The Gates of Paradise
Ghiberti's original gilded panels, their first radiance restored.
Giovanni Serafini — CC0 · Ricardalovesmonuments — CC BY-SA 4.0 · Francesco Bini — CC BY-SA 4.0 · Francesco Bini — CC BY-SA 4.0
Because what you saw on them is replica: the original doors and statues are all here, close up, lit as their lofty original positions never could. The monuments give you the scene; the museum gives you the art itself.
After the baptistery and cathedral, not before — so you know what you are looking at — and precisely at hot midday: cool and spacious while others stand in queues.
An hour for the core — façade, doors, Pietà, Magdalene; ninety minutes unhurried. The wall texts are among Italy's best written.
Sign in to write your review of this place.
No reviews yet — be the first.
The Opera museum is the Duomo's treasury: every masterpiece once on the cathedral, baptistery and tower was moved here for safekeeping, quietly making it — unnoticed by the crowds — one of the world's great sculpture museums: Donatello, Ghiberti and Michelangelo in spacious modern rooms that stay half-empty. Here are the original Gates of Paradise — Ghiberti's gilded panels, named forever by Michelangelo's remark — displayed after a quarter-century restoration recovered their gold. Here is the Bandini Pietà Michelangelo carved for his own tomb, Nicodemus's face his own, and Donatello's harrowing wooden Magdalene. The great hall rebuilds the cathedral's first façade at full scale with its original statues in position — a stroke of exhibition genius that makes the whole museum legible as a single image.
Ghiberti's original gilded panels, their first radiance restored.
Michelangelo carving for his own tomb, his face in the stone — the majestic late work.
Donatello at his most unsparing — a figure hard to forget.
The cathedral's first front at true scale with its original statues.
Piazza del Duomo 9, 50122 Florence