San Giovanni, Baptistery, Florence, Italy
| General Attributes |
DOI| 10.34946/D6WW2K | |
| Project Name | San Giovanni, Baptistery, Florence |
| Country | Italy |
| Status | Restricted |
| Citation |
| George Bent, Dave Pfaff, Florence As It Was 2026: San Giovanni, Baptistery, Florence - LiDAR - Terrestrial. Distributed by Open Heritage 3D. https://doi.org/10.34946/D6WW2K |
| Data Type |
Size |
Device Name |
Device Type |
| LiDAR - Terrestrial | Not available | Not available | Not available |
| Background |
| Site Description | Believed during the Renaissance to have been constructed around the time of the birth of Christ, the initiation of the Baptistery’s design and construction is now fixed to the year 1059. The green and white marble exterior is original to the building and, along with the marble used to ornament the façade of S. Miniato to the south of the city, has become synonymous with Florentine architectural materials of the Middle Ages. Its octagonal parameters create a central plan within, with three portals leading to the south, east, and north quadrants of the city. These portals bear bronze relief panels that mark important moments of artistic prowess: Andrea Pisano’s narratives of John the Baptist from the 1330s face the orphanage of the Bigallo and the city center beyond. Lorenzo Ghiberti’s quatrefoil scenes of Christ’s life, originally installed on the east portal to face the cathedral, were designed, cast, and chased between 1403 and 1424. They were moved to the north portal in 1452 to make room for Ghiberti’s later panels dedicated to Old Testament scenes, known by tradition as the Gates of Paradise (a title attributed to Michelangelo). The interior contains the large bronze sepulcher of Baldassare Cossa, the anti-pope known as John XXIII, produced by Donatello and installed on the northwest wall sometime around 1428-1430. The mosaics in the ceiling overhead provide the largest and most detailed narrative sequence in any of the city’s Medieval buildings, and recount scenes from Genesis and stories from the lives of Jacob, Joseph, Jesus, and John the Baptist – ending in a prominent representation of the Last Judgment that Dante may have seen (and borrowed) before his exile from Florence in 1301.
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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 |
| External Project Link | View exhibit |
| Additional Information | Learn more |
| Collection Date | 2018-08-01 to 2025-02-26 |
| Publication Date | 2026-03-19 |
| License Type | CC BY-NC-ND |
| 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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