Ours is a culture built on speed: we Americans love our fast cars, fast internet, and fast food. We invented the airplane and with it turned what was once a weeks-long journey across the Atlantic into a jaunt of a few hours, we perfected the assembly line to produce in hours what was once crafted in months, and we elected a president whose proudest accomplishment was finishing his buildings “under budget and ahead of schedule.”
The most jaw-dropping fact, then, when an American first encounters Florence’s world famous Duomo is perhaps that it took a mind-blowing 140 years to complete. Many of Florence’s most famous citizens, including the poet Dante Alighieri and the artist Giotto, never lived to see their beloved city’s architectural centerpiece completed; dozens of lead architects dedicated their lives to an undertaking they knew would outlive them; and the Florence city council dedicated what today would amount to billions of dollars on a project that promised no economic benefit or financial return.
To add to the immense timespan taken to complete the church, any visitor can attest to the building’s amazing dimensions. Most Catholics have at least seen pictures of the Duomo’s famous dome, which to this day remains the world’s largest work of masonry, but many are unacquainted with the fresco that decorates the entirety of the dome’s interior, with paintings reaching up 376 feet into the air. The remarkable stained glass window and the statues adorning the façade also reach into sky, far too high for most visitors to ever look at in detail.
These facts considered, many modern minds have to wonder why so many thousands of craftsmen would begin projects knowing their eyes would never see the completed project, or why a Renaissance peasant artist, whose name has long been forgotten to history, would dedicate a major portion of his to create a statue that future pilgrims would not even be able to see from the ground.
The answer is quite simple, although it betrays our modern sensibilities: these craftsmen dedicated their work not to their own fame and fortune, but to the greater glory of God. Although they were aware that their individual artwork would not be held in renown, and that their names would be forgotten shortly after their deaths, they also knew that God saw their efforts to work for His glory and would reward them for it.
Working for God’s glory also compelled the Duomo’s architects to slow down their work, ensuring the Duomo would be completed to perfection. When the original plans for the cathedral were drawn up in 1296 it called for the now famous dome, the biggest dome built since antiquity’s Pantheon. The technology to build such a dome, however, had not been invented yet, and the Florentines had no legitimate way of completing their architectural plans. This fact did not stop them from beginning construction of their ideal cathedral, though. Knowing the eternal God, and not any mortal man, was the true recipient of the Duomo’s beauty, the building’s commissioners were willing to wait until the technology was available to make their church perfect.
In 1418, well over a century after the initial plans were drawn up, the polymath Filippo Brunelleschi developed a system to construct the massive dome that we can visit today, using a new system of bricklaying that revolutionized the dispersion of weight in the dome. Rather than settling for the limited technology of the day to appease contemporary benefactors, the Duomo’s constructors realized that God deserves only the best, and that as an eternal being, He can wait for perfection.
As Catholics today, we have a great deal to learn from the architects of the Florence Duomo and the other great cathedrals of the past. We must realize, as the artisans who toiled in anonymity to complete their art did, that the Church is not a social club or a welfare organization or a government lobbying firm. It is intended to strive for the glory of God, first and foremost, and the art these craftsmen made continues to glorify Him, even if it is missed by the pilgrims who pass through the Duomo’s doors. Glorifying God is not a pursuit that can be rushed through or put to the side. As Jesus commanded us, “Be perfect, just as your Father in heaven is perfect” (Mt 5:48). Sometimes, as with the cathedral’s dome, this perfection requires hundreds of years of effort to achieve, but this does not mean God desires anything less.
Featured image courtesy of Mariamichelle via Pixbay
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