The New Opera del Duomo Museum

The expansion ofthe Museo dell'Opera di Santa Maria del Fiore in 2013-15 was an opportunity to rethink the general role played by the Cathedral Foundation in promoting and preserving the monuments it oversees: the Baptistery of San Giovanni, the Cathedral or Duomo of Santa Maria del Fiore, and Giotto's Bell Tower. The decidedly narrative approach of the museum's new installation project suggested the need to 'narrate' the churches to which the works in the museum refer, and thus to consider the entire monumental complex of Piazza del Duomo an enormous museum, providing visitors with interpretative instruments that can offer insight into its main contents and stylistic elements. This comprehensive
two-volume guide is one of those instruments.
This approach should not be misunderstood, however. Churches are never museums, even if they welcome scholars and tourists who come to see the artwork they contain. Every church is a "house of God" (this is exactly what the term duomo means: domus, 'house', 'house ofGod'). Consequently, those who want to explain a church must above all convey its sacred character, as this normally proves to be the surest key to its artistic and historical interpretation. It is important to help visitors, attracted by a church's art and architecture, to connect their aesthetic experience with the broader context ofreligious practice or, in other words, with thespiritual beauty the artwork was designed to serve.
Calling Florence Cathedral and its related structures a grande museo ('immense museum') is a way to insist on the uniqueness of what these buildings invite us to experience: the fact that the appeal of art is tied to
the far more powerful attraction that the idea ofGod holds for the human spirit. Happy the visitor who comes on a Christian holy day, since it is the liturgy- with its chants and rites, and with the choreographic presence of the faithful of every age and from every walk oflife - that unites art and faith, offering itself as the main symbol of our 'Grande Museo'.

Mgr Timothy Verdon
Director ofthe Museo dell'Opera del Duomo, Florence