Basilica di San Lorenzo
(Basilica of St Lawrence)

Great Discoveries "Personal Tour Guides" will provide you with the most enjoyable and informative way to visit the Basilica di San Lorenzo. Our carefully researched tour identifies and locates the most relevant treasures to ensure that you do not miss important works and that you clearly understand each items artistic and historic significance. As you view these carefully selected treasures, our professional narrators, accompanied by historically appropriate background music, will delight, amuse and inform you, making your visit a most memorable experience. Learn about San Lorenzo, the opulent Medici Chapel and Michelangelo's New Sacristy and Laurentian Library, with informative descriptions, photo's, building diagram, sample audio tracks and more.

The Basilica of San Lorenzo, one of Florence Italy’s most precious treasures and the city’s oldest church, is a Renaissance masterpiece designed by great Florentine master Fillipo Brunelleschi. Generations of Medici’s, Florence’s wealthiest and most powerful family, put some of the world’s greatest artists to work here, men like Michelangelo, Donatello and Fillipo Lippi. It is also important for its historical connection to the Medici’s. For over three-hundred years, this was their family church and generations of the great and not so great Medici were buried here.

Don’t be put off by San Lorenzo’s facade of antique brickwork. It belies the treasures you will find hidden inside. As you enter San Lorenzo Basilica you will notice the sense of peace and serenity that is created by the marvelous balance and proportion of the building. Brunelleschi, who had just submitted his model for the cupola of the Duomo, proposed this new style of church that is absolutely symmetrical in its design and flooded with light, not mystically shrouded in half light as had been the precedence. It is widely regarded as one of the city's purest Renaissance churches and was the very first church in this style to be built in the city.

He used vaulted ceilings with plain rough cast walls to lend the whole structure a remarkable feeling of pure serene majesty. The gray (pietra serena) stone columns with capitals topped by elegant abacuses which support the round arches perfectly harmonize with the white plaster walls. This decorative coloring is something you will see copied time and again; it creates an effect that became known as creste e vele, or waves and sales, with the creamy-colored walls being the sails and the gray pietra serena stone the waves.

San Lorenzo was built between 1419 and 1469 under a commission by the then head of the Medici family, Giovanni di Bicci, the father of Cosimo il Vecchio, who is better known as Cosimo the Elder. After Giovanni’s death, Cosimo decided to alter the entire church. The very richness of the church as it is today reflects the newly acquired wealth of the Medici family who even before they built their palace commissioned the chapel and what is now the Old Sacristy.

It was not for lack of ideas, or funding that the churches facade remained unfinished. In 1518, the Medici pope, Pope Leo X, son of Lorenzo the Magnificent, commissioned Michelangelo to complete the family shrine. Michelangelo kept coming up with new models but hesitated over which one to choose before he finally settled on a design. The model for that design, which never got started, is now on display in the Casa Buonarroti. The whole undertaking seemed doomed from the very start and in 1518, Michelangelo wrote, “I am dying of grief. It is as though fate is against me.”

In 1559, another Medici Pope, Clement VII, the nephew of Lorenzo the Magnificent, commissioned Michelangelo to construct the Laurentian Library in the basilica. Its purpose was to house the Medici’s 100-year-old collection of 15,000 precious books, papyri and manuscripts which had been collected by Cosimo the Elder and his son and grandson. Many of these historic and irreplaceable documents are on display today. Michelangelo designed everything in this reading room including the stalls.

Three centuries of Medici are buried in a part of San Lorenzo’s monumental complex known as the Medici Chapels. The remains of forty-nine less notable Medici scions are entombed in the gloomy low ceiling crypt, while the floor above contains the grandiose, though ostentatious, Chapel of the Princes. Once the Medici became Grand Dukes, the legitimate sovereigns of Florence and Tuscany and, therefore the reigning family, they desired a building that would be a visible sign of the glory and longevity of their dynasty.

The mostly mediocre grand dukes wanted a mausoleum that would allude to the majesty of the Pantheon and the great size of other Roman monuments. To communicate the immortality of the Medici dynasty they used the most splendid and imperishable materials available; marble and polychrome granite, porphyry, Barga red, Corsican green, jasper, alabaster, quartz, lapis lazuli, coral and mother of pearl. The lords of Florence did not hesitate to spend vast sums to cover their tombs with semi-precious stones, materials that are as incorruptible and eternal as they are cold and valuable. The Chapel of the Princes is the costliest single project the Medici had ever undertaken.

The absolute jewel of the Medici Chapels is Michelangelo’s New Sacristy, the heart of the museum and a fatal attraction for the thousands of people who visit each year. It is a relatively small room, but it echoes Michelangelo’s presence and gives one the impression of breadth, like a space that expands before you. Just as in the Sistine Chapel, no visitor of the New Sacristy can escape the feeling of having entered one of the grand places of the spirit, and its space seems larger than its true dimensions.

The New Sacristy was created by the will of Pope Leo X de Medici, who wished to build a suitable place, with funeral memorials of appropriate splendor, to honor his ancestors; his father, Lorenzo the Magnificent, and uncle, Giuliano, together with his brother Giuliano, Duke of Nemours, and his nephew, the Duke of Urbino. Michelangelo, the architect and sculpture of the New Sacristy, worked on it for nearly fourteen years but he never completed it. In 1534, a new pope enticed Michelangelo to Rome with a new project, painting the “Last Judgment” in the Sistine Chapel. The tomb of the greatest Medici of them all, Lorenzo the Magnificent, a friend and mentor to Michelangelo, was never completed. He lies in the New Sacristy under a simple slab which bears his name.

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San Lorenzo Interior	Medici Chapel
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