RENAISSANCE CHAPELS in Florence
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The renaissance chapels of Florence
are among the noblest witnesses to the city's great civic, religious
and artistic history. Today they offer their visitors a kind
of didacticism which is especially characteristic of Tuscan
and Florentine art. Although many of them have suffered alterations
and ill-judged interventions over the centuries, at least ten
have survived in good condition, and may easily be visited in
the churches or cloisters where the rich Florentine merchants
and bankers had them built. Their decoration, carried out by
the foremost artists of the period, allows us to glimpse that
interweaving of devotion, power, business, culture and art which
made 15th-century Florence one of the great centres of Christendom.
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| If the Brancacci Chapel was the great school
for artists of the 15th century, it was in the Old Sacristy at San Lorenzo that Brunelleschi and Donatello developed an ideal of perfection later given expression in the Pazzi Chapel in Santa Croce (c. 1443-78), by Brunelleschi himself and by Luca della Robbia. Inside the chapel, white plaster, grey stonework and blue-and-white glazed terracotta create a spatial and perspective harmony of rare beauty. Moving on to Palazzo Medici-Riccardi, we find the richest and most magical interior of any 15th-century palazzo: the Chapel of the Magi, built by Michelozzo and frescoed by Benozzo Gozzoli with the Procession of the Magi (1459-62). We leave the city centre and head for San Miniato al Monte, with its beguiling Chapel of the Cardinal of Portugal (1459-62), one of the noblest artistic achievements of the Florentine Quattrocento, where architecture, sculpture and painting attain perfect equilibrium.
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| Descending the hill and crossing the
river we come to Sant'Ambrogio, near the old Porta alla Croce, where the Chapel of the Miracle preserves a relic from a miraculous event that took place in 1230. There is a beautiful marble tabernacle by Mino da Fiesole, and a fresco by Cosimo Rosselli showing the Miracle of the Eucharist. In the church of Santa Trinita we find two of the finest 15th-century chapels: the Bartolini Salimbeni Chapel, frescoed by Lorenzo Monaco with scenes from the Life of the Virgin (1420-25), and the Sassetti Chapel, built by Giuliano da Sangallo and marvellously frescoed with scenes from the Life of St Francis by Domenico Ghirlandaio, who also painted the magnificent altarpiece (1483-85). The itinerary ends in the church of Santa
Maria Novella, where the apse (known as the Tornabuoni
Chapel) has frescoes of the Life of the Virgin and
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