The story
This is first of all a working cathedral, Santa Maria del Fiore, the mother church of Florence, and the thing that draws crowds is engineering as much as art: Filippo Brunelleschi's brick dome, raised between 1420 and 1436 without the usual wooden centring and still the largest masonry dome ever built.
For art-seekers the paintings sit mostly on the walls and the underside of that dome. Look up inside and you meet a vast Last Judgement, begun by Giorgio Vasari in the 1570s and finished after his death by Federico Zuccari, the join between their styles faintly visible.
Down at eye level are two frescoes made to stand in for costly bronze monuments to the city's hired captains. Paolo Uccello painted the English mercenary John Hawkwood on horseback in 1436, in shades of green, and 20 years later Andrea del Castagno painted a companion horseman for the condottiere Niccolò da Tolentino. Nearby hangs a picture the city commissioned in 1465 for the 200th anniversary of Dante's birth, Domenico di Michelino's Dante holding his poem, with Hell, the mountain of Purgatory and Florence itself laid out around him.
