Michelangelo and the Renaissance in One Walk

Walk in and stand still for a moment. The David stands four meters and thirty-four centimeters tall. But that's not what hits you when you first see it. What hits you is the tension. Look at the shoulders, slightly tilted. The clenched jaw. The eyes, not looking straight ahead — looking slightly to the left, toward something that hasn't arrived yet. Michelangelo carved it between 1501 and 1504. He was twenty-six when he started. The marble block he used had been sitting in the cathedral's storage for twenty-five years. Two other sculptors had tried it and given up. The stone was flawed — …

Look up and don't move yet. That dome is one hundred and fifteen meters tall. It weighs thirty-seven thousand tons. It was finished in 1436. And when they started building the cathedral in 1296, nobody in the world knew how to build it. They left the hole at the top of the cathedral open for one hundred and forty years, waiting for someone to figure it out. Filippo Brunelleschi wasn't an architect. He was a goldsmith. He had lost the competition to design the Baptistery doors and left for Rome, angry, to study ancient ruins. He came back with the answer. He didn't use scaffolding from th…

Look at the doors on the east side, the ones facing the square. They're made of bronze. They have ten panels depicting scenes from the Old Testament. Lorenzo Ghiberti made them. He took twenty-seven years to finish them. He finished in 1452, and they were placed here immediately. They became the most famous doors in Florence overnight. Michelangelo looked at them and said something that has been repeated ever since: "They are so beautiful they deserve to be the Gates of Paradise." That's been their name ever since. But there's an earlier story almost nobody tells. In 1401, the city held…

Stand in the middle and turn slowly. This square was designed in 1419 by Brunelleschi. It's one of the first urban spaces in history designed using mathematical perspective. Look at the two long sides: the arches are identical, the proportions symmetrical. Before the Renaissance, cities grew without planning. Squares were the leftovers between buildings. Here, someone designed the square first, and built the buildings around it. At the center stands an equestrian statue of Ferdinand I. But the story almost no one tells is about the two granite columns at each end. They were given by Cosi…

Find the exact spot where the original David stood in 1504. The platform in front of the entrance to the Palazzo Vecchio. That's where they put it. It stood there for over three hundred years. Today there's a copy. The original is in the Accademia. But this was the site Michelangelo chose. And choosing this site was a political act. The committee deciding where to place the statue had thirty members. Among them, Leonardo da Vinci. Leonardo and Michelangelo despised each other. Leonardo was twenty-three years older. He was the most famous artist in Italy. And he treated Michelangelo with…

This building wasn't born for art. It was born for control. "Uffizi" means offices. Cosimo I had it built in 1560 to concentrate all the duchy's magistrates under a single roof. Total control, total visibility. But there's something Cosimo I never expected. Botticelli's Birth of Venus was kept in this building. He painted it in 1484, commissioned by Lorenzo de' Medici, to decorate a private villa. Venus emerges from the sea, naked, on a shell. The wind pushes her forward. A figure offers her a cloak. For the time, painting a nude woman who wasn't a religious figure was almost a scandal.…

This is Florence's oldest bridge. It was rebuilt in 1345 after a flood. At first it housed butcher shops. The smell of blood, leather, and waste all day long. In 1593, Grand Duke Ferdinando I sent the butchers away and brought in goldsmiths. The official reason was the smell. The real reason was the Vasari Corridor running above this bridge. The Medici didn't want to walk through that smell when crossing the city. But there's something else nobody tells you when you stop here. During World War II, the Nazis blew up every bridge in Florence to slow the Allied advance. This was the only o…

Walk into the basilica. On your left, just as you enter, there's a large tomb with a reclining figure. That's Michelangelo's tomb. He died in Rome in 1564, at eighty-eight years old. He was the most famous artist in Europe, and had been for most of his adult life. But he wanted to be buried in Florence. His nephews stole the body at night, wrapped it in leather as if it were merchandise, and smuggled it out of Rome in secret. It arrived here. Look at the three figures surrounding the sarcophagus. They were designed by Giorgio Vasari, who also wrote the first history of art in the world,…