Orsanmichele

Located about halfway between Santa Maria del Fiore and Palazzo della Signoria, Orsanmichele stands on what was perhaps once the site of a Roman temple to Isis. In the early 800s, a Cistercian oratory surrounded by a garden was constructed there and named Oratorio di San Michele in Orto, a title that evolved over the centuries into its current one, Orsanmichele. In 1249 the oratory was demolished to make room for a grain market because the previous one had been severely damaged in 1239 during street battles between Guelphs and Ghibellines.

In 1278, it was the scene of something even stranger, as Villani tells us:

“It came to pass that there was once presented to the commune a very fine and strong lion, which was held in a cage in the piazza of San Giovanni. Through lack of care on the part of the keeper, the said lion escaped from there and ran through the streets, frightening the whole city. It came to a stop at Orto San Michele, and there caught hold of a boy and held him between its paws. The mother, hearing what had happened to her only child, who was born after his father’s death, ran up to the lion in desperation, shrieking aloud and with disheveled hair, and snatched the child from between its paws. The lion hurt neither the woman nor to the child, but only sat still and stared at her”  (Nuova cronica 7.69). Lions were later kept by the Medici in cages behind Palazzo Vecchio, a fact that gave that street the name Via dei Leoni.

In 1284, Arnolfo di Cambio transformed this area into a Gothic loggia of stone and wood that provided better shelter for the storage and distribution of food rations. The next year, a cult image of the Madonna of Orsanmichele was positioned on a pilaster in the southwest corner of the building, and its miraculous powers began to manifest themselves immediately:

“In the said year, on the third day of July, great miracles began to take place freely in the city of Florence on account of a painting of the Virgin Mary on a pilaster of the loggia of Orto San Michele where they sell grain. It has healed the sick, straightened the crippled and visibly liberated many who have been possessed. [...] Out of respect for the image, lay people have been singing lauds. Word of the Madonna’s miracles and great power has spread throughout Tuscany and people come from all over, bringing with them so many waxen figures in thanks for the miracles they received that the whole area around and in front of the loggia is full of them” (Villani, Nuova cronica 8.155).

Above: ​BAV Chig. L.VIII.296, f. 152r. (ill. of this passage in Villani)

Even Guido Cavalcanti wrote a poem in which he discusses the painting’s spectacular fame. However, this area saw scenes of a rather different nature as well. In 1298, after the suppression of a Ghibelline uprising against the Guelph government, Uberto degli Uberti and Mangia degli Infangati were tortured and then decapitated here in the garden.

In 1304, three years after Dante was exiled, this entire area of Florence was leveled in a fire (allegedly caused by one of the Abati family) and the miraculous image was destroyed. The building was not reconstructed until 1337, more or less as you see it today. In the new design, the top floor was used as a granary and the ground floor as a marketplace.

Two of the columns are actually hollow and you can see the hole where they channeled grain easily down to the commercial area from above (see below). 

The Madonna and Child now inside was carried out by Bernardo Daddi in 1346-47 (above). Coeval documents tell us that the completion of the work coincided with the end of a famine and many felt that it could take the place of the lost painting, not only physically but also spiritually. The Black Death arrived the following year. In 1350, the administrative officers of Orsanmichele (including Giovanni Boccaccio) decided to send a symbolic payment to Dante’s daughter Antonia (who took the name Beatrice when she joined her convent in Ravenna) in recognition of his confiscated properties in Florence.

Each of the niches on the outside of the building belongs to the guild that paid for the statue adorning it. This fresh air gallery houses some of the most important examples of Early Renaissance sculpture.

Inspired by Boccaccio’s lectures on Dante in the Badia (1373-74), Prof. Guido Mazzoni of the Italian Dante Society inaugurated a long-running series of lectures on Dante (called Lecturae Dantis) in the large open space inside of Orsanmichele on April 12, 1899. The tone of that lecture was characteristic of the same enthusiasm about Italy’s united future that we see represented in Dante’s statue in Piazza Santa Croce. The room subsequently became known as the Sala di Dante (Dante Room) and has hosted innumerable events in the poet’s honor.