Florence As It Was

Professor Bent, Department of Art and Art History, Washington and Lee University

Florence As It Was presents point clouds of cultural heritage sites and photogrammetry models of the artworks inside, transcriptions of selected documents pertaining to their creation, annotations that explain their importance to Medieval audiences, translations of early modern descriptions of those sites through the eyes of Italian and German specialists, and a geo-referenced database of nearly 2000 images pinned to their original locations on the Buonsignori Map of 1584. In collaboration with the proprietors of two dozen historic institutions in Florence, this project begins the process of returning to their original locations some of the images that formed the backbone of the visual vocabulary of Medieval residents during the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries.

Video

Further Reading

Florence As It Was (digital project)

Bent, George. Public Painting and Visual Culture in Early Republican Florence. Cambridge University Press, 2016. 

Brucker, Gene. Florence: The Golden Age, 1138-1737. University of California, 1998. 

Tuchman, Barbara. A Distant Mirror. Alfred A. Knopf, Inc., 1978.

Discussion Questions

  • How do the architectural designs of the late thirteenth-century mendicant churches of S. Maria Novella and S. Croce compare? 
  • How did monks and lay worshippers experience spaces and images in the eleventh-century church of S. Miniato? 
  • Why is Brunelleschi's dome innovative for its time?

Cite

Bent, George. "Florence As It Was", Middle Ages for Educators, October 9, 2024. Accessed [date]. https://middleagesforeducators.princeton.edu/florence-it-was