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Giotto was appointed Capomaestro of the Florence Cathedral in 1334. He probably confined himself to designing the separate Campanile which stands like a tower beside the façade. In fact Giotto's Campanile is not entirely as he designed it. Only the lower story of the bell tower was realized from Giotto's design. The next three stories were executed by Andrea Pisano, Giotto's successor as capomaestro. The remainder was completed by Francesco Talenti in the 1350s.
The reliefs on the campanile at Florence, probably designed by its architect Giotto and partly executed by Andrea Pisano, were begun a quarter of a century after those at Orvieto and have very little of the latter's Bible-based theology. They speak to us with a new voice. These are the accents not of the older, narrow, monastic order of things but of the newer scholastic outlook, shaped by the universities which embraced all knowledge, secular as well as sacred. Salvation is still the theme, to be obtained, however, not directly through the person of Christ, as at Orvieto, but through the mediation of the Church by its sacraments, administered by the priest. Daily labour, which is atonement for Adam's sin, is the road to virtue. This recipe for social harmony in the rising industrial cities of the Middle Ages is presented in several connected series of images. They consist of hexagonal and lozenge shaped reliefs arranged in two tiers on all four sides of the tower.
It is no accident that nearly every set of images is seven in number. The Middle Ages attached a mystical significance to numbers which it inherited from the ancient world as far back as Pythagoras. Three was a spiritual number because of the Trinity; four was related to life on earth because there were four elements and four evangelists. Twelve, the product of three and four, was the number of the Church in which divine and earthly met and which the twelve apostles symbolized, and so on. Dante deliberately organized the Divine Comedy, both as to the structure of the poem and the world it describes, on the basis of three and multiples of three. Medieval man, like us today, sought through numbers to understand the workings of the universe, though he arrived at rather different conclusions. In particular he expected to find an underlying connection between series of things having like numbers. Seven, which was closely related to the divine plan because it measured the days of Creation, was particularly rich in such concordances.
On the campanile are represented the seven Mechanical (or Technical) Arts and their inventors. Next come the seven Planets, seven Virtues, seven Liberal Arts and finally seven Sacraments.
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