SANTA MARIA NOVELLA

Santa Maria Novella

[Name of the Institute]

Santa Maria Novella

Introduction

The Basilica of Santa Maria Novella is one of the most important churches in Florence. The building construction was started by the Dominicans in the last years of the thirteenth century and its implementation occurs through different architectural styles, going from the Gothic to the Renaissance. The marble facade is among the most important works of the Florentine Renaissance. Dominican Church of the was built on the existing site of the oratory of 9th century of Santa Maria delle Vigne that is why it was called Novella which means New. The site was assigned to the Dominican order in 1221 and then they decided to construct a new church. Fra Sisto Fiorentino and Fra Ristoro da Campi, two Dominican Friars, designed this church. Construction of the building was started in the mid 13th century and was finished by 1360. It was completed under the supervision of Friar Iacopo Talenti. Upon its completion, Romanesque-Gothic bell tower and sacristy was also included in it. Until then it was the only lower part of the Tuscan gothic facade which reached its complete finishing. The three doorways are harbored by round arches while the other lower part of the porch is protected by blind arches. They are separated by pilasters, Gothic arches are pointed at the bottom and stripped in green and white colors and it also caps the tombs of noblemen (Ciatti, Seidel, 2002, pp. 23-28). The adjoining wall of the old church yard also keeps the same design. In 1420 the church of Santa Maria Novella was sanctified.

Florence Renaissance

In Renaissance Florence, the city became a work of art through humanist description and visual representation. The Florentine goldsmith, sculptor, and architect, Filippo Brunelleschi, painted two demonstration panels about 1419, setting out the new one-point perspective system of spatial representation and panoptic control over and within the medieval city, with a central vanishing point, receding orthogonal, and transversal lines of spatial diminution and proportional mathematical beauty, based on the human eye and classical body measure within an ideal rational grid space. Taking the imagined linear geometry of light, eye, and optics as primary, Brunelleschi represented (and redefined) the two foundational monuments and spaces of medieval Florence—the eleventh-century Romanesque Baptistery of Florence and the late-thirteenth-to-fourteenth-century Piazza Signoria, Christian religious and political centers—that framed the ancient grid center while projecting a new paradigm of Renaissance to early modern civic space. This was a Renaissance refoundation of classical city, ancient urban life, ideal “new town” optical grid space a refoundation of Florentia (city of flowers, Venus-Flora), based on the humanist eye and moral civic character. It took a humanist to imagine, but an artist to see and to make, the “Renaissance city.”

From the portal of the Duomo of Santa Maria del Fiore (Virgin Mary of the Flower), across the Paradiso, the traditional (eschatological) space between Baptistery and Cathedral, Brunelleschi refigured the Baptistery in Renaissance one-point perspective, setting the classical domed polychrome marble building block (Christianre-creation of the Pantheon in ...