Museo dell'Opera del Duomo: Where David Was Carved
Why is it significant?
On the eastern side of the square, behind the cathedral's apse, a sober facade with a modest doorway hides one of the richest small museums in Europe. It belongs to the Opera del Duomo, the cathedral works, the office that has looked after this building since the 1290s and still does today.
Key Facts
| Place | Museo dell'Opera del Duomo: Where David Was Carved |
|---|---|
| Address | Piazza del Duomo 9, 50122 Firenze FI, Italy |
| Geo Coordinates | 43.77330, 11.25800 |
| Part of Walk | From the Dome to David: Brunelleschi, Ghiberti and Michelangelo in Florence |
| Generated | Generated |
On the eastern side of the square, behind the cathedral's apse, a sober facade with a modest doorway hides one of the richest small museums in Europe. It belongs to the Opera del Duomo, the cathedral works, the office that has looked after this building since the 1290s and still does today.
Behind these walls lay the Opera's workshop and yard, and it was here, in 1501, that the cathedral board handed a twenty-six-year-old sculptor a problem nobody wanted. It was a towering block of Carrara marble that had been lying around for decades, already hacked at and abandoned by an earlier sculptor. The workers called it the Giant. It had been meant for a statue high up on one of the cathedral's buttresses. The young man was Michelangelo, and he worked on it here, shut away from prying eyes, for nearly three years. What came out was David.
Inside, the museum keeps the originals of what you saw outside. Ghiberti's restored Gates of Paradise stand behind glass, and a vast hall recreates the cathedral's lost medieval facade, lined with the very statues that once filled its niches. And in a room of her own stands Donatello's Mary Magdalene, carved in wood, gaunt, ragged and toothless, a saint at the end of a life of penance. Florentines who know her rarely forget her.
Then there is the other Michelangelo, the old one. In his seventies he began a Pietà meant for his own tomb, and the hooded figure of Nicodemus holding Christ is traditionally taken as his self-portrait. One day he attacked the group with a hammer. Vasari offers reasons: a flaw in the marble, his own impatience, a servant who kept nagging him to finish. The broken pieces went to that servant, then to a man named Francesco Bandini, and another sculptor patched them up. Christ's left leg is still missing.
So in this one building you have both ends of a life: the young man who turned a reject into a hero, and the old man who could not bear what he had made. Leave the square at its north-eastern corner and walk up the narrow, dead-straight street called Via dei Servi.