Bowl for baptismal water

Usage examples of baptistery.

Duomo, Baptistery, Leaning Tower and Campo-Santo silently repose like beautiful dead beings.

Facing the Duomo is the baptistery, which at first served as a church, a sort of octagonal temple surmounted by a cupola, built, doubtless, after the model of the Pantheon of Rome, and which, according to the testimony of a contemporary bishop, already in the eighth century projected upward the pompous rotundities of its imperial forms.

Cathedral and baptistery, of the Palazzo Pubblico, and the other chief buildings of the city.

Ghiberti for the baptistery gates, Filippo went to Rome, accompanied by Donato.

The exterior aspect of the Baptistery does not give one the idea of a building restored in the thirteenth, but rather in the fifteenth century.

The answer, it seems, lies in the Baptistery itself and what it meant to the Florentine people.

It was also in the Baptistery that the Florentines crowned poets and invested magistrates, blessed departing soldiers and honored those who returned from the wars.

The Baptistery was, in a sense, the official church of the Florentine Republic.

According to legend, the Baptistery was built on the site of a Roman temple to Mars, the god of war, and remnants of a Roman floor can still be seen through a grating, though whether this floor belonged to a temple is questionable.

Octagonal in form, clad in white and green marble, decorated with rounded arches and stately columns and pilasters, all crowned with a white marble roof that conceals the dome below, the Baptistery is an exquisite example of Tuscan Romanesque architecture.

In a few short centuries, the old legend of its Roman origins had become so intertwined with the various phases of building that they believed the Baptistery actually was a Roman temple to Mars that had been turned into a Christian church.

To the people of Florence, then, and to the men of the Calimala, the Baptistery was a direct connection to the republican ideals of ancient Rome.

The artists who entered the competition for the Baptistery doors may not have read Pliny, but they understood what this contest was all about.

His early style is more a new and personal approach to the Romanesque than a faithful resurrection of the Roman, and that inspiration was all around him in the Romanesque churches of Florence: the Baptistery, Santi Apostoli along the Arno, San Miniato al Monte high on a hill overlooking the city, to name a few that can still be seen today.

The fact that Brunelleschi may have shared the general Florentine belief that the Baptistery was a remodeled Roman temple only makes the case stronger: the seeds of his genius sprouted right before his eyes.