Siena Cathedral floor - Uncovering 2024

From 27 June to 31 July and from 18 August to 16 October 2024 the Siena Cathedral discovers its magnificent marble floor, the result of five hundred years of artistic expression, a symbolic journey in search of the highest values ??of the human spirit.

Information:
Website: https://operaduomo.siena.it/
Email: booking@operalaboratori.com
Telephone: +39 0577 286300

The result of a complex iconographic program, it was created over the centuries, from the fourteenth century to the nineteenth century, inlay after inlay, whose preparatory cartoons were drawn by artists, almost all "Sienese", including Sassetta, Domenico di Bartolo, Matteo di Giovanni, Domenico Beccafumi, as well as the Umbrian painter Pinturicchio, author of the famous panel with the Mount of Wisdom, a depiction of the path to Virtue as the achievement of inner serenity. As Prof. observes Giovanni Minnucci, Rector of the Siena Metropolitan Opera, "the overall vision of the fifty-six inlays on the floor can represent a moment of personal and silent reflection, forgetting, at least momentarily, our frantic rushes and our daily worries, in the fruitful search for the meaning that each of us intends to give to our lives". The precious carpet of polychrome marble is in fact extraordinary, unique, not only for the technique used, but also for the message of the figurations, a constant invitation to wisdom, starting from the naves with the protagonists of the ancient world, disheveled sibyls and authoritative philosophers, up to the biblical subjects under the dome, in the presbytery and in the transept.

On the occasion of the unveiling, visitors will also have the opportunity to "walk" around the choir and the apse where the wooden inlays of Fra Giovanni da Verona are preserved, carried out with a technique similar to that of the marble clerk, with wood of different colors , depicting urban views, landscapes and still lifes, cabinets showing internal shelves with liturgical objects rendered with perspective skill. The complete OpaSiPass itinerary allows, in addition to the visit of the Cathedral Floor, a visit to the Opera Museum where you can admire, in the Hall of Statues, the mosaics with the symbols of the cities allied to Siena and the original inlays by Antonio Federighi with the Seven Ages of Man. In the Sala dei Cartoni, whose entrance flanks the magnificent Maestà by Duccio, the famous floor plan of the Cathedral outlined by Giovanni Paciarelli in 1884 is visible, which allows you to have an overall picture of the inlays and of the path that, from the entrance , leads up to the main altar. The plan is due to the collaboration of the Rector, Ferdinando Rubini with Paolo Lombardi who photographed the cartoons that reproduced the floor. In 1887 the reproduction in platinotype plates was exhibited by Lombardi, who had his studio in Costarella, at the first Photographic Exhibition in Florence.