Orsanmichele, Florence, Italy
| General Attributes |
DOI| 10.34946/D6DW27 | |
| Project Name | Orsanmichele, Florence |
| Country | Italy |
| Status | Restricted |
| Citation |
| George Bent, Dave Pfaff, Florence As It Was 2026: Orsanmichele, Florence - LiDAR - Terrestrial. Distributed by Open Heritage 3D. https://doi.org/10.34946/D6DW27 |
| Data Type |
Size |
Device Name |
Device Type |
| LiDAR - Terrestrial | Not available | Not available | Not available |
| Background |
| Site Description | Used primarily as the city’s central grain repository, the 13th-century iteration of this site was as a simple loggia that doubled as a religious cult center thanks to the presence on one of its piers of a miracle-working painting called the Madonna of Orsanmichele. The loggia burned to the ground in 1304, taking with it the painting, but was quickly rebuilt to service the population’s need for grain. The city’s Guild of Silk Merchants (the Arte Por’ S. Maria) was granted permission to transform the structure into a church with the understanding the other twenty guilds of the city would contribute funds to decorate its interior. A replacement picture for the former Madonna was commissioned from Bernardo Daddi and installed in 1347. Orcagna’s enormous marble tabernacle was completed in 1359 to frame it, twenty years before infill walls were added between each of the piers to create a solid structure on the ground floor. Various guilds donated to the church panel paintings of their patron saints, which were hung of the piers surrounding the tabernacle. These were removed in 1409, when Niccolò di Pietro Gerini painted fresco versions of those same saints on the facings of those piers. Sculptures were added to niches designated to individual guilds periodically from 1399 to 1463, with additional effigies added in 1515 and 1601. Replicas currently occupy these niches, while the originals may be seen on the upper floor of Orsanmichele, in the Bargello Museum, and in the Ospedale degli Innocenti.
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| Project Description |
Florence As It Was has multiple aims within its broad goal of recreating selected structures in the city as they appeared in the year 1500. The pointclouds and photogrammetric models we build certainly serve their purposes as visual portals into the past, but the translations of early modern descriptions, transcriptions of contemporary documents, and the creation of a database of people, places, and things weaves these images into layers of information that help us interpret what we see. Intended as a study tool (as opposed to a substitution for the real thing), this project provides users with a combination of the type of original source materials that historians of art and architecture in particular typically use when crafting scholarly works. Its multi-variances routinely force us to make choices and adhere to a list of priorities as we go. We have progressed deliberately and with an eye toward posting the most original portions of our work first, and then filling in the gaps later on. We have concentrated much of our attention on the physically and politically challenging work of securing permissions, traveling to Florence, and then using state-of-the-art technology to scan the most important structures in the city before editing and modeling those scans so that they reflect accurately the dimensions and color patterns of those buildings.
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| UNESCO World Heritage Site | Historic Centre of Florence |
| Additional Information | Learn more |
| Collection Date | 2018-01-22 to 2024-02-26 |
| Publication Date | 2026-03-19 |
| License Type | Restricted |
| Model Information |
| Reuse Score | B - High-Quality Model without Georeferencing |
| Curator Notes | this dataset is restricted, to request access please consult the Florence as It Was Project
https://florenceasitwas.wlu.edu/
florenceasitwas@wlu.edu |
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