Florentine Romanesque

The Florentine Romanesque style is the Romanesque architectural style that developed in Florence between the eleventh and thirteenth centuries, with extremely peculiar characteristics. The Florentine Romanesque style spread only in the countryside of the city, which in the XII extended into a restricted territorial area, in a period in which the economic and political power and cultural influence of Siena, Lucca and Pisa were still vital in Tuscany..

Characters
The specific characteristics of the Florentine Romanesque are generally referred to a survival or a recovery of elements of Roman classicism. This derivation also gave rise to the myth according to which the baptistery of San Giovanni, the building that symbolizes the architectural culture of the Romanesque in Florence, was the result of a reuse of a building of the imperial era.

The most evident element of this style is the partition of the facades characterized by the presence of round arches, resting on semi-columns, geometric panels, obtained from marble inlays, which divide the surface according to complex modularity and from windows or aedicules generally surmounted by eardrums.

Together with the two colors (white and green), apart from the geometric and orderly character, subjected to the architectural order, these elements recall the classicism also in reference to the marble inlays that covered numerous Roman architectures.

Even the bichromism of the architectural façades is only partly attributable to the influence of the Pisan Romanesque that from the Piazza del Duomo shipyards radiated from northern Tuscany from Lucca to Pistoia and Prato where the alternation of white and green bichromatic horizontal bands became particularly marked also due to the use of local materials (white and green alberese stone from Prato). In Florence, even this element was used with a very different imprint, characterized by a serene geometric harmony that recalls ancient works. The chromaticism was in fact used not in horizontal bands, but just to draw the panels of the facades.

Even the architectural details, such as the kiosks, the capitals, the frames and generally the elements of the architectural order, find references in the classical testimonies. Moreover, there are significant examples of reuse of elements of countlessness, as in the baptistery.

The Florentine Romanesque style did not produce many works and did not have the diffusion of the Pisan or Lombard Romanesque, but its influence was decisive for the subsequent developments of the architecture, as it formed the base upon which Francesco Talenti, Leon Battista Alberti, Filippo Brunelleschi and the other architects who created the architecture of the Renaissance.

The Church of the Holy Apostles is a clear example of this; in fact, for his spatiality, he announces, as Vasari noted, Renaissance themes. For this reason, in the case of the Florentine Romanesque, we can speak of “proto-renaissance”, but at the same time of extreme propagation of the late antique architectural tradition. Precisely from the pursuit of a “classic” ideal placed outside of time, the difficulties of dating the Baptistery arise, similarly to what occurs for other medieval monuments of Italian strong classical style, such as the church of Sant’Alessandro in Lucca or the Basilica of San Salvatore in Spoleto.

The baptistery
The sense of rhythm in the external volumes is evident in the Baptistery of San Giovanni, through the use of squares, classical pilasters, blind arches, etc. following a precise modular pattern that repeats on eight sides. The dating of the baptistery has long been discussed (Roman building turned into a basilica? Early Christian building? Romanesque building?), Also due to the scarcity of documentation. Following archaeological excavations carried out after 2000, it was found that the foundations are two meters above the level of the Roman pavement, so it can be deduced that the building was not older than the ninth century. The internal parament to polychrome marble, strongly inspired by the Pantheonof Rome, it was nevertheless concluded at the beginning of the XII century (the floor mosaics are dated 1209 and those of the scarsella 1218), while the first phase of the external covering must date back to about the same period.

The church of San Miniato al Monte
The Basilica of San Miniato al Monte (begun in 1013 and gradually completed until the 13th century) presents a planimetric pattern perhaps referable to the Lombard Romanesque (tribune) and a rationally ordered scan of the bichrome façade, which historians compare to the marble inlays of monumental buildings Romans. Even the overall layout of the façade explicitly recalls classical themes, both in the lower order characterized by five round arches supported by columns in green serpentine with Corinthian bases and capitals in white marble, and in the upper order that represents the tetrastyle pronaos of a classic temple.

Other churches
Having removed the major works, there are only a few other examples of the renewed Florentine style. Among them are the small church of San Salvatore al Vescovo in Florence, the collegiate church of Sant’Andrea in Empoli and the incomplete face of the façade of the Badia Fiesolana, together with a modest number of churches in the countryside, complete the picture.

Of the original church of San Salvatore al Vescovo, only the lower order of the façade with three blind arches on semi-columns remains. It represents the only testimony within the walls, in addition to the baptistery, of the two-tone external parapet with marble squares, typical of the Florentine Romanesque style.

The collegiate church of Empoli is characterized by a façade marked by a double order on classical pilaster strips and by an extremely geometrical decoration, always with the usual combination of white limestone and green serpentine.

Source from Wikipedia