The Florence Baptistery, also known as the Baptistery of Saint John (Italian: Battistero di San Giovanni), is a religious building in Florence, Italy. Dedicated to the patron saint of the city, John the Baptist, it has been a focus of religious, civic, and artistic life since its completion. The octagonal baptistery stands in both the Piazza del Duomo and the Piazza San Giovanni, between Florence Cathedral and the Archbishop's Palace.
Florentine infants were originally baptized in large groups on Holy Saturday and Pentecost in a five-basin baptismal font located at the center of the building. Over the course of the 13th century, individual baptisms soon after birth became common, so less apparatus was necessary. Around 1370 a small font was commissioned, which is still in use today. The original font, disused, was dismantled in 1577 by Francesco I de' Medici to make room for grand-ducal celebrations, an act deplored by Florentines at the time.
The Baptistery serves as a focus for the city's most important religious celebrations, including the Festival of Saint John held on June 24, still a legal holiday in Florence. In the past the Baptistery housed the insignia of Florence and the towns it conquered and offered a venue to honor individual achievement like victory in festival horse races. Dante Alighieri was baptized there and hoped, in vain, that he would "return as poet and put on, at my baptismal font, the laurel crown." The city walls begun in 1285 may have been designed so that the baptistery would be at the exact center of Florence, like the temple at the center of the New Jerusalem prophesied by Ezekiel.
The architecture of the Baptistery takes inspiration from the Pantheon, an ancient Roman temple, as observers have noted for at least 700 years, and yet it is also a highly original artistic achievement. The scholar Walter Paatz observed that the total effect of the Baptistery has no parallels at all. This singularity has made the origins of the Baptistery a centuries-long enigma, with hypotheses that it was originally a Roman temple, an early Christian church built by Roman master masons, or (the current scholarly consensus) a work of 11th- or 12th-century "proto-Renaissance" architecture. To Filippo Brunelleschi, it was a near-perfect building that inspired his studies of perspective and his approach to architecture.
The Baptistery is also renowned for the works of art with which it is adorned, including its mosaics and its three sets of bronze doors with relief sculptures. Andrea Pisano led the creation of the south doors, while Lorenzo Ghiberti led the workshops that sculpted the north and east doors. Michelangelo said the east doors were so beautiful that "they might fittingly stand at the gates of Paradise." The building also contains the first Renaissance funerary monument, by Donatello and Michelozzo.
History
State of knowledge
Florentines once believed that the Baptistery was originally a Roman temple dedicated to Mars, or a remnant of the city's rebirth after the Ostrogoths' ravages. In the modern period skepticism mounted until these legends were abandoned in the nineteenth century, in part because excavations revealed that a very different structure, a large house, was present at the site in Roman times. A burial ground with rough-hewn stones from around the 7th century has also been discovered beneath a portion of the building.
No documents pertaining to the construction of the Baptistery have survived, and passing references to a church of Saint John the Baptist cannot establish its existence because the former Cathedral, now known only as Santa Reparata, was once also referred to as the church of Saint John the Baptist.
The overwhelming scholarly consensus today, based on its construction technique and architectural style, is that the origins of the Baptistery are to be found in the 11th or 12th century. Developing a more precise dating has been difficult because of two confounding indications in Ferdinando Leopoldo Del Migliore's Firenze città nobilissima (1684). According to one, Pope Nicholas II consecrated the Baptistery in 1059; according to the other, a baptismal font was brought into the Baptistery in 1128. Scholars have struggled to make sense of two apparent markers of completion almost 70 years apart, many supposing one must be mistaken in whole or in part.
In the 2020s archival research among the manuscripts of Del Migliore and a close associate revealed that neither claim is accurate: the Baptistery was not consecrated in 1059, and no baptismal font was introduced in 1128. This finding is not entirely surprising; historians started to notice errors in Firenze città nobilissima soon after it was published, and in the 20th century, a philologist even demonstrated that Del Migliore had falsified the existence of a medieval Florentine named Salvino degli Armati.
Determining a date for the Baptistery, therefore, depends entirely on relating the evidence inherent in the building itself to the broader context. In the 1930s, Walter Horn's study of Florentine masonry technique (refinement of stone cutting, mortar application, course patterning) showed that the sandstone construction of the lower levels of the Baptistery was close to that of the church of Santi Apostoli and of the later portions of San Pier Scheraggio, documents about both of which support a dating in the 1060s or 1070s. It is not as refined as the later parts of San Miniato al Monte, datable to 1077-1115.
Historic collaboration hypothesis
A hypothesis published in 2024 proposes that the Baptistery originated in the early 1070s from a collaboration between Beatrice of Lorraine and her daughter Matilda of Tuscany, the rulers of the March of Tuscany, and one of the popes with whom they were closely aligned, Pope Alexander II († 1073) or more likely Pope Gregory VII (on the papal throne 1073–1085). Although small, Florence was an important administrative and religious center, and these powerful figures would have been willing and able to sponsor a building as ambitious and costly as the Baptistery, which would otherwise seem out of reach for the city. Ranieri († 12 July 1113), the bishop of Florence appointed in 1072 or 1073 whose tomb has a place of honor inside the building, would have overseen the construction. The hypothesis dovetails with the masonry evidence and radiocarbon dating of charcoal excavated nearby that suggests a major building project took place at this time.
An origin in this period would fit well with the historical context. In the 1060s, reformist Vallombrosian monks accused bishop Pietro Mezzabarba of Florence of simony, specifically of having obtained his office through a corrupt offering of money made by his father. Their accusations gained traction among Florentines, to the point that, according to a contemporary witness, the Benedictine monk Peter Damian, they no longer accepted the chrism Mezzabarba consecrated for the baptism of their children, and sought baptism elsewhere. This situation seems to have persisted for three years until 1068, when a Vallombrosian brother underwent a trial by fire in front of the Badia a Settimo to prove the righteousness of the monks' accusations. His survival made the bishop's position untenable, and Mezzabarba left Florence that summer. A monumental new baptistery would likely have been seen as a way to restore the authority of the Florentine bishop and help ensure that he oversaw the communal baptism of Florentine infants on Holy Saturday, as canon law required.
The references the Baptistery makes to the Pantheon support the hypothesis of the involvement of a pope. In the eleventh century, the Pantheon, converted to a church in 609, was officiated only on the most important holidays, and only for masses celebrated by the pope himself. Moreover, papal interest in the Roman empire was high. Pope Alexander II sponsored the construction of Sant'Alessandro Maggiore in Lucca, with ancient capitals and imitative medieval counterparts, and very likely a classicizing facade. Pope Gregory VII's 1073 consecration of Santa Maria in Portico in Rome is commemorated on its Roman ara, a pagan altar, inscribed and repurposed for Christian use (now in Santa Galla, Rome). Church poetry compared Pope Gregory to Julius Caesar, and in a letter Gregory himself stated that the reach of the Church now exceeded that of the Roman Empire. The Church at this time also believed in the Donation of Constantine, according to which the pope inherited the temporal authority of the Roman emperor, justifying his equality with or supremacy over the Holy Roman Emperor in Germany. If interest in antiquity had arisen in Florence organically, one would expect more Florentine Romanesque churches to cite ancient buildings. Instead, parts of the Baptistery completed only a generation or two later, such as the interior gallery level, show a typically medieval delight in geometric and figurative ornament, foreign to the severe interior of the Pantheon.
The architect
Stylistic similarities suggest that a single architect may have designed the Baptistery, Santi Apostoli, and San Miniato al Monte. The affinity of the plan of San Miniato (portion begun 1077) with that of the demolished church of Santa Maria in Portico (consecrated by Pope Gregory VII in 1073) could indicate the hand of the same architect, strengthening the case that the architect of the Baptistery came from the papal entourage in Rome. The presence on the Baptistery of a motif including a round-arched window flanked by windows with triangular tympani, also seen on the facade of the Basilica of San Salvatore, Spoleto, could possibly indicate that the architect had been to Umbria.
Octagonal design
The Baptistery is octagonal in plan, but finds directionality and a place for its altar thanks to the rectilinear scarsella on its western side.
The octagon was a common shape for baptisteries since early Christian times. Other early examples are the fourth-century Battistero Paleocristiano excavated beneath Milan Cathedral and the fifth-century Lateran Baptistery. The eight-sidedness of these structures was significant. As Timothy Verdon writes, "while man's earthly life unfolds in units of finite time like the week with its seven days, in Baptism believers pass over into eternal life, beyond measurable time. They enter into the 'eighth day'."
Although the plan of the Pantheon is circular, it can be divided into eight slices, and thus lends itself to reuse in an octagonal building.
Construction and pre-existences
According to the most recent research, the baptistery may have been in use by the late 1080s, but construction would continue well into the 12th century.
Giovanni Villani records that the lantern atop the dome was completed in 1150. It is the first known example of this element in the history of architecture.
Excavations show that the building originally had a semicircular apse. Giuseppe Richa recorded that the present scarsella was begun in 1202, but his stated archival source cannot be verified. The installation of the lantern in 1150 presupposes a broad dome, which likely would not have survived the removal of a semicircular apse from beneath it since "the chancel [scarsella] is indispensable for the stability of the whole dome, which would not remain standing if the chancel were not to exist". Thus the scarsella may actually date shortly before 1150.
Thick walls beneath the floor of the Baptistery form an inner octagon whose size is approximated by the innermost portion of the Baptistery pavement. The purpose of these walls is obscure, but scholars have suggested that they were part of a smaller baptistery that preceded the current one, that they enclosed a full-immersion basin, or that they held up a ring of columns like in the Lateran Baptistery or Santo Sepolcro, Pisa.
Florence undoubtedly had a baptistery before the present one, but whether it existed at the same location, or was placed somewhere else near the cathedral (the Milan baptistery was behind the cathedral), is a matter of ongoing debate and inquiry.
For much of its early history, the Baptistery stood among tombs. Even in the 19th century, the southern portal was flanked by sarcophagi. These reminders of earthly death underscored the message of eternal life offered by baptism.
Exterior
Design and adornment
The Baptistery has eight sides ornamented with classical architectural elements over marble incrustation marked by two-color geometric patterns. The rectilinear apse (scarsella) expands out of the west side. The other sides are each adorned with three blind arches, of equal size on the intercardinal faces, and with an expanded central arch on the faces that include a doorway. Within these arches are windows with monumental surrounds modeled after the aedicules inside the Pantheon. Several different marbles are used, principally white Carrara marble and a green-black serpentinite from Prato. The architecture of this church would serve as an important influence for Renaissance architects including Filippo Brunelleschi and Leone Battista Alberti.
The zebra-stripe corners are not part of the original design, but were added in 1293, as work on the new cathedral of Santa Maria del Fiore began. They covered blocks of sandstone, the stone used for the building structure. The porphyry columns on either side of the "Gates of Paradise" were plundered by the Pisans in Mallorca and given in gratitude to the Florentines in 1117 for protecting their city against Lucca while the Pisan fleet was conquering the island. As a painted cassone in the Bargello shows, they were originally freestanding in Piazza del Duomo. Badly damaged in a storm in 1424, they were placed in their current location a few years later.
The cassone also shows the medieval decorative scheme, in which a group of statues by Tino di Camaino surmounted each door. The surviving statues are now in the Museo dell'Opera del Duomo, with a Charity in the Museo Bardini possibly sharing the same provenance.
During the Renaissance, new sculptural groups were commissioned: above the east door, a Baptism of Christ begun by Andrea Sansovino in 1505 (Baptist), continued by Vincenzo Danti in 1568–1569 (Christ), and completed by Innocenzo Spinazzi in 1792 (angel); above the north door, a Baptist Preaching by Francesco Rustici (1506–1511), strongly influenced by Rustici's friend Leonardo da Vinci who depicted the subject himself; and above the south door, Vincenzo Danti's Beheading of the Baptist (1569–1570). Today, all three groups are in the Museo dell'Opera del Duomo. Only the Baptism of Christ has been replaced by a copy, the spaces above the other two doors now being empty.