Museo dell'Opera del Duomo

The Museo dell'Opera del Duomo traces its origins to the Opera del Duomo, the works committee established in 1296 to oversee construction of Florence's cathedral complex, and it holds the largest collection of Florentine sculpture in the world, most of it removed over the centuries from the cathedral, campanile, and baptistery facades for preservation. The museum's current building, expanded and reopened in 2015, includes a full-scale reconstruction of the cathedral's lost medieval facade, reassembled with surviving original statues in their historical positions. Centerpiece works include Lorenzo Ghiberti's original gilded bronze panels from the Baptistery's Gates of Paradise, moved indoors after decades of restoration to protect them from pollution and weather, along with Donatello's wooden Mary Magdalene and his cantoria (singers' gallery), Michelangelo's late Florentine Pietà, and Andrea Pisano's earlier Baptistery doors. A dedicated hall displays Brunelleschi's construction models and tools used to build the cathedral's dome between 1420 and 1436, documenting the engineering solutions behind the largest masonry dome ever constructed at the time. The museum's chronological and thematic layout moves from the medieval facade reconstruction through the campanile reliefs to the dome-building technology and later sculptural additions, giving a continuous narrative of the cathedral complex's roughly six centuries of construction and decoration. Restoration of the Ghiberti panels, completed in the 2000s, allowed for their permanent indoor display in climate-controlled conditions.