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Great Discoveries "Personal Tour Guides" will provide you with the most enjoyable and informative way to visit the Basilica di Santa Maria Novella. 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 the the prettiest church in Florence, with informative descriptions, photo's, building diagram, sample audio tracks and more.
Florence Italy, like Venice and many other Italian cities, has a major church for each of the great medieval preaching orders, the Dominicans Santa Maria Novella, and the Franciscans Santa Croce. Many wealthy families paid for chapels and tombs inside the churches that today are appreciated for their fine works of art. Santa Maria Novella has the prettier face, with its stupendous black and white marble facade, it is the finest in Florence.
Santa Maria Novella is chronologically the first of the great Florentine cathedrals. Its name, Novella, or new, comes from the fact that it was built on the site of a 9th century church, called Santa Maria delle Vigne. Construction started on what would be the sumptuous new headquarters of the powerful Dominican Order in 1278 in accordance with the Gothic design of its two architect monks, Brother Sisto Fiorentino and Brother Ristoro da Campi. It was completed in 1360, almost one hundred years later, under the direction of Brother Iacopo Talenti, who also designed the Spanish Chapel and the convent Refectory.
Santa Maria Novella owes its exterior beauty to its architect, Leon Battista Alberti. While the church and bell tower were started in 1278 and completed nearly 70 years later, the facade was still unfinished by the time Alberti inherited the project in 1458. Rather than demolish what progress had already been made, Alberti built around the existing Gothic foundations adding his preferences for classical elements.
Acoustic effects may have been a consideration in the adoption of the French Gothic fashion for using stone vaults, as timbered roofs had always before been the norm in earlier Tuscan churches. Its architects were not content with its sheer physical size alone so they created a further illusion of space using an ingenious trick to deceive ones eyes. Looking from the back of the church to the main alter the distance between the columns diminishes while the arches get lower and the floor gets higher thus creating a deceptive tunnel effect, a perspective illusion that makes the 100 meter nave seem even longer. Gothic architects were aware of the rules of a three dimensional perspective but they had not yet learned to render it on a two dimensional canvas. The interior's architectural grandiosity is further enriched by the richness of its artwork.
Treasures aplenty fill the interior, not the least of which is a groundbreaking painting by Masaccio, a crucifix by Giotto and no fewer than three major fresco cycles. Originally, the basilica was completely decorated in wall frescoes but thanks to Vasari, who was set loose to remodel the church to 16th century tastes, many frescoes were painted over and lost forever.
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Santa
Maria Novella Basilica is the mother church of Florence’s Dominican
Order and one of the most picturesque churches in all of Florence.
The Dominicans, or the Domini Canes (the Hounds of God), mission
was to hunt down heresy and punish the heretics. Its members are
referred to as black friars, the mendicant friars who revolutionized
religious life in Europe during the high Middle Ages.
Santa
Maria Novella’s interior is quite magnificent, with its arches
in two colors that lead gracefully toward the high altar. It is
vast, lofty, illuminated by ample sunlight and more Gothic in feel
than any other church in Florence. This church was designed specifically
with the idea of preaching sermons to as large a congregation as
possible, hence its size.
for your first sample before playing the second sample, or you
will not hear it.
