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Updated: June 16, 2025
It is built, as I have already said, upon an octagonal plan. The altar, which formerly stood beneath the cupola, has been removed. On the 24th of June every year the magnificent retablo in massive silver, which is preserved among the treasures in the Opera del Duomo, is displayed in the Baptistery.
The reliefs that, set some five-and-twenty feet from the ground, are so difficult to see, are the work of Andrea Pisano, the sculptor of the south gate of the Baptistery. Born at Pontedera, the pupil of Giovanni Pisano, this great and lovable artist has been robbed of much that belongs to him.
Looking at them turn about, one finds that the Gothic boldness of light and shade of the Campanile makes the windows, pillars and cornices of the Baptistery seem at first very flat and uninteresting. But after the first time, and once that sense of flatness overcome, it is impossible to revert to the belfry with the same satisfaction.
I hardly think there can be a place in the world where life is more delicious for its own simple sake than here. I went to-day into the Baptistery, which stands near the Duomo, and, like that, is covered externally with slabs of black and white marble, now grown brown and yellow with age.
Outside it was so garish with its coloured marbles, under the southern sky; outside, too, one's ears were filled with all the shattering noises in which Florence is an adept; and then, one step, and behold nothing but vast and silent gloom. This surprise is the more emphatic if one happens already to have been in the Baptistery.
To pass from the Baptistery into the Campo Santo, where among Christian graves the cypresses are dying in the earth of Calvary, and the urns and sarcophagi of pagan days hold Christian dust, is perhaps to make easier the explanation we need of the art of Niccolò. Here, it is said, he often wandered "among the many spoils of marbles brought by the armaments of Pisa to this city."
A congestion at the head of a narrow street had checked the procession, and he was obliged to rein in his horse. He looked about and found himself in the centre of the square near the Baptistery. A few feet off, directly in a line with him, was the weather-worn front of the Royal Printing-Press. He raised his head and saw a group of people on the balcony.
Twenty-one years were devoted to their making, by Ghiberti and his assistants, with the stipulation that all figures in the design were to be personal work of the master, the assistants only attending to secondary details. The doors were in place in April, 1424. The competition for the Baptistery doors reads like a romance, and is familiar to most people who know anything of historic art.
The wicked anti-Christian Ghibellines, Nicholas of Pisa helping, cut the side of it "so that the tower might fall on the Baptistery. But as it pleased God, for better reverencing of the blessed St.
Which he did, and they are San Giovanni in Bragora, and San Zaccaria. "Then appeared to him the apostles of Christ, wishing, they also, to have a church in this new city: and they committed it to him that where he should see twelve cranes in a company, there he should build it." Of the Baptistery mosaics the most scanned will always be that in which Salome bears in the head.
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