Florence Cathedral

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Florence Cathedral — Santa Maria del Fiore, the Duomo — is the cathedral church of Florence, begun in 1296 and consecrated in 1436, its nave roofed by the vast brick dome that Filippo Brunelleschi raised without external scaffolding. The dome remains the largest brick dome ever built, and for the better part of a century after its completion it was simply the largest enclosed space in the Christian world. The building belongs to architectural and civic history before it belongs to any esoteric one, and that order matters.

What draws the cathedral into the orbit of Western esotericism is less the fabric than the city around it. Fifteenth-century Florence, under Medici patronage, was where the Greek philosophical inheritance returned to Latin Europe at scale. Cosimo de’ Medici set the young Marsilio Ficino to translate the Corpus Hermeticum — the Greek texts attributed to Hermes Trismegistus — ahead of Plato himself, on the conviction that they preserved an ancient wisdom older than and consonant with Christian revelation. Ficino went on to render the whole of Plato and then the Enneads of Plotinus into Latin. The Platonic Academy that gathered around him, and the speculative theology of Giovanni Pico della Mirandola, took shape in this city, in the parishes and households spread beneath the new dome.

The cathedral is woven into that world in concrete ways. Its sacristy was the refuge into which Lorenzo de’ Medici fled during the Pazzi conspiracy of 1478, when his brother Giuliano was murdered at the high altar during Mass — an event that fixed the building at the centre of Florentine political memory. Inside the dome, the fresco of the Last Judgement begun by Giorgio Vasari and finished by Federico Zuccari carries an iconographic programme that scholars have read as informed by the Christianised Neoplatonism then current in the city; how far any deliberate Hermetic scheme governs it remains debated, and claims of hidden esoteric ciphers in the building tend to outrun the evidence.

Practitioners and devotees, then as now, came to Santa Maria del Fiore as a place of Catholic worship, not as a monument of occult philosophy. The link between the cathedral and the esoteric tradition is one of setting rather than doctrine: this was the church at the heart of the city where Hermes was read as a sage and Plato as a near-prophet, and where the idea later called the perennial philosophy took its early modern form. The dome that ordered the skyline ordered, in a sense, the world that thought beneath it.

→ In the library: The Corpus Hermeticum (Mead) — I. Poemandres

→ Related: Renaissance Neoplatonism · Neoplatonism · Hermes Trismegistus · St Paul S Cathedral · Notre Dame De Chartres