Florence Baptistery
Religious building in Florence, ItalyWikipedia
3
MENTIONS
3
EPISODES
3
PODCASTS
Search complete. 3 mentions across 3 episodes found for "Florence Baptistery".
Oct 15, 2026
Michelle JohnstonHOST
"The masses rush in where the selective tourist has fled." Dot, dot, dot.
Michelle JohnstonHOST
Florence is scraping the bottom of the tourist barrel, and the stolid presence of these masses with their polyglot guides in the Uffizi, in the Pitti, around the Baptistery doors, in the Medici tombs, in the cell of Savonarola, and the courtyard of Palazzo Vecchio is another of the disagreeables, as the Victorians used to call them, that have made Florence intolerable and more than that, inexplicable to the kind of person for whom it was formerly a passion.
Michelle JohnstonHOST
"How can you stand it?" She asked once again.
Michelle JohnstonHOST
[laughs] Anyway, I started reading this just wanting to think about Florence because I was having this conundrum in my head about visiting last year, which turned out, as I said, to be one of the great joys of my travel experiences in Italy.
speaker_0NARRATOR
Only this year, the architect and scholar Leon Battista Alberti has written a treatise on painting in Italian and dedicated it to Brunelleschi.
speaker_0NARRATOR
and in a tangle of narrow alleys between the old market the mercato vecchio and the great octagonal baptistery of san giovanni stands the public brothel of the florentine republic on your way you pass the baptistery itself its striped marble walls glowing in the last of the light Its north doors, a masterpiece of gilded bronze by Lorenzo Ghiberti, were installed only 12 years ago, after more than two decades of work.
speaker_0NARRATOR
Ghiberti is now labouring on a second pair, for the east side, with panels of such astonishing depth and beauty that Michelangelo, a century later, will supposedly call them fit to be the gates of paradise.
speaker_0NARRATOR
Florentines stop to admire them every day.
Gary MannersHOST
Tommaso di Cristo Forofini, known as Masolino, was born in 1383 in Panical in Valdelsa.
Gary MannersHOST
Giorgio Vasari, defined as one of the best renetatory, cleaners and engravers of bronze tiles used in artistic castings, and in the service of Lorenzo Ghiberti, a Florentine artist and the creator of the bronze doors of the Florence Baptistery, was in an excellent position to capture the history of contemporary artists in his lives of the most excellent painters, sculptors, and architects.
Gary MannersHOST
He recorded Masolino began painting in AD 1402, in Florence.
Gary MannersHOST
In circa AD 1423 at a mature age, he enrolled in the Corporation of Doctors and Speeches, which also included painters since they worked with chemical materials, the pigments used to produce colors.