Description
The Ospedale del Ceppo is Pistoia's old hospital, a stone's throw from Piazza del Duomo, founded in the 13th century and in use until 2013. You'll recognise it at once: a long frieze of bright, glossy coloured terracotta runs above its Renaissance loggia.
The arcaded loggia echoes Brunelleschi's at the Ospedale degli Innocenti in Florence: the Florentine administrators wanted it that way, at a time when Pistoia had come under Florence and the hospital answered to Santa Maria Nuova.
The Della Robbia frieze is the reason to come. In panels glazed in blue, white, yellow and green, it tells the works of mercy: clothing the naked, sheltering pilgrims, visiting the sick and the imprisoned, burying the dead, feeding the hungry.
Between the scenes stand the Virtues, and at the corners two harpies placed there as a warning. In the spandrels of the arches, Giovanni della Robbia's roundels show the Annunciation, the Visitation and the Virgin in glory among angels. Above the doorway next to it, a lunette by Benedetto Buglioni stages the Coronation of the Virgin, white figures on a blue ground.
Inside, the Museo dello Spedale del Ceppo keeps the surgical instruments of the old medical school, where the anatomist Filippo Pacini trained. The most surprising piece is the neoclassical anatomical theatre: masonry benches rising like an amphitheatre, frescoed walls and, in the next room, the marble table where bodies were prepared. From the museum you can also go down into Pistoia Sotterranea.
The name comes from a legend: the Virgin is said to have told a married couple, Antimo and Bendinella, to found the hospital wherever they found a tree stump, a ceppo, in bloom in the depths of winter. More prosaically, it may have been the hollow trunk where people left their alms.
During the Black Death of 1348 many patients left their property to the hospital, which came out of it enormously rich. So rich that the appointment of its administrator, the spedalingo, sparked violent clashes between Pistoia's great families, the Panciatichi and the Cancellieri.
The frieze is also a portrait: the Florentine spedalingo Leonardo Buonafede, who commissioned it, appears in every scene dressed in white with a black cape. He left Pistoia before the work was finished, and the panel of the thirsty was never put up: its fragments turned up in 1936 where the Della Robbia had kept their kilns.
Don't miss
• The frieze of the works of mercy.
• Giovanni della Robbia's roundels.
• The anatomical theatre.
• The surgical instruments of the medical school.
Did you know?
• The last panel on the right, redone in 1586 without glaze, shows the spedalingo of the day in place of Buonafede.
• In the ward for contagious patients, the sick were tended from a distance, from an outside walkway.
The arcaded loggia echoes Brunelleschi's at the Ospedale degli Innocenti in Florence: the Florentine administrators wanted it that way, at a time when Pistoia had come under Florence and the hospital answered to Santa Maria Nuova.
The Della Robbia frieze is the reason to come. In panels glazed in blue, white, yellow and green, it tells the works of mercy: clothing the naked, sheltering pilgrims, visiting the sick and the imprisoned, burying the dead, feeding the hungry.
Between the scenes stand the Virtues, and at the corners two harpies placed there as a warning. In the spandrels of the arches, Giovanni della Robbia's roundels show the Annunciation, the Visitation and the Virgin in glory among angels. Above the doorway next to it, a lunette by Benedetto Buglioni stages the Coronation of the Virgin, white figures on a blue ground.
Inside, the Museo dello Spedale del Ceppo keeps the surgical instruments of the old medical school, where the anatomist Filippo Pacini trained. The most surprising piece is the neoclassical anatomical theatre: masonry benches rising like an amphitheatre, frescoed walls and, in the next room, the marble table where bodies were prepared. From the museum you can also go down into Pistoia Sotterranea.
The name comes from a legend: the Virgin is said to have told a married couple, Antimo and Bendinella, to found the hospital wherever they found a tree stump, a ceppo, in bloom in the depths of winter. More prosaically, it may have been the hollow trunk where people left their alms.
During the Black Death of 1348 many patients left their property to the hospital, which came out of it enormously rich. So rich that the appointment of its administrator, the spedalingo, sparked violent clashes between Pistoia's great families, the Panciatichi and the Cancellieri.
The frieze is also a portrait: the Florentine spedalingo Leonardo Buonafede, who commissioned it, appears in every scene dressed in white with a black cape. He left Pistoia before the work was finished, and the panel of the thirsty was never put up: its fragments turned up in 1936 where the Della Robbia had kept their kilns.
Don't miss
• The frieze of the works of mercy.
• Giovanni della Robbia's roundels.
• The anatomical theatre.
• The surgical instruments of the medical school.
Did you know?
• The last panel on the right, redone in 1586 without glaze, shows the spedalingo of the day in place of Buonafede.
• In the ward for contagious patients, the sick were tended from a distance, from an outside walkway.