In Florence

Between​ 1240 and 1300, the population of Florence doubled, reaching almost a hundred thousand. There were more mouths to feed than ever before, but the Tuscan soil was poor, so from the 1270s the communal government began to import grain from southern Italy and set up a market in the centre of Florence in which to sell it. The market stood on the site of the vegetable garden (or orto) of an eighth-century monastery dedicated to St Michael, so it was nicknamed Or-san-michele. In the centuries since, it has been transformed from market to church to museum. Its latest incarnation, the newly restored Museo Orsanmichele, considers the artistic and architectural innovations of each successive occupant of the site.

In the 1280s, a loggia for the market was built by the architect Arnolfo di Cambio. Soon after its construction, Orsanmichele became the only place where grain could be sold in the city. Sellers needed a licence, and their wheat, flour and legumes were weighed and inspected by officials known as the sei della biada (the ‘fodder six’) before trading began each morning. The different grains were ranked according to quality, on a sliding scale from bello to bellissimo, and displayed in huge vats. Buyers, too, were subject to rules: the amount they could purchase each day was limited to prevent stockpiling. Most people bought grain rather than bread, taking the ingredients to the baker to be cooked. The average citizen consumed about a staio of grain a month (around 17.5 kg).

In her book Orsanmichele: A Medieval Grain Market and Confraternity (Brill, £150), Marie D’Aguanno Ito compares the market to Wall Street. It had many features of the pre-electronic exchange model, with its standardised measures and pricing, set hours and regulatory oversight, and the beginning and end of trading each day was even marked by the ringing of a bell. But the New York Stock Exchange doesn’t have an image of the Virgin Mary painted on the wall. The painting in Orsanmichele appeared overnight, out of nowhere, on one of the loggia’s piers shortly after construction finished in 1290. The Madonna had long been associated with grain and wheat: a mid-13th-century Marian treatise suggested that just as ‘a grain was shut in the granary, so Christ was a grain of wheat enclosed in the virginal womb’. Images proliferated of the ‘Madonna del Grano’, in which the Virgin is depicted in a dress adorned with wheat sheaves, like a hula skirt.

The interior of the Church of Orsanmichele.

The painted Virgin watched over daily trading at Orsanmichele and soon started performing miracles. The 14th-century banker and chronicler Giovanni Villani describes her ‘curing the sick, straightening the lame and clearing away madnesses, visibly [and] in great quantity’. In 1291, a laud-singing confraternity formed in her honour. It was the only confraternity in Florence not affiliated with a specific church and it attracted both men and women. The laudesi built an oratory around the image to protect it, covering it with a cloth during trading hours, and sold candles and wax votive offerings from a small shop next to the market with which shoppers supplicated the Virgin to intercede for a successful harvest.

In 1304, a fire broke out in Orsanmichele – possibly an arson attack, given the intense infighting between government factions at the time. The image of the Virgin went up in flames, fuelled by the wax offerings and flour dust that surrounded her, and Arnolfo di Cambio’s loggia was all but destroyed. This didn’t curb devotions at the site, however, and a placeholder painting was quickly installed until the confraternity could rebuild the market and commission a suitably magnificent reincarnation of the Orsanmichele Madonna. This time, a ‘grain palace’ was built, consisting of a vaulted market loggia on the ground floor, a granary on the first floor, and offices and living quarters for the sei della biada on the top floor. Bernardo Daddi, Giotto’s most famous pupil, painted a 2.5-metre Madonna delle Grazie to occupy the market’s south-eastern bay. In this version, the Virgin is enthroned and surrounded by angels. On her lap sits the infant Christ, caressing her face with one hand and squeezing a goldfinch a little too tightly in the other. Daddi finished the work at the beginning of 1348, just as the Black Death descended on Florence. Some thirty thousand candles were left at the Virgin’s feet each week as the plague spread; almost half the city’s population died within a few months. Periods of famine both before and after the Black Death caused such panic and violence that the government stationed soldiers outside the market and distributed vouchers for grain and bread.

The Orsanmichele laudesi, though, continued to thrive, not only thanks to oblation sales and membership dues but also because many of the plague’s victims left their entire estates to the confraternity. By 1352, it could afford to commission an elaborate tabernacle in which to house the Madonna delle Grazie. The sculptor Andrea di Cione, better known as Orcagna, spent almost a decade overseeing the construction of the Gothic shrine, a marble canopy heaving with lapis lazuli inlay and Marian imagery. It was so massive that the pinnacle atop its central dome grazed the keystone of the building’s vault. The awestruck chronicler Marchionne Stefani wrote that ‘whosoever viewed it, never in the world up until that day would have seen such an embellished object of that size.’ A desire to maintain the mystique, as well as the security, of the Virgin led to a remarkable feat of engineering: during the week, a pulley system lifted bronze grilles from a structure concealed in the base of the tabernacle to enclose Daddi’s central panel, and on Sundays and special occasions the grilles were lowered again to dramatic effect. To operate the pulleys, a member of the confraternity would enter the tabernacle through a small door, and climb a narrow spiral staircase, emerging high up between the pediment and the dome, where the mechanism was hidden.

In 1365, the Madonna delle Grazie was named the Special Protectress of the Republic, a title apparently invented for it. Orsanmichele had become the civic and spiritual centre of Florence – and everyone wanted a piece. The art and trade guilds felt that the institution suitably embodied their ideals of egalitarian corporatism; in the 1320s the wool guild approached the confraternity to offer sponsorship of an image of St Stephen in the market loggia. By the end of the 14th century, twenty of Florence’s 21 guilds had secured places for depictions of their patron saints inside Orsanmichele. More important, the laudesi agreed to allow each of the major and middle guilds – an increasingly oligarchic group, many of whose members were also key players in the city government – to commission a statue of its patron saint for the façade of the grain palace.

These larger-than-life statues are Orsanmichele’s greatest claim to fame. Made between the very end of the 14th century and the early 1600s, they encapsulate the evolution of Italian Renaissance sculpture, from Brunelleschi’s marble Peter for the butchers’ guild to Giambologna’s bronze Luke for the judges and notaries. The earliest of them are widely considered to be the first free-standing sculptures since those of the Ancient Greeks, and the delicate, perspectively rigorous rilievo stiacciato (‘flattened relief’) that Donatello developed to decorate some of their niches was key to the development of modern bas-relief sculpture. Perhaps it was the competition between guilds that spurred on these innovations. With each new commission we see the poses becoming more dynamic and the facial expressions more human.

Ghiberti’s St John, Andrea del Verrocchio’s St Thomas and Giambologna’s St Luke.

Orsanmichele officially became a church at the start of the 15th century. Although efforts had always been made to keep the clamour and coarseness of trading as far away from the Virgin as possible, almost as soon as Orcagna’s grand tabernacle was finished the government declared that sharing the loggia with the grain market would ‘diminish and obscure the fame and beauty’ of the sacred image. Plans to move the market out of Orsanmichele were expedited when it became clear that the weight of the grain stored in the first-floor granary was damaging the structure below, though it was not until the 1600s that a new purpose-built market was opened nearby. The massive open archways of the loggia were filled in with limestone tracery and stained-glass lancet windows, and the interior walls and vaults were frescoed with biblical stories, while the two upper floors became the confraternity’s headquarters. But Orsanmichele couldn’t entirely erase its origins. Not only was it an unconventional shape for a church, with two naves and an off-centre altar, but burrowed into its frescoed piers were the chutes that had been used to deliver sacks of grain from the granary, and the symbol of the staio was carved above one of the doors.

For the next five hundred years, Orsanmichele bore witness to Florence’s shift from self-governing state to Grand Duchy to key city (and, briefly, capital) of the Italian Republic. It was at the heart of Florence’s civic and cultural life; its upper floors served as the archive of contracts and testaments under Cosimo I de’ Medici in the 16th century, and in the 20th century it was the site of public readings of the Divine Comedy. In 1996, it became a museum. After a period of restoration and structural stabilisation that began in 2021, it reopened last year and can now be visited six days a week, like most museums in Florence. The ground floor is still a consecrated church, managed jointly by the Florentine curia and the art and architecture soprintendenza (a regional arm of the Italian Ministry of Culture). They are responsible for balancing Orsanmichele’s interests as a site of worship and education, and much of the recent campaign of works, including the restoration of some of the damaged pier and vault frescoes, addresses the needs of both.

The installation of fortified glass panels in the church’s entryways has allowed the old wooden doors to be kept open all day, as they would have been in the 15th century. The daylight activates the colours of the stained glass and plays off the inlaid lapis and gold of Orcagna’s tabernacle. The two storeys above the church are occupied by the museum proper. The first floor, a vast open space which recalls its origins as a granary, houses the guild sculptures made for Orsanmichele’s façade. These statues were moved indoors one by one from the mid-19th century, starting with Donatello’s St George after his nose was damaged by a ‘malicious urchin’ throwing stones. By the 1980s they had all been removed, mainly due to concerns about the effects of pollution and bad weather. The niches on the façade are filled with replicas in ‘artificial marble’, a mixture of stone dust and resin poured into a mould. These have been met with resistance by some, including the scholar Diane Zervas, who feared that the ‘clones’ would turn it into ‘a Disneyland-like attraction to serve the increasingly shallow needs of mass tourism’. But the decision to make and display these copies is preferable to the alternatives: allowing the original Renaissance masterpieces to slowly deteriorate outside, or leaving the exterior of Orsanmichele pocked with empty niches.

Only thirteen of the fourteen façade sculptures can be found in the Museo Orsanmichele. Donatello’s St George was not returned to the building after his nose was repaired, but displayed in the nearby Bargello sculpture museum. There have been calls for him to be reunited with his peers, but the organisation that runs both museums seems to have little appetite for the upheaval. The priority of the recent campaign was conservation and cleaning: some of the sculptures hadn’t been properly examined for almost a century. New laser technology has been used to remove, at last, the brown staining inside the cloak folds and hair curls of the marble statues, which were painted with a dark substance in the 18th century out of a misguided desire to make them match their bronze counterparts. One of the bronze statues, Ghiberti’s St Matthew, has also been greatly improved by careful cleaning. The inlaid whites of his eyes are now visible, as are the letters in the open book he holds.

The arrangement of the sculptures has been criticised since the museum first opened. They were originally positioned on a series of low platforms that spread out across the massive hall. While this meant you could look at them more closely than would have been possible when they were high up on the façade, it was far from the sculptures’ original context, and made them look strangely vulnerable: unmoored from their tabernacles, the concavity of the half-cast figures and the roughness of the unfinished marble backs was exposed. In the new installation, the sculptures are arranged in a rectangle around the room in a reflection of their respective positions around the façade, and they stand on 1.4-metre plinths. This is much closer to their intended position in relation to the viewer, although originally they were installed more than two metres off the ground, and it feels like a missed opportunity not to have raised them to the height for which they were designed. Backboards have also been inserted behind the plinths, simulating the enclosing effect of the niches in which the sculptures once stood.

The curators have found a stylish solution for the presentation of the sculptures, gesturing towards their original context without attempting to reconstruct it. But on the whole Orsanmichele has struggled to integrate the role of museum into its identity and structure. It is both monument and container, expected to house its own exterior artworks while the interior is itself an artefact. On the top floor, empty save for a group of sandstone figurines (also saved from the exterior), it is the view that draws our attention: ten windows frame a complete panorama of Florence.