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Updated: June 16, 2025
This Baptistery is endowed with the most pleasing echo of all the echoes we have read of. The guide sounded two sonorous notes, about half an octave apart; the echo answered with the most enchanting, the most melodious, the richest blending of sweet sounds that one can imagine. It was like a long-drawn chord of a church organ, infinitely softened by distance.
Two of the finest baptisteries in the world are at Florence and Pisa; that at the former, place being 100 feet in diameter, made of black and white marble, and surrounded with a gallery on granite columns; that at the latter being 116 feet wide, and beautifully ornamented. The biggest baptistery ever made is supposed to have been that at St.
The frieze of ramping and running animals around the ancient baptistery was concealed by heavy green garlands alternating with religious banners; and every church and chapel had draped its doorway with crimson and placed above the image of its patron saint the ducal crown of Pianura. No less sumptuous was the adornment of the private dwellings.
The present church dates, in part at least, from the eleventh century, and the three white pillars of the nave are from the Roman building; but the real interest of the church lies in its Baptistery Lombard work dug out of the earth which had covered it, the floor set in a waved pattern of black and white marble, while in the midst is the great square font in which the people of Lucca were immersed for baptism.
It is an octagonal building of the thirteenth century, and is chiefly remarkable for the beauty of Ghiberti's great bronze gates, representing scripture scenes. "Ghiberti left behind him wealth and children; But who would know to-day that he had lived If he had never made those gates of bronze In the old Baptistery those gates of bronze Worthy to be the gates of Paradise?
Also the bronze gate of a baptistery in Florence, carved all over with relieves of Scripture subjects, executed in the most lifelike and expressive manner. The cast itself was a miracle of art. I should have taken it for the genuine original bronze. We then wandered into the House of Diomed, which seemed to me a dismal abode, affording no possibility of comfort.
There, near an old baptistery which he used as a wash basin, under a long mirror of forged iron, which, like the edge of a well silvered by the moon, confined the green dull surface of the mirror, were bottles of every conceivable size and form, placed on ivory shelves.
Pisa Hotel Victoria Pisan weather The poet Shelley Historic Pisa Lung 'Arno San Stefano di Canalia Cathedral Baptistery Leaning Tower Campo Santo The divine angels The great chain of Pisa Leghorn Smollett's grave Poste-restante A sweet thing in Beggars Ugolino's Tower Departure for Rome.
They are certainly very early for work of the Catholic restoration; and yet they remind one strongly of the processions of S. Apollinare Nuovo. If as a whole the design of these mosaics is of the time of the archbishop S. Agnellus, it is curious that the subject of the Baptism should have been used for a church which by his act had ceased to be a baptistery.
Here are also two caps from the fourth-century church, fragments of mosaic pavement found in mediæval tombs, and a good many pieces of eighth and ninth-century carving. The survival of the Constantinian plan is explained by the slight alterations made by Euphrasius. The walled-up doors in the baptistery show that it was not an isolated building.
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