An architect and sculptor, Arnolfo Di Cambio was born in Colle Val D’Elsa and died in Florence. He was one of the greatest artists of the second part of the Duecento, a contemporary of Giovanni Pisano and he worked at the same time, in sculpture, as the young Giotto.

One assumes that his training took place through contact with the artistic environment of the Cistercians. Upon later entering the atelier of Nicola Pisano, he worked under this artist’s direction between 1265 and 1268 on Saint Dominic’s Tomb in San Domenico at Bologna and on the Pulpit of Siena Cathedral, and developed a notable interest in ancient sculpture which was helped on by a stay in Rome (and perhaps in the south of Italy) as well as by his being a visitor to the home of  D’Angiò: he is attributed with the statute in honour of Carlo D’Angiò, in Rome at the Musei Capitolini.

He was attached to models created by the ancients, classical sculpture, the Greeks and the Etruscans. Rigour combined with plastic and voluminous construction in the figure appears above all in the sculptures in Perugia at the National Gallery, which we assume to be the remains of the fountain commissioned by the Perugians from this “subtilissimus et ingeniosus magister” and created between 1277 and 1281 and, for those supporting the paternity of Arnolfo regarding this statue, he appears again in the bronzes of the Vatican in Saint Peter’s Cathedral around the year 1300, but is also not absent from the Monument to Cardinal De Braye in San Domenico at Orvieto (1282), a work which combines a closeness to classic art (the Virgin Enthroned is actually a readapted ancient statue) with the knowledge of French Gothic art that blossomed around Louis IX.

This opening was borne witness to by the works that Arnolfo later created in Rome: the Ciboria in San Paolo (1284) and in Santa Cecilia (1293), the Hannibal monument in San Giovanni in Laterano (circa 1290), in which the architectonic design disciplines the scultural element: the Crib of Santa Maria Maggiore (1285 – 1291), the complex structure of the Sacellum of San Bonifacio, which he was commissioned to work on around 1296 by Bonifacio VIII as his future funeral monument: once in the counter façade of Sain Peter’s, now dismantled (plastic remains in the Vatican Catacombs).

It was only in Florence however that this architectonic vocation of his, brought up to date on the basis of the  gotico rayonnant, was able to acquire a monumental dimension in other buildings partly attributed to him (see the Badia Fiorentina, Santa Croce, Palazzo Vecchio) but, especially, in the Cathedral of Santa Maria del Fiore, his work on which, started around 1296, already in 1300 was praised by the Council of the Centre of the city. It was quite likely that Arnolfo had in fact already drawn up a project for the Cathedral substantially very close to the one built (radial chapels, cupola), concentrating himself however on the façade, the first three registers of which he managed to create.  This is documented by a drawing made by Bernardino Poccetti (Museo dell’Opera del Duomo) in 1587 when the facade was destroyed, ornate with mosaics and sculptures, based on a Marian iconographical programme.

There are however a considerable number of statues still in existence: in Florence, in the Museo dell’Opera del Duomo e and in private collections (Nativity, Madonna Enthroned, Bonifacio VIII, Apostles and Deacons); as well as in Berlin at the Staatlichen Museen (Dormitio Virginis), and Cambridge (Massachusetts) in the Fogg Museum (Angel). They testify to the plastic rigour linked to Nicola Pisano, but is organised mainly by means of an architectonic drive. There is some claim (Romanini)  that as a painter he was responsible for the Storis of Isaac in the upper church of  San Francesco d’Assisi.

The exhibition located on the ground floor of the Museum of the Opera di Santa Maria del Fiore presents over a hundred works consisting of most of Arnolfo’s production in Florence, as well as that which it was possible to transport from other parts of Italy or from abroad.  There has never before been seen such a concentration of masterpieces by this great Tuscan artist. 

The exhibition is divided into the following sections:

• Getting to know Arnolfo
• The beginnings of Arnolfo
• Arnolfo and Santa Maria del Fiore
• Arnolfo and the years of the Cathedral
• The Florentine context after Arnolfo
• Investigating techniques and restoration