Arnolfo di Cambio

Look around. The town hall is behind you, the cathedral five minutes away, Santa Croce ten. The three main buildings of medieval Florence began with the blueprints of a single man, and that man is almost entirely unknown. Arnolfo di Cambio was, as Judith Testa writes, a "prominent local architect"-and that is essentially all we can say about him as a person. No birth year, no portrait, no letters. Only the dates of his works remain. In 1294, the Florentines decided to rebuild their old cathedral of Santa Reparata into a new one-Santa Maria del Fiore, "Saint Mary of the Flower," because the lily is the city's emblem. Arnolfo drew up the plan, and construction began in 1296. In 1299, he started the town hall, the very one before you, finishing it in 1302. He is also credited with initiating Santa Croce, the largest Franciscan church in the world; one of its courtyards is still called Arnolfo's courtyard. And in 1310 he dies, and the construction of the cathedral grinds to a halt. Then happens what makes this card worth reading. Arnolfo's original design did not survive in its pure form in any of the three buildings. Throughout the 14th century, the cathedral was altered: subsequent architects expanded its plan and made major changes, and in 1367 an entirely audacious project was adopted-an octagonal dome of unprecedented size, without the external buttresses that supported all Gothic architecture north of the Alps. No one knew how to build that dome, and so by the early fifteenth century, the city was left with a forty-meter-high monolith with a gaping hole at the top. How it was covered is told on the cathedral card. In other words, Arnolfo set Florence's scale, and another man had to solve the problem he posed a hundred years later. In architectural history, this happens more often than one might think: the one who begins is almost never the one who finishes. In this city, that rule works literally-for the cathedral, the bell tower, San Lorenzo, and Santa Maria Novella. And one final little detail. It is not just the town hall that reminds Florence of Arnolfo: in Valdarno, in the small town of San Giovanni, stands the Palazzo d'Arnoльфо (Palazzo d'Arnolfo)-a building from the town's founding era. At the end of the thirteenth century, Florence was building not only its own center, but also new towns in the valley, erecting houses there modeled after its own.