Basilica di San Lorenzo (Florence)

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Coordinates: 43 ° 46 ′ 29.6 ″  N , 11 ° 15 ′ 13.9 ″  E

General view with library, cloister and the domed Medicean chapel
Church plan: 1. Old Sacristy, 2. New Sacristy, 3. Princely Chapel, 4. First Cloister, 5. Second Cloister, 6. Biblioteca Laurenziana
Exterior view from Piazza San Lorenzo
The bare facade

The Basilica di San Lorenzo is one of the largest churches in Florence and stands in the center of the market area. It was consecrated in 393 and is one of the many churches in the city that claim to be the oldest. It was the city's cathedral for three hundred years before losing that status to Santa Reparata , which is now overbuilt by the Cathedral of Santa Maria del Fiore . In addition, it was the parish church of the Medici , where the first name Lorenzo therefore occurs frequently.

Building history

In 1419 Giovanni di Bicci de 'Medici , the father of Cosimo de' Medici , offered to finance a new church to replace the Romanesque building. Filippo Brunelleschi was commissioned with the design. He was already busy planning the dome of the cathedral and his fame had increased with it. Initially, the order only related to building a sacristy as an extension of the old Romanesque church of San Lorenzo, today's "Old Sacristy". He caused a sensation and was now also commissioned to plan a new nave, which was to be the first church building of the Renaissance and thus the first church building in modern art history . The order took place either around 1421 or not until 1425. When Brunelleschi's death in 1446 only the sacristy and the transept were finished. The construction was continued by his student Antonio Manetti .

The Medici raised large sums of money, but to this day nobody has financed the construction of the facade (although Michelangelo designed one that still exists today as a wooden model). The campanile dates from 1740.

architecture

The tomb of Lorenzo di Piero de 'Medici

The renaissance interior of the church is huge, cold and airy, with chapels in a row. The entire church building is wested. In the south transept is the domed Sagrestia Vecchia (old sacristy ), the oldest part of the current church, which contains the tombs of a number of Medici family members - the only part of the church that was completed during Brunelleschi's lifetime.

This "old sacristy" is the first domed central building of the Renaissance, the foundation for the central building of modern art history. It was completed in 1428. The tondi were made by Donatello . The twelve-part "umbrella dome" is a special form, its numerical symbolism (Christ and the apostles) already shows the possibility that in the baroque era leads to the dome as the great image of heaven.

Here - like later in the nave - we have a geometrically clearly structured room that gets by with few design elements: round arches , fluted pilasters and an entablature that divides the wall into two zones. The white wall surface is partly left completely unorganized. The important structural elements are traced by clear bands of gray stone ("pietra serena"), a very impressive decorative principle used here for the first time. By the way, a sacristy is always an adjoining room to the choir, which is used to dress the priests and to store cult objects.

The Cappelle Medicee ( Medici chapels ) behind the church belong to San Lorenzo : On the north transept is the Sagrestia Nuova (New Sacristy), which was begun in 1520 by Michelangelo, who also designed the Medici tombs it contains. Behind the choir rises the huge domed building of the Cappella dei Principi (Princely Chapel), the construction of which began in 1604, a large, vaulted, octagonal central room in which the Grand Dukes are buried.

The interior - Brunelleschi and the central perspective

Interior view with a view of the high altar
Interior view with a view of the main entrance
Choir dome

The Medici had planned a Gothic building around 1418 when Brunelleschi took over the construction management. Brunelleschi changed practically everything in this plan by 1421. He started with a completely new plan; it was an instant decision for a new architectural style .

This interior is an excellent example of the architecture of the early Renaissance in a traditional longitudinal building, which thus stood outside the ideal of a purely central building . Here, for the first time, Brunelleschi's novel conception of a space based on linear perspective was realized, which is determined by lines of flight that all seem to converge at one point - Brunelleschi was the inventor of the scientific central perspective with the mathematician Manetti and others .

Before Brunelleschi, various devices were used in such cases to suggest distances in paintings and drawings. Brunelleschi, however, developed a system with which space could be represented in a precisely measurable way. He observed that lines running parallel to a viewer seem to converge in the distance. When transferred into the picture, such lines of alignment (orthogonals), which converge in a vanishing point in the depth of the picture, create a strong spatial effect.

Here the turning away from medieval architecture and the opposition to the Franco-German influences of the Gothic, which had shown an ecstatic striving for height and dramatic effect, becomes particularly clear. When building the dome, Brunelleschi was prevented from realizing such principles because the basic dimensions and the idea were already given there. But he actually wanted something different in his architecture.

In Italy, and especially now in the Renaissance, making a building taller and taller was no longer an end in itself. One orientates oneself on what is often referred to in the literature as the "human measure" ( misura dell'uomo ).

"The Renaissance finally consolidates the primacy of formal beauty over every other aspect [...] The basis of its style, in which the virtues of its soul are transferred to the architecture, are: order, clarity, harmony".

The first thing that strikes you is that Brunelleschi preferred strict, clear geometric shapes in order to emphasize the linear perspective. One means of doing this was to put the same elements in a row as a supporting principle. And since the pillars in particular are the bearers of this principle, they stand very freely and openly between the main and side aisles, so they are clearly highlighted as individual elements.

At the same time, the wall structure of the aisles uses pilasters. The naves are separated from each other by regular, large round arches, not like in the Gothic with the less harmonious pointed arches. The main nave is closed off by a flat ceiling, no longer by a ribbed vault. The whole room dispenses with an upward gradient, but prefers a calm, classic positioning with a strong emphasis on horizontal elements - such as the so-called entablature, which lies as a continuous line over the arcades of the central nave and the pilasters of the aisles and in the flat ceiling has a parallel.

The vertical structural elements are placed one behind the other in precisely calculated proportions and perspective. This rational order principle leaves the remaining wall surfaces white and undesigned. They are no longer used for paintings, as they were in the Middle Ages, that would only disrupt the experience of perspective. In addition, there would hardly be any space left for it. The decoration that is applied is not a stand-alone image program, but rather “painted architecture”, thus underlining the basic concept of the room.

The naves are connected by wide arches. They were in the Italian Gothic buildings before (for example with the cathedral ). But here the impression of the single room is even stronger than in the cathedral 30 years earlier. The light is bright and clear and not dim and mystical like in the time of the Middle Ages before.

It is controversial in the specialist literature which models Brunelleschi took up here in the interior of S. Lorenzo. It is sometimes claimed that he was looking at classic ancient buildings. On the other hand, it is pointed out that the influence of buildings of the Tuscan Romanesque of the 11th and 12th centuries is greater. The Gothic sense of space, as it had developed in Italy, is also mentioned as a possible source. Hence, in the literature for the development of Brunelleschi's architecture, all art epochs are used that only existed in Italy up to this point in time in 1420.

Evidence can be provided for each of the theories cited. There is no doubt that Brunelleschi knew all architectural styles well and that elements from all areas are somehow represented. For Brunelleschi, however, it is not the citing of older art that is decisive, but the design of a new architecture, as it was described in its decisive forms under the keyword of the central perspective.

"Brunelleschi selected all elements of his style from Tuscan buildings of the 11th to 14th centuries and rearranged them according to the new relationships that were required by the newly discovered perspective view."

At the same time he had taken up the model of the early Christian basilicas with this building . It was through this interior space that he awakened the artists' understanding of perspective. A style emerged that guided the entire Florentine architecture of the century and in which “rulers and compasses” took their place again in order to enforce the concept of geometric beauty with the means of symmetry and the measured regularity of the constructions. The nave forms a functioning system, the parts of the room are clearly related to each other. The ratio of central nave to aisle to chapel depth is 4: 2: 1. The height of the ships is twice the width. Basic mathematical conditions determine the dimensions of the building.

The stairs of the Biblioteca Laurenziana

Stairway to the Biblioteca Laurenziana

There is another work by Michelangelo in this church, namely the staircase to the library, to the so-called Biblioteca Laurenziana . The valuable manuscript collection of the Medici should be kept here. The problem arose of how the stairs that lead from the vestibule to the floor level of this library should be designed. Clemens VII , the then Pope from the Medici family, himself suggested using the entire space for this staircase. But Michelangelo left Florence in the direction of Rome in 1534 and that is why the project fell through for the time being.

Giorgio Vasari and Bartolomeo Ammanati then turned the original plan into reality over 20 years later, 1559–1568, with the help of Michelangelo. The result is a grandiose construction in a small space.

In the later centuries, staircases were to gain increasing importance in secular buildings, for example in the French palace complex in Chambord on the Loire designed by Leonardo da Vinci at around the same time , or - much later - in the 18th century Balthasar Neumann's Würzburg residence . , so in the baroque. Here we have one of the earliest cases in which something as "unimportant" as a staircase became the subject of consideration by leading artists. At that time, this broad, three-part construction was compared with a cascade, i.e. a waterfall, which also makes it clear that such a staircase was absolutely unusual in the 16th century.

Works of art

Donatello's pulpit
Agnolo Bronzino : The Martyrdom of St. Laurentius
First cloister

Organs

There are three organs in the basilica . The main organ was built in 1864–1865 by the organ builder Fratelli Serassi (Bergamo). The instrument has 35 registers on three manuals and a pedal . The actions are mechanical.

I Echowerk
Principals (B / D) 8th'
Ottava (B / D) 4 ′
Quintadecima 2 ′
Due di Ripieno
viola (B) 8th'
Flauto a Camino (D) 8th'
Flauto in Ottava (B) 4 ′
Arpone (B) 8th'
Clarino (D) 16 ′
violoncello (B / D) 8th'
Corna Musa (D) 8th'
Voce Umana (D) 8th'
II major work
Principals I (B / D) 16 ′
Principals II (B / D) 8th'
Principals III (B / D) 8th'
Ottava I (B / D) 4 ′
Ottava II 4 ′
Duodecima 2 23
Quintadecima (B / D) 2 ′
Due di Ripieno
Quattro di Ripieno
Terza Mano
III swell
Ottava (B) 4 ′
Zampogna (S) 4 ′
viola (B) 4 ′
Violetta (D) 8th'
Voce Flebile (D) 8th'
Cromorno (B) 8th'
oboe (D) 16 ′
tremolo
Pedal mechanism
Contrabbasso 16 ′
Basso 8th'
Violone 8th'
Bombarda 16 ′
Trombones 8th'
Timballo

Funerary monuments

Remarks

  1. Volker Herzner: "How much Brunelleschi?" Matthew Cohen and his phantom architect of San Lorenzo in Florence . On: art history. Open Peer Reviewed Journal (May 13, 2013), online at www.kunstgeschichte-ejournal.net.
  2. Hugh Honor, John Fleming: World History of Art. Anniversary edition, 5th edition. Prestel, Munich 1999, ISBN 3-7913-2094-7 , p. 332.
  3. Bertrand Jestaz : The Art of the Renaissance (= Great Epochs of World Art. Series 3, Vol. 4). Herder, Freiburg (Breisgau) et al. 1985, ISBN 3-451-19404-X , p. 25.
  4. ^ André Corboz, Henri Stierlin (Ed.): Early Middle Ages (= Architecture of the World. Vol. 14). Taschen, Cologne 1994, ISBN 3-8228-9534-2 , p. 127.
  5. ^ Alain J. Lemaître: Florence and its art in the 15th century. Photos by Erich Lessing . Terrail, Paris 1993, ISBN 2-87939-067-2 , p. 70.
  6. Information on the organ
  7. The last representative of the Medici dynasty is exhumed in autumn. Researchers want to examine the remains of Maria Luisa de 'Medici. In: Die Welt , July 2, 2012.

Web links

Commons : Basilica di San Lorenzo  - Album with pictures, videos and audio files