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| The Marble Cupola Above the Dome |
The cathedral in Florence is everything it was said to be and more. The city is small enough and walkable enough and
Il Duomo, is large enough that its presence dominates everything. It, and the campanile by it, is so big and
every facet of its immensity covered with so much detail that it is impossible
to take it all in as one integrated object, as one building.
We marveled at the outside and toured the inside. The altars get lost in the space, the floors
are intricately designed marble, the ceiling of the dome is a fresco of heaven
and hell. Although very much the
architectural style of a Catholic church, it has a secular feel. People are not there to be close to God, they
are there as tourists, as we were, to gawk at the feats of renaissance man. The walls are lined with gospel scenes and
saints but also with frescoes and murals and coats of arms devoted to the
wealthy merchants who built the cathedral as a mark of their own success and
standing amongst the city states of Italy and the rest of Europe.
I have to give credit to the men who built it, not just to the designers
and the financiers but to the masons, carpenters, wagoneers, metalsmiths,
laborers, because I know what it is to execute the design of
another, what it is to work daily in all kinds of weather at repetitive,
difficult, physical tasks, to solve mechanical problems as they arise, to put your hands to the blocks of stone, to smell the mortar and hear men
admonishing, encouraging, cursing one another as the building goes up. I know what it is to be totally absorbed in
the completion of a mechanical task, to craft it with your hands to an ideal
cradled in your mind. I wanted to know
how they did it.
The highlight for me was the climb to the top of the dome. You start by going up a circular stone stairway
for, (here I am guessing at heights and dimensions), several hundred feet to
emerge at the edge of an octagonal drum on which the dome itself is built. From this height you can look down into the
main part of the cathedral to see tourists, already small and distant and you can look up at the ceiling inside the
dome to see high above the opening to the cupola, itself the size of a small
building.
From here you climb inside the double layered dome up another
stairway where you can see some of the internal structure. Most of the structure is buried in the mass
of masonry under your feet. Your head
brushes against the outer dome and occasionally you pass a small window looking
out on Florence. Each time you are a
little further from the ground. At the
top you climb out onto the base of the cupola.
You cannot go inside the cupola which opens downward into the church ,just walk around it on the edge of the roof. At the very top there is an
eight foot diameter brass ball which is big enough to stand inside of but
actually gets lost in the enormity of everything else.
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