Description
The Basilica of San Lorenzo is the Medici family church, a short walk from the Duomo and the San Lorenzo market: behind an unfinished, rough-stone facade stands one of the first Renaissance churches, designed by Brunelleschi.
It is also one of the oldest churches in Florence. According to tradition it was consecrated in 393 in the presence of Saint Ambrose, and for three hundred years it served as the city's cathedral. Almost all the Medici are buried here.
The interior is bright and orderly: columns and arches of gray pietra serena against white plaster, repeated in a steady rhythm that draws your eye all the way to the altar. This is Brunelleschi's style at its most recognizable.
At the far end of the nave, facing each other, stand Donatello's two pulpits, his last works: the Passion and the Resurrection of Christ in bronze, with dramatic figures and surfaces deliberately left rough. His signature is on the frieze of one of them.
In the second chapel on the right is Rosso Fiorentino's Marriage of the Virgin, a crowded celebration in vivid colors. In the Martelli Chapel, on the left, you will find Filippo Lippi's Annunciation and a sarcophagus by Donatello carved to look like a big wicker basket.
The jewel is the Old Sacristy, the first part of the church Brunelleschi completed: a cubic space under an umbrella dome, with colored roundels and Donatello's bronze doors. A starry sky is painted in the small dome over the altar.
The Medici Chapels, behind the apse, are a museum of their own, entered from the back. Here you will find Michelangelo's New Sacristy, with the tombs of the dukes and the statues of Day, Night, Dawn and Dusk, and the sumptuous Chapel of the Princes, clad in marble and semiprecious stones.
Cosimo the Elder, who died in 1464, was buried in a pillar right beneath the high altar, a spot normally reserved for saints. In front of the altar, a bronze grille by Verrocchio set in the floor marks the place.
The facade was meant to be by Michelangelo. Pope Leo X, a Medici, commissioned it from him in 1518, and he even made a wooden model of it. But between technical problems and money troubles it was never built: the design ended up on a church in L'Aquila.
For the Chapel of the Princes, the grand dukes dreamed of placing the Holy Sepulchre at the center: their attempts to buy it, or steal it, in Jerusalem failed. And the sarcophagi are empty: the remains lie in the crypt below.
Don't miss
• The Old Sacristy.
• Donatello's pulpits.
• Rosso Fiorentino's Marriage of the Virgin.
• Michelangelo's New Sacristy.
• The Chapel of the Princes.
Did you know?
• The sky painted in the Old Sacristy is the one above Florence on the night of July 4, 1442.
• Donatello's stucco work set two old friends against each other: Brunelleschi accused him of stealing the show from his architecture.
• Donatello is buried here too, in the crypt.
It is also one of the oldest churches in Florence. According to tradition it was consecrated in 393 in the presence of Saint Ambrose, and for three hundred years it served as the city's cathedral. Almost all the Medici are buried here.
The interior is bright and orderly: columns and arches of gray pietra serena against white plaster, repeated in a steady rhythm that draws your eye all the way to the altar. This is Brunelleschi's style at its most recognizable.
At the far end of the nave, facing each other, stand Donatello's two pulpits, his last works: the Passion and the Resurrection of Christ in bronze, with dramatic figures and surfaces deliberately left rough. His signature is on the frieze of one of them.
In the second chapel on the right is Rosso Fiorentino's Marriage of the Virgin, a crowded celebration in vivid colors. In the Martelli Chapel, on the left, you will find Filippo Lippi's Annunciation and a sarcophagus by Donatello carved to look like a big wicker basket.
The jewel is the Old Sacristy, the first part of the church Brunelleschi completed: a cubic space under an umbrella dome, with colored roundels and Donatello's bronze doors. A starry sky is painted in the small dome over the altar.
The Medici Chapels, behind the apse, are a museum of their own, entered from the back. Here you will find Michelangelo's New Sacristy, with the tombs of the dukes and the statues of Day, Night, Dawn and Dusk, and the sumptuous Chapel of the Princes, clad in marble and semiprecious stones.
Cosimo the Elder, who died in 1464, was buried in a pillar right beneath the high altar, a spot normally reserved for saints. In front of the altar, a bronze grille by Verrocchio set in the floor marks the place.
The facade was meant to be by Michelangelo. Pope Leo X, a Medici, commissioned it from him in 1518, and he even made a wooden model of it. But between technical problems and money troubles it was never built: the design ended up on a church in L'Aquila.
For the Chapel of the Princes, the grand dukes dreamed of placing the Holy Sepulchre at the center: their attempts to buy it, or steal it, in Jerusalem failed. And the sarcophagi are empty: the remains lie in the crypt below.
Don't miss
• The Old Sacristy.
• Donatello's pulpits.
• Rosso Fiorentino's Marriage of the Virgin.
• Michelangelo's New Sacristy.
• The Chapel of the Princes.
Did you know?
• The sky painted in the Old Sacristy is the one above Florence on the night of July 4, 1442.
• Donatello's stucco work set two old friends against each other: Brunelleschi accused him of stealing the show from his architecture.
• Donatello is buried here too, in the crypt.