The church of Orsanmichele, formerly also known as the church of San Michele in Orto, is a historic building in the center of Florence, located from via Calzaiuoli, via Orsanmichele, via dell'Arte della Lana and via dei Lamberti. It was originally a loggia built for the storage and market of grain, later transformed into the church of the Arti, the ancient Florentine guilds. Today, the upper floors house a museum with the originals of the sculptural cycle of its external niches (replaced on the outside by copies), made by some of the most important masters of the Florentine Renaissance.
Origins
On the site there was a female monastery with vast
vegetable gardens, in which a primitive oratory was replaced around the
middle of the eighth century by the small church dedicated to the
Archangel Michael, called San Michele in Orto, from which the name of
"garden of San Michele" and then "Orsanmichele".
The church was
demolished around 1240 to make room for the grain market, as an
extension of the nearby Mercato Vecchio. Later, around 1284-1290, it was
decided to build a more suitable building, which would guarantee
storage, but also a covered space for trading, in the urban project
which aimed at the creation of public and private loggias, such as to
mark the streets with spaces similar to squares, to invite you to stop
and social contacts. This first loggia was probably built by Arnolfo di
Cambio, the architect responsible for the main building sites in the
city in those years. On one of the pillars there must have been a
painting, perhaps in fresco, of a Madonna del Popolo, believed to be
miraculous and the object of very fervent popular devotion: it is
possible that the image existed well before the erection of the loggia,
because since the time of St. Peter the Martyr, the birth of a
confraternity that dealt with the cult and the management of donations
and ex-voto donations for this image, the company of the Laudesi, is
remembered. The painting could therefore either have come from the
ancient monastery or from another pre-existing building, or it could
have been repainted here in continuity with an older image.
In
any case, on 10 July 1304 the loggia was seriously damaged by a fire,
which also destroyed that venerated image.
Corporation Church
«And it was ordered that each art of Florence take its pilaster, and on
it have the figure of that saint in whom art has reverence made; and
every year for the feast of the said saint the consuls of the said art
made an offering with its craftsmen, and that it was from the company of
Santa Maria d'Orto San Michele to dispense to the poor of God; which was
a beautiful order and devoted and honorable to the whole city.
(Giovanni Villani, Nuova Cronica, XII 67)
A new loggia was
rebuilt, albeit thirty years later, based on a project by Simone
Talenti, Neri di Fioravante and Benci di Cione Dami, with the laying of
the first stone on 29 July 1337. In its original layout, the building,
with a rectangular plan and with three floors, it had an open loggia on
the ground, intended for the grain market and containing the image of
the Madonna delle Grazie, painted by Bernardo Daddi in 1347 to replace
the previous one. Meanwhile, on 26 July 1343, Saint Anne's day, the
despotic Duke of Athens Gualtieri VI of Brienne was driven out with a
popular uprising, deciding to pay homage to the saint with an altar
under the loggia. The role assumed by the guilds in the expulsion of the
tyrant meant that since then every 26 June the church was decorated with
the flags of the guilds, starting to become a place full of symbolic
meanings for these corporations.
The works were interrupted
following the serious economic crisis linked to the plague of 1348,
these were resumed and, between 1360 and 1366, the cornice of the first
floor parapet was overcome. At the same time, the decision was made to
fill in the perimeter arches of the loggia, maintaining the structure of
the large three-mullioned windows, and to remove the market to use this
space as a church, a function that has remained to this day. In 1359
Orcagna signed the marble tabernacle for the Marian image inside. In
1380 remains the news of a supply of white Carrara marble for the
mullioned windows on the upper floors. In 1386 the carpenter Bartolo di
Dino was in charge of providing the trusses for the roof of the
building. On that occasion, Franco Sacchetti had a series of panels
dusted off with figures of half-apostles from the school of Giovanni
Pisano (by Giovanni di Balduccio) and placed in a position of honor in
the sealed arches. The conclusion of the works up to the crowning with
corbels is to be dated between 1404 and 1406.
In the meantime,
since 1339, the Arte della Seta had asked the Municipality for
permission to make a series of tabernacles with the statues of the
patron saints of the Arts, which was accepted only in 1404, despite the
fact that some corporations had already had some statues prepared. It
was then established which crafts could dispose of one of the fourteen
tabernacles, the decoration of which should have taken place within ten
years, otherwise the right would be lost in favor of another Art. In
reality the times were often longer. The result was gradually an
extraordinary sculptural cycle of the greatest Florentine artists from
the fifteenth century onwards (Ghiberti, Nanni di Banco, Donatello,
Brunelleschi, Verrocchio and others), who composed an extraordinary
compendium of the transition from late Gothic to fully Renaissance
forms.
In 1569 the Grand Duke Cosimo I installed the Archive of Contracts
and Testaments on the upper floors, which had never been used for
storing the grain for which they had been built, entrusting the
adaptation of the halls to Buontalenti. On that occasion, the
grand-ducal architect also built the arched pier that connected the
first floor of the building with a specially built staircase in the
building next to the Arte della Lana palace, with an entrance on
Calimala, being the spiral staircase in the north-eastern corner pylon
of Orsanmichele too small. Today the flyover and the portal to Calimala
remain, while the staircase was demolished in favor of another one
inside the enlarged Palazzo dell'Arte della Lana, at the beginning of
the twentieth century.
Between the eighteenth and nineteenth
centuries the marble statues were blackened by a dark patina that wanted
to make them look like bronze, to make them all homogeneous. The Madonna
della Rosa, which had been inside the church since 1628, was not
subjected to this process.
The restorations
The events linked
to the conservation of the large factory are also extremely complex and
tormented. Between 1834 and 1839 the architect Giuseppe Martelli
directed the restoration works on the roofs and the revision of the
facades: in 1844, due to the persistence of the static problems, the two
central pillars were raised to the second floor, based on a project by
Pasquale Poccianti in support of coverage. In 1853 all the decorations
relating to the mullioned windows and the attic area were renewed. In
1883 it was decided to transfer the archive elsewhere, and to start
various restoration works, led by Giuseppe Castellazzi and Luigi Del
Moro, which saw the demolition of the internal superstructures of the
first hall and, to heal the cracks that had opened in the vaults cruise,
the creation of a new attic. In the midst of the "Renovation" era, more
drastic projects were discarded, such as the reopening of the loggia on
the ground floor or the demolition of the arch and the Palazzo dell'Arte
della Lana to isolate Orsanmichele from the urban context. In 1891 there
was the first musealisation of a statue of Orsanmichele, the San Giorgio
which was destined for the recently established National Museum of the
Bargello, where it is still today with the tile at the base of the
niche.
In 1941 Orsanmichele was the object of special care in
anticipation of the air conflict with the removal of a part of the
statues and the protection of the rest with scaffolding and sandbags. On
that occasion, the Superintendency commissioned a detailed photographic
campaign.
Around 1960, given the persistence of a worrying static
situation, a complex and exemplary building site was opened again under
the direction of the Superintendency of Monuments (architect Guido
Morozzi) and the Civil Engineers (engineer Francesco Lardani), which
affected both the static that of the decorative apparatus and which
closed in 1967, also seeing the construction of a modern staircase
wrapped around one of the ancient pillars between the first and second
floors.
In 1984 a complex work of revision of the external stone
facings was then begun, facilitated in 1986 by the arrival of a
substantial funding during the year of "Florence Capital of European
Culture". It also led to addressing the problem of conservation of the
statues of the Arts, and to the decision to remove the sculptures from
their original location to house them inside the two large rooms of the
same monument. The then Superintendency for Environmental and
Architectural Heritage of Florence (architect Paola Grifoni and Dr.
Francesca Nannelli) therefore planned the restoration of all the
statues, in bronze and in marble, having as main contact the Opificio
delle Pietre Dure and other laboratories of Florentine restoration, also
involved thanks to providential sponsorships that followed one another
over time and which allowed the undertaking to be concluded in 2005 and
the new Orsanmichele Museum to be inaugurated (although not yet
finished), in June 1996, on the occasion of the European summit in
Florence. The need not to leave the tabernacles unguarded and to keep
the relationship between the statues and the structure of the aedicules
clear, and between these and the building, and between this and the
surrounding urban space, then motivates the decision to create and place
external elevations a faithful copy of all the statues (the last one was
San Matteo, in 2005).
Thanks to the sponsorship and a generous
bequest of the Ross Family Charitable Foundation of New York, in 2000
the church received an unexpected funding which was used mainly to
restore the statues, the group of the altar of St. Anne, the frescoes
and to create the copies to be placed outside in niches and other
plaster copies.
The museum and the church can be visited on
Tuesdays and Saturdays. For some time Orsanmichele has also been used
for concerts and in 2006, from a religious point of view, it became a
rectory, resuming regular liturgical service. It is also the venue for
the liturgical celebrations of the Guelph Archconfraternity.
Characteristic of Orsanmichele is the refined and well-kept treatment
of the surfaces, starting from the large Gothic three-mullioned windows
decorated with fine fretwork and statuettes placed at the level of the
impost line of the arches. The upper floors have a smooth facing in
pietraforte, on which large marble mullioned windows open, decorated,
among other things, with coats of arms of the Florentine Republic and
the Arts. The crowning is composed of trilobed arches resting on
shelves. The pillars between the mullioned windows house the famous
niches with the statues of the patron saints of the trade guilds, with
works by the most important Florentine sculptors of the time.
The
interior is accessed today from one of the two portals on via dell'Arte
della Lana, while the entrance behind the altar, on via de' Calzaiuoli,
contains a box from the booking office of the Florentine state museums.
The interior has two naves, with two large square pillars in the centre,
which support, together with the semi-pillars leaning against the walls,
the six round cross vaults which support the upper halls. On the door in
the northwest corner is the bushel, an ancient unit of measurement for
grain and fodder. The arch of the vault shows the opening where the
sacks were hoisted, while the pillars on the north side show the
discharge openings, where there were channels for the grain to flow from
the upper store.
To access the upper floors there is a steep
spiral staircase in the north-west corner pillar or you can pass from
the building opposite, the Palazzo dell'Arte della Lana, through the
arch that connects the two buildings, forming a glimpse picturesque of
the city among the most famous, above all thanks to the
nineteenth-century prints on Florence.
The left portal on via
dell'Arte della Lana has decorations that are the work of Niccolò di
Pietro Lamberti, datable to 1410. At the four outer corners, at the
bottom, there are plant motifs that symbolize the four seasons: dry
twigs for winter , flowering branches for spring, ears of corn for
summer and bunches of grapes for autumn.
The external tabernacles
Since the 19th century, copies of some of the statues have been made and
kept safe inside the museum on the first floor of the building.
Furthermore, only three original statues are in bronze: those of the
richest Arti (Calimala, del Cambio and della Lana), given that the cost
of a bronze statue was at least 10 times higher than that of a marble
statue. However, the copies were sometimes made in a material different
from the original one: between the end of the eighteenth century and the
beginning of the nineteenth century, in fact, the juxtaposition between
marble and bronze was considered disharmonious, so it was decided to
make copies in bronze instead that in marble and some marble statues had
even been blackened with oily substances to obtain uniformity, a
reckless procedure that irrevocably stained some of the statues
(especially the San Jacopo del Lamberti).
The rounds
Above
each tabernacle, at the top, there are a series of large medallions
where the art owner of the underlying tabernacle inserted its coat of
arms. This could have been in fresco or in glazed polychrome terracotta:
while the former are now almost all illegible, the latter are still
clearly visible and often of great value.
On the tabernacle of
the Court of Mercatanzia there is a lily of Florence within a garland
made by Luca della Robbia in 1463. The medallions of the Guild of Judges
and Notaries and of the Masters of Stone and Wood are also by Luca della
Robbia (the second is not in relief), while that of the Arte della Seta,
with two cherubs holding up the coat of arms, is by his nephew Andrea.
The tondo with the coat of arms of the Arte dei Beccai is not
Renaissance: it was made in style in 1858 by the Ginori porcelain
factory, at the expense of the butchers of Florence, in honor of their
fellow ancestors.
The left altar presents the marble group of Sant'Anna, the Madonna
and Child by Francesco da Sangallo (about 1526). It replaced a painted
image, commissioned by the Signoria, in thanksgiving for the expulsion
from Florence of Gualtieri VI of Brienne, the Duke of Athens.
On
the opposite side is the tabernacle built by Andrea Orcagna between 1349
and 1359 to house the Virgin with Child and Angels (painting by Bernardo
Daddi of 1347), which replaced a miraculous image, the Madonna of
Orsanmichele (by Ugolino di Nerio) once placed on the pillars of the
first loggia and probably burnt down in the fire of 1304. The tabernacle
is a sumptuous canopy with colored marble inlays, gilding and minute
geometric decorations. The aedicule is supported by four pillars with
twisted columns, on which round arches, triangular cusps and pinnacles
are set. The base is decorated with high relief panels with Virtues and
stories of Mary; the rear part, on the other hand, is decorated with a
single, large bas-relief with the Transit and Assumption of the Virgin,
where there is also the signature of the artist, who qualifies as
"archimagister" and the date 1359. On the pillars and on the upper
horizontal band there are some statuettes and half figures in relief,
with angels, prophets, sibyls, virtues and apostles. The ovoid dome is
decorated at the top with a relief of the Redeemer.
The marble
enclosure, with bronze gratings, twisted columns at the corners and
angels holding candles, is the work of Pietro Migliore from 1366.
Inside, many late 14th century frescoes (covered with plaster in the
18th century and rediscovered during the 19th century restoration)
decorate the pillars, some of the walls and the segments of the vaults.
The pictorial cycle of the vaults, executed in 1398-1399 represents
characters from the Old and New Testaments, according to an iconographic
program conceived by Franco Sacchetti. The first bay of the left aisle
has vaults frescoed by Lorenzo di Bicci (by attribution), with the
figures of Eva, Rachel, Rebecca and Sara; the second span on the right
presents Judas Maccabeus and David attributed to Ambrogio di Baldese and
Moses and Joshua to Spinello Aretino; the two spans on the altars have
frescoes attributed to Mariotto di Nardo, with the Eternal Father and
three Saints and the Virgin with three female saints.
The
perimeter of the walls and the pillars are decorated with many figures.
Starting from the right entrance portal and proceeding counterclockwise
you will find:
In the right wall
St. Michael the Archangel
St. John Baptist
Saint Nicholas of Tolentino
St. Julian
St.
George
St. John the Evangelist
Saint Matthew, by Lorenzo di Bicci,
(1375-1380)
St. John the Evangelist (bis)
St. Augustine
Saint
John the Evangelist (ter), by Niccolò di Pietro Gerini
St. Barnabas,
by Cenni di Francesco (1395-1400)
Saint Lucia, by Cenni di Francesco
(1395-1400)
Santa Viridiana, by Cenni di Francesco (1395-1400)
On the back wall:
St. Philip
St. Francis, by Mariotto di Nardo
(1398)
St. Augustine, by Niccolò di Pietro Gerini
St. Dominic
In the left wall
Saint Catherine of Wheels
Saint Anne
Saint
Peter
St. Julian
San Jacopo
San Martino (on panel), by Giovanni
Antonio Sogliani
Santo Stefano (on panel), by Francesco Morandini
known as il Poppi
Four crowned saints
San Bartolomeo (on panel),
by Lorenzo di Credi
San Giuliano (bis, on panel), by Jacopo del
Sellaio
Saint Zenobius
Saint Stephen
On the first central
pillar:
Saint Zenobius
Holy Trinity, by Niccolò Gerini (1400-1410)
Santissima Annunziata, by Niccolò Gerini (1400-1410)
St. Martin, by
Niccolo Gerini (1400-1410)
On the second central pillar:
St.
Bartholomew, by Giovanni Bonsi (1355-1360)
San Lorenzo, by Taddeo
Gaddi
Good Thief, by Niccolo Gerini (1400-1410)
Mary Magdalene, by
Niccolo Gerini (1400-1410)
The stained glass windows on the lunettes of the three-mullioned
windows make up a cycle with Stories and miracles of the Virgin and the
miraculous image of the Madonna of Orsanmichele, composed in two phases:
the first by the master glassmaker Leonardo di Simone in around
1380-1400, with drawings by Agnolo Gaddi, Niccolò Gerini and Giovanni
del Biondo, followed by the erratic window by Niccolò di Piero Tedesco
based on a design by Lorenzo Monaco and a second phase with Francesco di
Giovanni Lastra and Bernardo di Francesco based on a design by Lorenzo
Ghiberti (1429-1432). The stained glass windows of Orsanmichele, unlike
other important Florentine cycles such as that of Santa Croce, have
undergone relatively non-invasive restorations, and can be said to be
mostly original.
List of scenes
From the northeast corner,
counterclockwise
Angel musicians (left door), by Lorenzo Ghiberti
Modern stained glass window (right door)
Presentation of the Virgin
in the Temple (first trifora south), by Lorenzo Ghiberti
Presentation
of Jesus in the Temple (first trifora south), by Lorenzo Ghiberti
Assumption of the Virgin (second trifora south), by Lorenzo Ghiberti
Renunciation of earthly goods (third trifora south), attr. to Giovanni
del Biondo
Miracle of the unjustly accused Ebbo thief (third trifora
south), attr. to Giovanni del Biondo
Trial by fire at the grain
market (third trifora south), attr. to Giovanni del Biondo
Rest on
the Flight into Egypt (south right trifora), attr. to Niccolo Gerini
Miracle of the snow (south right trifora), attr. to Niccolo Gerini
Saving the soul of a drowned man (south right trifora), attr. to Niccolo
Gerini
Miracle of the sinful abbess (south left trifora), attr. to
Niccolo Gerini
Miracle of the drowned sexton (south left trifora),
attr. to Niccolo Gerini
Last communion of a dying woman (south left
trifora), attr. to Niccolo Gerini
Miracle of the child born black
(third trifora north), attr. to Agnolo Gaddi
Miracle of the amputated
hand of "Pope Leo" (third trifora north), attr. to Agnolo Gaddi
Miracle of the drowned child (third trifora north), attr. to Agnolo
Gaddi
Announcement to Joachim (second trifora south), by Lorenzo
Monaco
To the left of the altar of Sant'Anna, there is the Tamburini pipe
organ opus 701, built in 1975.
The instrument has an entirely
mechanical transmission and is partly enclosed within a simple wooden
case, with an exhibition made up of main pipes. The console, with two
keyboards and a pedal board, is windowed; to his left is the tremolo
control, to the right, on two columns, the side-scrolling handcuffs that
operate the various registers and unions.