(piano playing)
Dr. Steven Zucker: We're on the first floor
of Orsanmichele, which is this extraordinarily
complicated and important building.
It's a grainary and it's odd to think
of a grainary right in the middle of town.
Dr. Beth Harris: Well, we don't often
think about granaries.
Granaries were a place to store grain.
Dr. Zucker: But this was incredibly important
because there were years when a town
might be under siege and you couldn't get to the fields,
or there might be bad harvests.
Dr. Harris: Right, so right here on the first floor
of Orsanmichele, there was a grain market
and it was open.
Dr. Zucker: And then upstairs there were
the storage areas and those are huge spaces.
Dr. Harris: So this was, at one point,
the church and then became a grainary
and there was an image of the Madonna
that was located here that was believed to have
miraculous powers and at some point it burned
and then another image of the Virgin was created
Dr. Zucker: Was endued with the same powers
and I think we're up to the third version.
This was by Bernardo Daddi, but it's surrounded
by this extraordinary alter,
which was by [Orcania], who we generally
think of as a painter.
Dr. Harris: It's an amazing tabernacle
housing this miraculous image of the Virgin,
so we have to imagine that this space was once open.
Dr. Zucker: Okay, so the walls that are there now
we're not there originally.
This was really a part of the city.
The city, in a sense, flowed through it.
I think it's important to think about this place
as an intersection of the spiritual,
it was a church, and of the sort of everyday
business of the city, that is it was a grainary.
In even it's location, it's midway between
the great cathedral the Duomo and
of the town hall, the Signoria.
Dr. Harris: It's here that the first Renaissance
sculptures were created for the niches
on the outside of this building.
It's in this context that the first, really,
humanist Renaissance sculptures are born.
Dr. Zucker: Let's go upstairs
because sculptures that used to be in the niches
are now all protected upstairs in the area
that used to hold the grain.
Dr. Harris: We just climbed up a long flight of stairs
and we entered a large open space,
filled with the sculptures, the monumental figures,
that stood on the outside of Orsanmichele
in the niches.
Dr. Zucker: So, now if you go outside,
you see casts of the originals, which are here
because it's safer from the elements.
Dr. Harris: To protect them.
Dr. Zucker: Yeah.
Dr. Harris: In the very early 15th century
the guilds of Florence each were responsible
for completing a figure for a niche
on the outside of Orsanmichele
and the guilds each commissioned a sculptor
of their choice and we're sitting in front
of Donatello's Saint Mark, which was commissioned
by the Linen Drapers Guild.
Donatello gives us this classical figure.
Dr. Zucker: So, what is classical about it?
I mean, the first things your eyes see,
of course, is this incredible contrapposto
that comes through even under that heavy cloth.
I mean, look at the way, for instance,
that his right engaged leg, the drape falls down
to almost as if that's the fluting of the column.
Dr. Harris: And we can see his left knee
pressing through the drapery, so Donatello
is really reviving contrapposto,
which hasn't been seen in western art
in a thousand years.
Dr. Zucker: But it's so beautifully handled.
You have the sense of the absolute stability
of this figure and yet the sense of his movement.
Dr. Harris: The thing that's most impressive
is the psychological intensity of this figure,
which is really overwhelming.
There's a sense, almost as though,
along with the contrapposto, he's going to move
and he's going to speak.
There's a real sense of the dignity of Mark here
and I think by extension, that sense that one has
in the Florentine Renaissance of the dignity of man,
of human beings.
Dr. Zucker: There's a kind of intensity.
There's a kind of focus.
There's a kind of deep human sense of understanding
in that face, in the just little bit
of the furrow of the brow that you can see
and the way that the head is cocked slightly
and it's off-center in terms of the shoulders,
turning back around and there's an interior
awareness, a kind of interior intelligence
that comes through so starkly.
Dr. Harris: At the same time, without a halo.
Dr. Zucker: Yeah.
Dr. Harris: I have no doubt that this is
someone who sees something that ordinary human beings
don't see, when you look at his eyes,
he is, in a way, seeing past us.
Dr. Zucker: So, isn't that the core
of the story of the Florentine experience
in the 15th century?
You have this intensely devout culture
and yet at the same time, you have a culture
that is beginning to really celebrate human experience,
the individual and the idea of the rational.
(piano playing)