Santa Maria Novella

(Vacation day four, continued.) Having visited the Dominican monastery in the morning, I was off to the Dominican church in the afternoon. Santa Maria Novella is one of the older churches in Florence, here at least since the 10th century, taken over by Dominican friars in 1221, and the present structure built between 1279 and 1357. The front facade (photo) is a little older, circa 1470, created by Leon Battista Alberti. You're getting a better view of that lovely marblework than I did--the whole thing was behind scaffolding and tarps when I visited, and I couldn't see a speck. Humph.

 

Though the facade doesn't look that wide, the church goes deep, nearly 100 meters. At right you can see the Romanesque, black-and-white-banded and peaked arches that draw your eyes up, and in the left foreground is the central pulpit. The guidebook boasts that the latter was designed by Brunelleschi, the Duomo's architect, but conveniently omits one of its uses: From this pulpit Galileo was first denouced for theorizing that the earth was not the center of the universe, setting off a chain of events that lead to him being condemned by the Inquisition (the same office, incidentally--though now called the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith--that the current pope led before getting the white smoke). All along those long walls are massive paintings, most notably Masaccio's fresco of the trinity.

 

Up in the apse, the central, or Tornabuoni, chapel is busy with detail, with an elaborate, architectural-looking altar, towering stained glass windows, and tiered frescoes reaching up to the ceiling. These last are by Ghirlandaio, who also painted the Adoration of the Magi in Santa Trinita and the Last Supper with kitty and peacock at San Marco. Like his Adoration, these biblical scenes feature his contemporaries, 15th century Florentines. In the Birth of Mary (right), for example, Mary looks as though she's been born into a fine Tuscan mansion, attended by women in gowns made of Florence's world-famous fabrics.

 

My favorite bit, though, was the Strozzi Chapel, named for those bankers with the massive Cyclopean palace and the "hole in the wall." These frescoes are by Filippino Lippi and depict the lives of St. Philip and St. John the Evangelist. I liked them for their unusual subjects, like St. Philip at the Temple of Mars--an oddly pagan-looking image for this high church--and for their unusual colors: the tones aren't off in those photos; the paintings really are a neutral, stony palette overlaid with stronger color, kind of like those old movies Ted Turner had colorized in the 1980s. The Strozzi Chapel also has a literary reference: In Boccaccio's Decameron, it was where the first tale began, as the seven Florentine ladies decided to get out of their plague-ridden city and stay in the country, passing time by telling stories. (The Decameron inspired Chaucer to write his story cycle, The Canterbury Tales--he even retold some of the 100 stories from that earlier book.)

 

There's an adjoining piece of Santa Maria Novella, the cloisters, currently accessible through a separate, not-immediately-noticeable entrance. (I followed a sign that pointed to both the cloisters and an adjacent judo club--now there's a juxtaposition.) In the Green Cloister are some worse-for-the-weather frescoes by Uccello (left), who also painted the clock in the Duomo. But the most arresting room is the Spanish Chapel, so called because Grand Duke Cosimo de Medici's Spanish wife, Eleanor of Toledo, built it for her Spanish countrymen in Florence. Walls and ceiling are crowded with images, like the one at right.

 

For the completist--or just those who like pleasantly smelly things--there's one more building in the Santa Maria Novella complex, the Officina Profumo Farmaceutica. This pharmacy had its genesis around 1221, when the Dominican friars arrived, and was charged with growing herbs and creating remedies for the monks' infirmary. In 1612 the pharmacy opened to the public. These days it's not affiliated with the church but is a privately run lotions-and-potions store, though it employs some of the raw materials and recipes the original pharmacy used, and displays some of the old apothecary jars and whatnot. I found it rather intriguing, seeing all the herbs and spices, and bought some bitter-orange lotion (Relax) that smells divine. The pharmacy's official Web site doesn't have anything on it yet, but you can get some of its products through eLuxury.com.

And once again the day was far from over, but I shall continue my coverage in the next blog.