artwork has been removed to the associated museum. And that underscores my one dissatisfaction — the cathedral itself is free, but you pay to get into the museum, you pay to get into the baptistry, you pay to climb the bell tower, you pay to climb to the top of the dome. As with so many places in Florence, you pay several times to see one site, instead of paying once to see several sites (as in Rome or Ravenna).

We paid to climb to the top of the dome, and we're glad that was the one ticket we bought. 463 steps took us to the sunny and gleaming top of the largest brickwork dome in the world, below which all of Florence is laid out like a boundless game of Cathedral. Swallows wheeled above the rooftops far below us in a distinct bird-layer. The stairs took us between the inner and outer domes and around the base of the stunning fresco of the Last Judgment that covers the dome's interior, which is full of angels and saints and prophets who unfortunately cannot hold a candle to the hordes of demons capering around the base. The walls of the stairs are covered in graffiti: "I will come back here with someone." "James the architect rocked this dome: 2005." "Elvis vive!"

Mary and the apostles below the great rose window






YHWH, aka Triangle Man


a remarkably expressive pope


the angel as Snape


the dome and the city


the lantern as seen from the Uffizi Gallery beside the Arno, and the inverse of that shot (the photo above was taken from the balcony above the big triple arches near the right edge of the photo below, just above the midline):



Via dell'Oriuolo


Ximenes Observatory and the outdoor market


coats of arms


The Baptistry of Saint John, which the cathedral was designed to match


The Last Judgment


\m/ \m/


the hydra, with seven distinct expressions on its faces (and one neck you can see through)


Who can tell me three things that are odd about this clock (made in 1443 A.D.)?


a geometric floor that says "OPA!"


votive trees


Farewell, Duomo! Farewell, bell tower! Farewell, baptistry! Farewell!

The complete set is here, and my Italy collection is here.

Comments

[http://users.livejournal.com/_swallow/]

wow!!

[adfamiliares.livejournal.com]

Did we see a bunch of surly angels around that niche, or could that one be, you know, the surly angel?

[jere7my.livejournal.com]

You can see some of the other angelic lozenges around that door here (http://www.flickr.com/photos/jere7my/3796509687/sizes/l/in/set-72157621843837519/). They all look perfectly pleasant to me....

[asmanyaswill.livejournal.com]

Clocks, clocks! I want to know your four odd things. My three odd things are: 1. it's a 24-hour clock, 2. its numerals are rotated 90 degrees counter-clockwise from their usual display orientation on a clockface, and 3. there is no subtractive form in any of the numerals. I guess 4. might be that there is no "high noon": it's off-center of straight up. But I was counting that as an artifact of the 24-hourness. Oh! Twenty-four! There's no zero.

May I presume that the four figures are the gospel-makers? They look awful sad.

[jere7my.livejournal.com]

The oddest thing, as far as I'm concerned, is that it doesn't run clockwise.

I think nobody is quite sure if the figures are the evangelists, nor why the one in the lower right looks like Quasimodo.

[asmanyaswill.livejournal.com]

Clockwise! Hah!

But don't sundials also run "backwards" that way? I wonder when "clockwise" became standard.

[elwenlinuiel.livejournal.com]

I too, have climbed the Duomo, and loved it. worth all those endless stairs, and the claustrophobia inducing space between the inner and outer domes... was it really windy when you were there? we had to hold on the time I was there, not to be blown away.
the clock is really cool, and yes, it is strange that it doesn't run clockwise, although my first impression was that it counted down, and ran clockwise (not seeing the hand move).