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Orsanmichele

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artslover
artslover
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Orsanmichele

  • May 28, 2007
  • Rated 4 of 5 by artslover from Calgary, Alberta
Orsanmichele

While walking in central Florence, you will likely stroll past Orsanmichele. It is on one of the busy streets full of great shops. A visitor doesn't even need to go inside Orsanmichele to enjoy the art. If you want to go in, it is open Monday through Sunday from 9am to noon and from 4pm to 6pm.

Compared to other religious buildings from the same period, this 14th century church is somewhat unusual in design. Rectangular in shape, with two naves, it looks more like a grain store. That's because when it was built, it was to be a grain market, but later in the 14th century, it was transformed into a church. As a church, it became a powerful symbol for the city guilds. Those guilds have given the building its unique character. On the exterior of the chapel, marble tabernacles were built to house statues of the patron saints of the guilds. They commissioned the greatest artists of the 15th and 16th centuries.

Today, the whole building is a museum. Inside the church is the imposing Tabernacle by Andrea Orcagna, painstakingly built and decorated in flamboyant Gothic style between 1355 and 1359. Two rooms above the church, on the first and second floors, exhibit works that could no longer be left on the building's facade and display works that had been explicitly commissioned for Orsanmichele and had been disseminated due to various reasons.

The first floor currently exhibits eight of the fourteen statues or groups of statues, in bronze or marble, which once adorned the niches dedicated to the Guilds on the outside of the building. Reproductions for some of the statues are now on the outside. The second floor displays the small stone sculptures representing the Saints and Prophets originally installed on the top of the columns that divide the windows with three lights and the doors.

The notable statues include St. Mark and St. George by Donatello, The Disbelief of St. Thomas by Verrocchio, St. John the Baptist by Ghiberti, Sant'Eligio and St. Philip by Nanni di Banco. The group also comprises the statues of St. Jacob, St. Peter and the Madonna of the rose respectively attributed to Niccolò di Pietro Lamberti, Bernardo Ciuffagni and Pietro di Giovanni Tedesco.

The museum has yet to be completed. The original statues that are still located on the outside of the building are waiting to be restored and replaced with copies, like the others already displayed inside the museum.

This art display on the outside of a building is one of the many reasons that Florence ranks as one of the great art cities of the world.

From journal Arte Firenze

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