FLORENCE, ITALY – Florence’s cathedral museum housing the world’s largest collection of Florentine mediaeval and Renaissance sculpture is to reopen to the public on October 29 after an expansion and renovation project lasting two years.
The largest concentration of Florentine monumental sculpture in the world includes medieval and Renaissance statues and reliefs in marble, bronze and silver by the leading artists of the era.
Most of the masterpieces on display were specifically designed to adorn the interior or exterior of the religious monuments that still stand on the museum’s doorstep: the Baptistry of San Giovanni, the Cathedral of Santa Maria del Fiore (the “Duomo”) and Giotto’s Bell Tower.
The Museo dell’Opera provides the ideal setting for the works of art made for these buildings, which today form a single group known as the “Great Museum of the Cathedral”.
The gallery contains over 750 marble, bronze and silver sculptures and reliefs including works by Michelangelo, Donatello, Arnolfo di Cambio, Lorenzo Ghiberti, Andrea Pisano, Antonio del Pollaiolo, Luca della Robbia and Andrea del Verrocchio among others.
The new display includes Donatello’s Maddalena, the original north doors created by Lorenzo Ghiberti for the Florence baptistery and 27 silk and gold embroidered panels designed by Antonio del Pollaiolo. Visitors can also see many works previously held in museum storage, including 15 14th-century statues and almost 70 fragments of the cathedral’s original mediaeval façade.
The new museum occupies two adjoining buildings, one hosting the museum founded in 1881 and the other bought by Florence Cathedral Works, the oversight body, for the purpose of expanding the original premises in 1997. It boasts 25 rooms on three floors covering a total of nearly 6,000 sqm, including a room containing a 1:1 scale model of the mediaeval cathedral façade created by Arnolfo di Cambio from 1296, which was subsequently destroyed.
The Museo dell’Opera’s 6,000 sq. mt. surface area consists of twenty-five rooms on three floors comprising a partial renewal of the museum, several totally new exhibition halls and innovative areas to link the two.
For the very first time, a spectacular new design hosts the museum’s unique masterpieces in a setting reflecting the environment for which they were originally designed, creating a museum within a museum in a concentration of faith, art and history unparalleled anywhere in the world encapsulating the very roots of Western culture.
An area for temporary exhibitions, thematic exhibitions and special events is devoted to dialogue with other museums and with the international world of culture as a whole.
A visit to the Museo dell’Opera del Duomo ends, fittingly, on a panoramic terrace offering a truly remarkable and unfamiliar view of Brunelleschi’s dome, a panorama that aptly summarises the key to understanding the new museum’s underlying purpose, showing how the drama of beauty has served the faith down the ages.
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