If you missed Part 1 and Part 2, you may want to read them first.
It was the greatest day in Florence and maybe the most significant day in the history of architecture. At 9 am on March 25, 1436, the sky was a brilliant blue and the temperature warm. The large procession — which included Pope Eugenius IV, seven cardinals, thirty-seven bishops, and nine members of the Florentine government, including Cosimo de’ Medici — exited the Dominican Church of Santa Maria Novella, kicking off the momentous day (see Brunelleschi’s Dome: How a Renaissance Genius Reinvented Architecture, by Ross King, p. 137). Moving slowly, they walked on a wooden causeway built six feet above the ground and decorated with sweet-smelling flowers. The “magnificently robed and jeweled” procession made its way toward the Cathedral. The procession was an urban spectacle that would overwhelm any onlooker. As they moved across the gangway toward the Piazza San Giovanni, the Cathedral dramatically appeared; its new dome was large enough to cover the entire Tuscan population with its shadows and take away the breath of anyone seeing it for the first time. One hundred and forty years in the making, it was time to inaugurate Santa Maria del Fiore.
Alberti, then advisor to Eugenius, poet, author, expert surveyor, and architect, was in the audience. Alberti — who, following Augustine, understood the power of signs to help humans experience the eternal — was deeply moved by the meaningfulness of the day. “Whether onlookers walked on the causeway, or ambled along the street, or wandered through the basilica itself,” wrote Alberti, “they were stimulated by delights of all sorts, seeing and smelling at the same time, and were filled with many kinds of pleasure.”
As the procession entered the Cathedral (or Duomo, in Italian), the onlookers’ senses were overwhelmed. “The basilica … was decorated,” remembered Alberti, “with every conceivable kind of ornament” for the special occasion. Moreover, special music composed for the event stunned onlookers with its transcendent quality.
Caught up in the moment, Alberti was transfixed. The causeway, procession, architecture, music, tapestries, flowers, sights, sounds, and smells — all had been harmonized, like the music of heaven, for one reason: to deeply move and shape the people of Florence.
“Each of its parts,” he would write sometime later about the Duomo, “seem to be designed for pleasure, while on the other, one understands that it all has been built for perpetuity.”
“I would add,” he continues, “that here is the constant home of temperateness, as of springtime outside: outside, wind, ice, and frost; here inside, one is protected …. Outside, the heat of summer and autumn, inside coolness. And if, as they say, delight is felt when our senses perceive what, and how much, they require by nature, who could hesitate to call this temple the nest of delights? Here, wherever you look, you see the expression of happiness and gaiety; here it is always fragrant, and, that which I prize above all, here you listen to the voices during mass, during that which the ancients called the mysteries, with their marvelous beauty?” (quoted in Timeless Cities, by David Mayernik, 143)
From beginning to end, the Consecration brought together the civic and religious institutions, engaged all the senses, and moved mind and body. It was more than intellectual; it was more than delightful; it was to help those present make sense of human experience and action. In fact, to shape the citizens of Florence into a society of harmony, virtue, and love for God. Architecture speaks, but it also shapes. By witnessing the Consecration, Alberti had seen how the power of architecture and the built environment shaped them into the people. He would spend the next thirty years working out this exciting vision of the city, influencing Popes and powerful patrons, and constructing sublime structures that moved the mind and will of people to action.
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I saw it first coming around a slight bend in the Via Dei Panzani. My family, busy enjoying the sights and sounds of Florentine city life — street vendors selling sunglasses, bakeries releasing the smell of newly baked bread, shops catering to gelato and all kinds of sweets — had not seen it. When I got their attention, they looked up and froze. Alberti was right. Santa Maria del Fiore cast a magnificent shadow: its size, built initially to hold 30,000 worshipers; its polychromatic exterior, symbolizing its floral dedication; its dome, with its egg-shaped contour and red brick hues. She towered over the city like a mother hen with her chicks. It was May 3, springtime in the air, and the sun shone brightly. We had left Rome three days earlier and had rented a flat in the Tuscan countryside, about an hour’s train ride from Florence.
When we entered Piazza San Giovanni, it was teeming with people enjoying the cafés or strolling about or taking pictures. We walked around the Baptismal, studying Ghiberti’s doors made famous, in part, by the competition to win the right to design the doors, a competition in which Ghiberti defeated Filippo Brunelleschi. When Brunelleschi lost to the more famous and accomplished Ghiberti, he was so humiliated that he fled Florence for Rome, not to return for twenty years. As we approached the Duomo, my wife Michelle quizzed us on the details of the conflict between these two Renaissance architects, a battle almost as famous as the dome itself and chronicled by the History Channel, a program my kids had watched numerous times before arrival. When Brunelleschi returned to Rome, he did so for the competition to design the dome for the Cathedral that at the time didn’t have one. With his revolutionary design inspired by his study of the Pantheon in Rome, Brunelleschi won the contest, defeating his archrival Ghiberti.
Entering the Cathedral, in the form of a Latin cross, we noticed how long it was — the third-longest church in the world after St. Peter’s in Rome and St. Paul’s in London. Expecting an ornately decorated interior, we were surprised at how plain the walls appeared and struck by the controlled and measured proportions, different from the Gothic Cathedrals we had seen in England and France. We moved across the open floor, past solid and straightforward pilasters (supporting arches) that ran along both sides of the church and under the dome. As Michelle stopped to explain something to the kids, light streamed down upon us from the rose window in the centralized nave and tall thin windows of the aisles, calling attention to the detailed, tiled floor. We stood under the cupola, looking up to the interior dome. “We Christians,” wrote Alberti, “build our churches high so that those who enter feel elevated and the soul can rise to the contemplation of God… We enter here to greet the name and figure of God.”
We had pursued Alberti here to the Duomo for a reason. Though he had nothing to do with the Cathedral's design (completed before he returned from exile in Genoa), he used it as an example to explain his vision for religious buildings. Through my time with David Mayernik, we learned that buildings could speak to us in Rome. Through their materials, design, and layout, when done right, they communicate the truth about virtue, the best life, and the City of God. But along with speaking to us, we learned that they also change us, shape us, and bless us. “Earthly things,” wrote St. Augustine, “are to be used to help us and, as it were, sustain us as we move toward blessedness so that we may gain and cling to those things which make us blessed.” (cited in Timeless Cities, by David Mayernik) We had come to Florence to test this thesis. Is it true that the built environment shapes us?
And why is this important? Because if buildings and space play a role in shaping us into people who care about other people and the civic realm, then applying this principle could help my children overcome the kind of autonomous individualism that Tocqueville described (see part 2 of this series).
In The Architecture of Happiness (2006), Alain De Botton’s described the afternoon he entered the McDonald’s on Victoria Street in London. He observed “customers eating alone, reading papers or staring at brown tiles, masticating with a sternness and brusqueness beside which the atmosphere of a feeding shed would have appeared convivial and mannered…The restaurant’s true talent lay in the generation of anxiety… [inviting] thoughts of the loneliness and meaningless of existence in a random and violent universe.” Depressed by his surroundings, he couldn’t get out of there fast enough.
As he continued to walk, he noticed the “imposing Byzantine forms of the Westminster Cathedral, its red and white brick campanile soaring eighty-seven meters into the foggy London Skies.” He went in. After describing the setting inside — the mosaics and carved statues, the smells of incense and the sounds of prayer, the reverent guests and whispering attendants — he writes that the “stonework threw into relief all that was compromised and dull, and kindled a yearning for one to live up to its perfection.” All kinds of religious and philosophical ideas appeared in his mind; “concepts that would have sounded demented forty meters away” (in the McDonald’s) now, “through a work of architecture,” had acquired “supreme significance and majesty.” (The Architecture of Happiness by Alain de Botton, 110-11)
De Botton experienced what Alberti first taught in the 15th century. Architecture impacts us; it moves us to think different thoughts, act in different ways, and live different lives than we would typically experience in a place like McDonald’s. So the built environment does matter for the kind of life we want our children to live.
While my family went in pursuit of gelato, I walked five blocks south to see the façade of Santa Maria Novella (where the Pope resided from 1434-1443) that Alberti designed in 1460, commissioned by the patron, Giovanni Rucellai. Sitting in the piazza in front of the church, watching people enjoying a quiet afternoon in the warm sun outside the church, I realized that beautiful churches draw us like magnets because they emotionally and visually affect us. They move us to think and act differently. They persuade us as if they were a speaker trying to inspire us to action. And, in fact, they are.
For Alberti, oratory and architecture were connected. The beautiful architecture will stir our emotions, shape our imagination, and move our will like a great orator. Alberti believed that both oratory and architecture move people by sensory beauty. Though the intellect is essential, we don’t come to know God primarily through our thinking, he contended, but through our imagination, emotions, affections, and desire. For this reason, he taught that churches should be so beautiful that they would move us deeply so that we act differently, just by being around them. By drawing us in by our emotions and imaginations, by inspiring us with beauty, churches “move the heart, mind, and soul of the spectator to cognizance of divinity.” But even for those who never attended religious services, it was Alberti’s goal that churches still play a civic role. Their very presence would lead to more civic virtue and the strengthening of the bonds of communal life, thus benefitting not only the individual but also the city.
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By now, it was late in the afternoon, and after a full day of touring around Florence, we were standing high above the city. “San Miniato is best in the late afternoon,” David Mayernik had told me. San Miniato, a Benedictine monastery set high above the town, was a favorite walking destination for Alberti; he did some of his best thinking about the city on that walk.
“When you get there,” David had counseled me, “notice what two buildings stand out for the skyline is a map of the city’s values.” So, as we stood at San Miniato, the red rooftops of the city’s buildings shimmering below us in the low-lying sun, we had no trouble seeing what two buildings stood out: the Duomo and the Palazzo Vecchio (Town Hall). Both institutions, representing church and state, had a role to play in shaping the character and virtue of the citizens.
In Timeless Cities, David writes, “Florence is like a meticulous, penetrating painted self-portrait,” telling everyone who pays attention precisely what is most important in the city. Alberti cared about the city. He cared about the people. The architecture was vital because it helped shape people. But it also helped shape good government. Later, as we sat at a café on the edge of the hill overlooking Florence, the sun setting behind the mountains, my mind drifted to how architecture helps shape good government. I recalled something David had told me about the famous frescos in Siena. Right then, I knew where we had to go there next.
In Part 4, our journey takes us to Siena and the impact architecture and art have on civic life.
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