Florence Cathedral
The Basilica di Santa Maria del Fiore is the cathedral church (Duomo) of Florence, Italy, begun in 1296 in the Gothic style to the design of Arnolfo di Cambio and completed structurally in 1436 with the dome engineered by Filippo Brunelleschi. The exterior of the basilica is faced with polychrome marble panels in various shades of green and pink bordered by white and has an elaborate 19th century Gothic Revival facade by Emilio De Fabris.
The exterior walls are faced in alternate vertical and horizontal bands of polychrome marble from Carrara (white), Prato (green), Siena (red), Lavenza and a few other places. These marble bands had to repeat the already existing bands on the walls of the earlier adjacent baptistery the Battistero di San Giovanni and Giotto's Bell Tower. There are two lateral doors, the Doors of the Canonici (south side) and the Door of the Mandorla (north side) with works of art of Nanni di Banco, Donatello, and Jacopo della Quercia. The six lateral windows, notable for their delicate tracery and ornaments, are separated by pilasters. Only the four windows closest to the transept admit light; the other two are merely ornamental. The clerestory windows are round, a common feature in Italian Gothic.
Commentary
Essentially, the Dome is a product of the synthesis of the structural and engineering sophistication of the late Gothic era, with the particular inventive ingenuity of Brunelleschi himself. Insofar as it does echo Roman precedents, it does so only in a superficial sense: the Romans never built in quite the way that Brunelleschi does here. Brunelleschi uses an intimate knowledge of structural geometry to produce a ‘sectional’ dome which is fully self-supporting during construction. His central structural insight was to visualise the Dome as a series of concentric masonry ‘rings’, each slightly smaller than the last, which themselves possess full structural integrity once completed. Thus as each masonry ‘ring’ is completed, it can then act as the support which enables work to begin on the next (slightly smaller) ‘ring’. Once this system of interlocking masonry ‘rings’ is complete – you have your finished Dome – which has been built without the need for unfeasibly massive temporary buttressing or timber centring.
Nevertheless, the comparison with the dome of the Pantheon is a vitally important aspect of the design and construction of the Dome of Florence Cathedral: nothing of this form had been attempted or even conceived since antiquity (the dome is a structure unknown to Gothic architecture), so the simple fact of the Florentine Republic commissioning such a structure, on such a scale, was of immense symbolic importance. This was Florence announcing to the world, to other city-states, and to posterity, that it could now rival, and in some respects exceed, the achievements of Rome itself
The most important doors are Porta dei Canonici (or door of canonici), in Gothic style, and Porta delle Mandorle
