Italy: Collaborative Florence Wall with the Duomo

This past spring, as part of the Art Inspired by Italy Unit, my students in grades K-4 participated in a collaborative art project where we made a wall mural (actually a giant collage) of the Duomo in Florence, Italy and surrounding area. Kinder students helped color the bricks on the roof of the Duomo, other students made oil pastel panels for the church buildings, other students helped paint the clouds, the acrylic mural of houses, and the Arno River. It was exciting for the students to see the mural in various stages of development and taking shape on the wall over a couple of weeks time. It was quite the topic of conversation at school as well with many teachers and parents bringing their students down to the art end of the building to take their photos in front of the mural. Students really enjoyed this project and it evolved into higher level questioning about the purpose of the bigger building, why it was so much bigger than the other buildings, why their houses look different than ours, did their houses really look like that, and so on.  It also gave me opportunity to share some history with the students linking it to an architecture lesson.  I told the story of Bruneschelli, a jewelry maker, winning the "contest" to put the dome on the building after it had sat there domeless for a couple of years and as an eyesore for Florence.  Since Florence was greatly concerned with being the leading city in Italy at this time in history when the Medici's were the self appointed and elected leaders of Italy, the huge, open building with no roof was quite a problem.  One even became the Pope. It was quite an interesting history lesson. Globally inspired art lessons have such a unique ability to bring several disciplines to the art room and encourage students to think critically about the world they live on.  You can read more about the Duomo here: Click Here for Duomo Info 

Pippo the Fool by Tracey E. Fern is also a good children's book to read about the dome. Children find it interesting that it was an "egg," or so the legend says, that gave Bruneschelli the idea for the dome.

The Duomo is one of the architectural wonders of the world. Even to this day architects and engineers cannot quite figure out how Bruneschelli did it! It's a great story!


Here is a time lapse slide show of the collaborative wall mural being made and a few pictures of the real Duomo in Florence as well.