Historic Centre of Florence

History

Work on the cathedral began in 1296 under Arnolfo di Cambio, but its dome was not resolved until Filippo Brunelleschi won the design competition in 1418. He had tested his structural ideas on a smaller scale at the Sagrestia Vecchia in San Lorenzo between 1421 and 1428, developing a herringbone brick pattern that allowed the dome to rise without a wooden supporting frame. The dome was finished in 1436, using an estimated four million bricks, and the precise engineering of the technique is still debated by specialists.

The Uffizi building was commissioned in 1560 by Cosimo I de’ Medici from Giorgio Vasari, the painter and architect who also wrote the Lives of the Artists, published in 1550 and long regarded as the foundational text of art history. The marble block that became Michelangelo’s David had been quarried for the cathedral works committee in 1464 and left unused for twenty-five years before Michelangelo, then twenty-six, was given the commission in 1501; the finished statue stood outside the Palazzo della Signoria until it was moved indoors for conservation in 1873. At Santa Croce, begun in 1294, Michelangelo was buried in 1570 in a tomb designed by Vasari. Galileo Galilei, denied burial in the main church after his condemnation by the Inquisition in 1633, was reinterred there with full honours in 1737, when several relics, including fingers and a tooth, were removed from his remains and are now kept at the Galileo Museum in Florence.