Florence, Italy ｜ Duomo, Santa Maria Del Fiore ｜ The Renaissance

We are standing in the middle of Florence, Italy, the beating heart of the Renaissance. We are looking at the Santa Maria del Fiore. This was the largest building constructed in Europe for nearly 1,000 years. It's crowned at 376 feet by the soaring cupola or dome atop it all, developed by Filippo Brunelleschi, who is also credited with developing linear perspective. Brunelleschi moved to Rome after losing the contest to design the doors on the baptistry which face the cathedral. While in Rome, he was inspired by the dome atop the pagan Roman temple, the Pantheon, or hall to all of pagan Rome's gods. After studying in Rome, Brunelleschi returns to Florence and wins a competition to design the dome atop the cathedral. It's interesting to note that one of the greatest cathedrals in all of Christendom was inspired by a pagan Roman temple. While the dome over the cathedral was finished in 1461, the cathedral itself was designed by Arnolfo di Cambio nearly 150 years earlier. Before Brunelleschi's dome was designed, the cathedral actually sat without a roof overhead for decades. Meanwhile, the adjacent Campanile, or bell tower, rose above the domeless cathedral. To bell tower's designer, Giotto, so too was a painter, credited with developing painting techniques that added mass and volume, giving realism to his paintings. These elements of his artworks would inspire numerous artists throughout the Renaissance, such as Michelangelo, Verrocchio, and Leonardo da Vinci. After the bell tower's completion, it functioned as a sculpture gallery for artists like Donatello. In addition to the aforementioned, Giotto was so too the master architect of the city, in charge of developing the city walls and fence around Florence in the 14th century. The baptistry was the first of these buildings. Its construction began in 1059. Interestingly, Dante Alighieri, author of the Divine Comedy, was baptized here as were numerous members of the Medici family. The aforementioned doors facing the Duomo have panels designed by Ghiberti, who beat Brunelleschi to win the commission of these panels, made in solid bronze, gilded in gold, credited with being amongst the earliest of artworks defining the beginning of the Renaissance era. It's worth noting that Michelangelo's David was initially meant to sit at the base of the buttress, just beneath the cathedral dome. This plan was never realized as David's 12,000 pounds of profundity would be too great of a weight for the roof to withstand. Instead, his sculpture was placed outside the Piazza della Signoria for nearly 400 years before being moved inside the Accademia, where it stands to this day. The beautiful green facade of the cathedral was left bare until the 19th century, when it was designed by Emilio de Fabrizi in the neo-gothic style. The structure is within this plaza, anchored by the cathedral of the Santa Maria del Fiore, the bell tower, the baptistry, and its doors, not to mention the phenomenal dome atop it all, remind us how the incredible developments in architecture, devised by the Romans and Greeks two millennia earlier, were employed at the end of the Middle Ages and throughout the 14th and 15th centuries, forming the heart of the Renaissance in Florence, Italy.