This impressive museum safeguards sacred and liturgical treasures from the duomo , baptistry and bell tower. Awe-inspiring highlights include Ghiberti's original 15th-century masterpiece, Porta del Paradiso (Gates of Paradise) – gloriously golden, 16m-tall gilded bronze doors designed for the eastern entrance to the Baptistry – as well as those he sculpted for the northern entrance. The best-known work is Michelangelo's La Pietà , a work he sculpted when he was almost 80 and intended for his own tomb.
Vasari recorded in his Lives of the Artists that, dissatisfied with both the quality of the marble and of his own work, Michelangelo broke up the unfinished sculpture, destroying the arm and left leg of the figure of Christ. A student of Michelangelo's later restored the arm and completed the figure.
The museum's spectacular main hall, the Room of the First Facade , is dominated by a life-size reconstruction of the original facade of Florence's duomo , decorated with some 40 14th- and early-15th-century statues carved for the facade by 14th-century masters. Led by Arnolfo di Cambio, building work began in 1296 but it was never finished and in 1586 the facade was eventually dismantled.
In the Gallery of Brunelleschi's Dome, look at 15th-century tools used to build the cathedral's groundbreaking cupola. Brunelleschi's funeral mask is also here.
Look out for the pair of exquisitely carved cantorie (singing galleries) or organ lofts – one by Donatello, the other by Luca della Robbia. Originally in the cathedral's sacristy, their scenes of musicians and children at play add a refreshingly frivolous touch amid so much sombre piety. Don't miss the same sculptor's wooden representation of a gaunt, desperately desolate Mary Magdalene in the same room, a work completed late in his career.
