Orsanmichele: The Guilds' Granary Church

Why is it significant?

Stand on Via dei Calzaiuoli and face the tall, square block of stone that looks more like a warehouse than a church... because that is exactly what it was. Now count the niches around its walls.

Key Facts

Open the walk

Stand on Via dei Calzaiuoli and face the tall, square block of stone that looks more like a warehouse than a church... because that is exactly what it was. Now count the niches around its walls. There are fourteen of them, each with a saint inside, and every one of those saints was paid for by a different trade.

Orsanmichele began as an open loggia for the city's grain market. After a fire, the commune rebuilt it from 1337, with granaries on the upper floors, and inside you can still find openings in the pillars where grain once slid down chutes to the hall below. A miracle-working image of the Madonna on one of those pillars drew crowds of pilgrims, the open arches were walled in, and the market became a church. Bread upstairs, prayers downstairs. Very Florentine.

Then came the competition. The commune handed the niches to the guilds, the arti, which ran the Republic. There were twenty-one of them, seven major and fourteen minor: wool merchants, bankers, judges, doctors and apothecaries, butchers, armourers. Each guild had to fill its niche with its patron saint, and nobody wanted to look poor. Marble was respectable. Bronze was a statement, and only the richest guilds could afford it. In 1412 the cloth merchants of the Calimala commissioned Lorenzo Ghiberti's Saint John the Baptist, the first life-size bronze statue of the Renaissance.

Walk slowly around the building and you pass a parade of genius. Donatello's Saint George for the armourers, alert and ready for a fight. Verrocchio's Doubting Thomas for the merchants' court, with Thomas stepping half out of his niche to touch the wound of Christ. What you see outside today are faithful copies; the originals are kept safe in the museum upstairs and, for Saint George, in the Bargello.

Think of it as the city's first billboard. Every passer-by could read who was rich, who was pious and who was in charge. After the Ordinances of Justice of 1293, the top offices were reserved for men enrolled in a guild, so these statues were also a list of the people allowed to govern. Now head south-west, past the arcaded Mercato Nuovo with its bronze boar, to the palace of the party that once owned half the confiscated property in town.