(firenze) Tuscany # 48-51 ~ what were they thinking?
The Basilica di Santa Maria del Fiore is the Duomo (cathedral) in Firenze. It is, in a word, insane, or, in a phrase, insanely incomprehensible.
I mean, I've been there, touched it, walked around it, pictured it, stared at it, thought about it but I still can't wrap my head around it. I keep getting hung up on the fact that this massive thing was conceived a little over 700 years ago. What were they thinking? Or, maybe a better question is - what were they smoking?
The sheer scale of the place is fantastic (5 football fields - US football, real football, not that silly soccer thing - long) but throw in the structure's facade(s) detail and the sculpture / statuary and the frescoes and the paintings and the windows and the woodwork and the nearly 3-story bronze doors and it makes one wonder about the sheer chutzpah (I know, wrong religion) that it took to full this thing off.
The structure alone took from 1296 until 1636 to complete and at that point the facade was still unfinished. The facade was not completed until 1887 after undergoing a number of false starts which included a complete dismantling of the facade-in-progress in 1587 (by order of the Grand Duke Francesco I de' Medici). The facade remained bare until the 19th century.
Reader Comments (8)
Soccer - silly!! Mark, now you have lost the plot. Soccer players are not the ones dressed up in 'silly' armour and outfits.
Real men are playing football and rugby. Dressed up americans are playing american football.
A monument of hypocrisy like few others. No wonder most Europeans are "socialists" after 1000 brutal years of Christian rule. These cathedrals taste as sour to me as the "architectrual art" of Albert Speer. Sure you can build great things when you systematically torture and steal from virtually every citizen under your rule.
Frank, soccer players are those dandy playboys spending most of their time selling perfume, underwear and hair gel. Real men have no time for play!
In my home town of Adelaide (Australia) the numerous churches and the occasional "grand" cathedral have little affect on me. But after a recent trip to Peru, the disparity between the time & effort lavished on cathedrals and the general dilapidated state of other buildings and roads became offensive.
The only consolation is the knowledge and skills gained in building cathedrals was applied to more practical structures.
Svein-Frode, you might have a point. Where I come from real men play Gaelic - the only true amatuer sport left in the world. And it's not for the faint hearted.
In Victor Hugo's "Hunchback of Notre Dame" there is perhaps one of the finest peices of Architectural writing that exists, explaining the why's and wherefores of the monumental structures that permeated the world before the printing press existed. that in fact architecture was the premier art in a basically illiterate world and all other arts subservient thereto. Lost in the midst of the grandeur, is also the fact that there was an emotional connection to the structures and the building of them we, in this day and age, might only see in football stadia or a corporate office. and without the beauty
The way I see it, building these grand structures created many jobs in a very dark time.