Glimpsing the Duomo around corners...
... it crops up from the most unexpected angles... I'm approaching it sideways, tracking Bruneschelli's life of dome-building through Santa Croce, the little Rotunda in the rather grubby piazza named after him, San Lorenzo... finally some day I'll make it inside.

And I'm totally in love with Donatello. After the two of them together, with a little bit of Lucia della Robbia, what was left for the people who had anything to do with the public buildings of Florence to do? Why did they bother? Why waste your time, Michelangelo, with those stupid little games with swags and straight lines and arches, when these other people are concerned with space and light and quietness?

My brain is crowded with reflections on all these churches - the great empty spaces full of people looking at art and trying to nudge them pitifully towards something more than art. Santa Croce: the Franciscans versus the inevitable pressure to show off, the people who tried to have a council to bring the churches together and ended up stimulating secular humanism. San Lorenzo: the Medici who chose Bruneschelli and Donatello and Lippi to throw in that little annunciation (teenage Mary: 'Dude, I'm totally not pregnant...') got a much better deal than the Medici who commissioned Michelangelo. Who is much more interesting unfinished with the feet still climbing out of the rock and the face of the Christ child a vague suggestion than heroically allegorising inferior princelings.