[2] The original font, disused, was dismantled in 1577 by Francesco I de' Medici to make room for grand-ducal celebrations, an act deplored by Florentines at the time.

[3] The Baptistery serves as a focus for the city’s most important religious celebrations, including the Festival of Saint John held on June 24, still a legal holiday in Florence.

In the past the Baptistery housed the insignia of Florence and the towns it conquered[4] and offered a venue to honor individual achievement like victory in festival horse races.

[7] The architecture of the Baptistery takes inspiration from the Pantheon, an ancient Roman temple, as observers have noted for at least 700 years,[8] and yet it is also a highly original artistic achievement.

In the modern period skepticism mounted until these legends were abandoned in the nineteenth century, in part because excavations revealed that a very different structure, a large house, was present at the site in Roman times.

[17] This finding is not entirely surprising; historians started to notice errors in Firenze città nobilissima soon after it was published, and in the 20th century, a philologist even demonstrated that Del Migliore had falsified the existence of a medieval Florentine named Salvino degli Armati.

In the 1930s, Walter Horn’s study of Florentine masonry technique (refinement of stone cutting, mortar application, course patterning) showed that the sandstone construction of the lower levels of the Baptistery was close to that of the church of Santi Apostoli and of the later portions of San Pier Scheraggio, documents about both of which support a dating in the 1060s or 1070s.

In the 1060s, reformist Vallombrosian monks accused bishop Pietro Mezzabarba of Florence of simony, specifically of having obtained his office through a corrupt offering of money made by his father.

The three monumental sets of doors made for the Baptistery, masterpieces of Gothic and Renaissance art, are now preserved in the Museo dell’Opera del Duomo, opposite a reconstruction of the Cathedral facade as it would have appeared when the last of them was completed.

In the 1320s, the powerful guild that had the patronage of the Baptistery, the Arte di Calimala, determined to embellish it with a set of doors for the south portal, through which parents bearing infants for baptism are believed to have entered.

The figures above them represent the three theological virtues — hope, faith, and charity — as well as humility, whose inclusion was perhaps inspired by the Baptist’s choice to live a life of privation in the desert.

For Anita Moskowitz, “Divine events are interpreted in the most human and down-to-earth terms, without ever sacrificing that sense of the exalted nature of the drama that lifts them into the realm of the spiritual.”[45] Kenneth Clark notes that Andrea’s style is “profoundly human” and that whereas “Giotto’s men and women are types; Andrea’s are individuals.”[46] The frame around the doors, completed over a century later by the workshop of Lorenzo Ghiberti’s son Vittorio, show Adam and Eve after the Fall of Man and the infant Cain and Abel fighting, below flowers and fruits symbolic of the original sin that baptism could remove.

The 21-year enterprise proved extremely expensive, equivalent to the annual Florentine defense budget and almost as costly as Florence’s purchase of the entire city of Sansepolcro a few years later.

Nonetheless, Ghiberti is an innovator, seeking to overcome the limitations of the format by implying a new sense of three-dimensionality through foreshortening, swelling drapery, differing levels of relief, and architecture angled away from the viewing plane.

Ghiberti, now widely recognized for his enormous talent, was awarded the commission at the beginning of 1425,[54] and by 1429, when work began, had won his patrons over to a completely new format, ten panels without quatrefoils, each large enough to accommodate multiple episodes.

[55] For George Robinson, on the other hand, the telling of the stories of Jacob and Esau, Joseph, the Battle of Jericho, and David and Goliath has political overtones: “if the Israelites were to survive… they had to be united despite conflict, and were obliged to allow power and authority to find its place in the hands of the young and untested.”[56] A recent study emphasizes the learned Ghiberti’s attempt to reconcile Biblical and classical history, for example including increasingly elaborate architectural structures, following Vitruvius’ account in De architectura of the history of architecture.

[57] Work on the doors lasted from 1429 until 1447 and involved a large workshop that included Ghiberti’s sons Vittorio and Tommaso, Benozzo Gozzoli, Luca della Robbia, Michelozzo, and Donatello.

Monumental columns of the size used could not be produced in the 11th and 12th centuries, so must have been salvaged from ancient buildings, probably civic or religious structures in the Roman forum that stood at the site of the present Piazza della Repubblica.

Most of the baroque decor of the Baptistery was removed in the early 20th century, but a statue of the Baptist by Giuseppe Piamontini, donated by Cosimo III de' Medici remains in the niche to the left of the chancel.

Artists from the circle of Orcagna including Leonardo di Ser Giovanni began work on a new silver altar frontal with scenes from the life of John the Baptist, now displayed in the Museo dell’Opera del Duomo.

[65] In the mid-15th century, the decision was made to transform the frontal into a mobile altar that could be set up on the ancient font at the center of the Baptistery three times a year, along with liturgical objects and reliquaries.

Commissioned by the Arte di Calimala in 1457 probably to hold a relic of the True Cross, it consists of a crucifix atop a monumental support that includes a representation of Golgotha in Jerusalem and cast figures of a mourning Mary and Saint John Evangelist.

The most artistically significant parts of the work, by Antonio del Pollaiuolo, are in the lowest section, and include an architectural structure similar to the lantern of Brunelleschi’s Dome; two harpies supporting adoring angels; and reliefs of the Baptism of Christ, Moses flanked by Faith and Hope, and four Church Fathers.

The now-demolished Romanesque font and the octagonal enclosure around it were revetted in marble, fragments of which survive in the Museo dell’Opera del Duomo and the Church of San Francesco in Sarteano.

In 1466, the Arte di Calimala commissioned liturgical vestments for Baptistery canons in a project that would last more than twenty years, yielding two albs, a chasuble, and a cope.

[72] The Baptistery is crowned by a magnificent mosaic ceiling in an Italo-Byzantine style, generally considered to have been completed between about 1240 and 1300, with numerous interruptions due to an unstable political situation.

The great artist who made the drawings for the six-meter-high Christ Sitting in Judgment (1) and at least parts of the elegant canopy at the center (2) appears to be an anonymous master known for a large Crucifix in the Uffizi (no.

It pullulates with small devils… who transport the damned and inflict on them the most varied tortures, at times culinary in aspect: in the foreground on the right a man, impaled on a spit, is being turned by a devil who with a long stick stokes up the flames below the roasted sinner, while a fellow-demon bastes him with oil.

[80] Cimabue possibly collaborated with, but in any case was succeeded by, Corso di Buono, known from signed and dated frescoes in the church of San Lorenzo, Montelupo Fiorentino.

[82] Below the main vault, interspersed with rectangular openings, are mosaic depictions of saints, popes, bishops, and martyr deacons, and on the outside faces of the gallery-level parapets are busts of patriarchs and prophets, all from the early 14th century.