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Updated: June 16, 2025
The six figures of the saints are the original ones placed there when it was first erected. Francis, and on his right, San Buenaventura. The baptistery is on the left, at the entrance. Over its old, solid, heavy doors rises a half-circular arch. Inside are two bowls of heavy sandstone. In the belfry are two bells, one of which is modern, cast in San Francisco.
Vasari states that as a youth Masaccio helped Ghiberti with his first Baptistery doors; and if so, the fact is significant. But all that is really known of his early life is that he went to Rome to paint a chapel in S. Clemente. He returned, apparently on hearing that his patron Giovanni de' Medici was in power again.
In some instances the baptistery adjoins the atrium or forecourt; but it soon became customary to erect detached baptisteries of considerable size. These generally have a high central portion carried by a ring of columns, and a low aisle running round, the receptacle for water being in the centre.
But if the dove runs defectively and there is any hitch, every one is dismayed, for the harvest will be bad and the pyrotechnist will receive nothing. Once he was imprisoned when things went astray and quite right too but the Florentines have grown more lenient. At about a quarter past eleven a procession of clergy emerged from the Duomo and crossed the space to the Baptistery.
The general plan of the church with its panelled arcade and open clerestory is original, but the northern side is modern, and compared with the old work hard and lacking in feeling. The east window and the chapel now used as the baptistery are both fine examples of perpendicular architecture and worthy of careful study.
On the pier opposite the side door an inscription records the gift of the right femur of "B. Jo. Ursinus" to Benedict XIII. by the Venetian senate in 1724. The baptistery is of the same date as the chapel, and was founded by the same bishop, who belonged to the Anconitan family of Turglonia. The door externally is square-headed, and has an architrave with sculptured della Robbia like fruits.
The campanile as a structure had been finished in 1387, but not for many years did it receive its statues, of which something must be said, although it is impossible to get more than a vague idea of them, so high are they. A captive balloon should be arranged for the use of visitors. Those by Donatello, on the Baptistery side, are the most remarkable.
Simple as it is, without, a cruciform building of plain brick, within it is so sumptuously and splendidly adorned that not an inch anywhere remains that is not encrusted with mosaic or precious marbles. These mosaics were, before their radical "restoration," perhaps finer and more classical than those of the baptistery.
This was the only occasion on which I saw the Baptistery accessible freely to all and the door into the Piazzetta open. One should not look at a guide-book on the first visit to S. Mark's; nor on the second or third, unless, of course, one is pressed for time. Let the walls and the floors and the pillars and the ceiling do their own quiet magical work first.
Of Leonardo I could write for ever, but this book is not the place; for though he was a Florentine, Florence has very little of his work: these pictures only, and one of these only for certain, together with an angel in a work by Verrocchio at the Accademia which we shall see, and possibly a sculptured figure over the north door of the Baptistery.
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