Parma Baptistery
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Transcript
The Baptistery was begun in 1196 under Benedetto Antelami and completed over the following century.
Its octagonal pink Verona marble exterior is one of Italy's great examples of the transition between Romanesque and Gothic art.
That phrase 'transition' should not imply artists woke up one morning and changed styles.
Construction lasted long enough for techniques, tastes and workshops to evolve.
Antelami's sculpture includes biblical scenes, months, seasons, zodiac imagery and fantastical creatures.
The programme connects Christian salvation with time, labour and the created world.
A baptistery is also institutional architecture. Baptism marked entry into the Christian community, giving the building social importance beyond aesthetic admiration.
Look at the regular geometry. Octagonal baptisteries draw on long architectural traditions in which eight could symbolise renewal beyond the seven-day week.
The exterior is almost diagrammatic compared with the turbulent illusion of Correggio's later cathedral dome.
Parma therefore gives you two very different ways of making theology visual within one square.
Our next stop is the Monastery of San Giovanni Evangelista, another Correggio site. There his dome experiments become part of a broader cluster that made Parma disproportionately important to sixteenth-century painting.