Brunelleschi, Old Sacristy, San Lorenzo, Florence, begun c. 1421
[0:00] [music]
Dr. Steven Zucker: [0:04] We’re in San Lorenzo in Florence, in the Old Sacristy. That’s a room that is traditionally used in a church for the priest to vest, that is to put on the garments for a religious ritual, but in this case, it was intended to be a mausoleum for the founder of the Medici dynasty.
Dr. Beth Harris: [0:25] Giovanni di Bicci de’ Medici, who’s buried here along with his wife. In the early 1400s, when a group of people decided to rebuild the church that was here, the families contributed money.
Dr. Zucker: [0:36] Now, it wasn’t that they were chipping in. Each was in control of its own chapel.
Dr. Harris: [0:41] Giovanni di Bicci de’ Medici decided to pay for the building of the sacristy.
Dr. Zucker: [0:46] He got a bigger space.
Dr. Harris: [0:47] He got a bigger space. He paid more money, and he hired Brunelleschi. He was smart. We should say that when you enter the church, the sacristy is off the left transept. It’s now known as the Old Sacristy.
Dr. Zucker: [0:59] Because Michelangelo designed the New Sacristy.
Dr. Harris: [1:01] But here we are in Brunelleschi’s Old Sacristy, which is the epitome of Renaissance architecture.
Dr. Zucker: [1:07] Now, Brunelleschi has done some extraordinary things here. First of all, there’s a sense of solemnity, of calmness, that is in part a result of the extraordinary sense of geometry here and order, rationalism.
[1:19] So many of the characteristics that we associate with 15th century Florentine Renaissance thinking, humanism.
Dr. Harris: [1:26] Instead of the mysterious soaring spaces of a Gothic church, we have a space built on the fundamental geometric shapes of the square and the circle and a sense of clarity.
Dr. Zucker: [1:39] This notion of geometry having a philosophical importance. Of course, this is a burial site. The idea of the eternal, the idea in fact of resurrection, is crucial here. The room itself is a perfect square. In fact, one could argue it comes close to being a cube.
[1:58] Then it’s surmounted by this beautiful hemispheric dome. One of the ways in which art historians understand this is that the circle is a reference to the spirituality of the geometry of heaven.
Dr. Harris: [2:09] If you think about a circle, it has no beginning and no end, like God.
Dr. Zucker: [2:12] Whereas we inhabit the much more rectilinear space, the earthly space, the space of gravity. How do you get the circle down to the square that is the room itself? He’s done this by borrowing a technique that we find in Byzantine architecture — I’m thinking about Hagia Sophia — which is to use pendentives.
[2:31] In this case, Brunelleschi has created these perfect hemispheres, these perfect half-circles that rise up but don’t quite touch the bottom of the dome, which creates a sense of lightness. It is this tension between that circle and that square that informs this entire room, but it also informs its symbolism. At the same time, it’s just the colors.
Dr. Harris: [2:53] The grayish green of the Pietra Serena, which Brunelleschi and Michelangelo both used a lot, the stone that was local to Florence.
Dr. Zucker: [3:01] And that frames these broad open planes of a cream-colored stucco that really helps to emphasize the geometry of the space.
Dr. Harris: [3:09] That’s right. It sort of outlines the squares and rectangles and semicircles and circles. You really read the geometry.
[3:16] One of the things that’s remarkable about Brunelleschi is that he’s clearly borrowing so many forms from ancient Greek and Roman art. The pilasters, and the fluting, and the capitals, and also this rational approach to architecture, but he’s combining those elements and using them in a new way.
Dr. Zucker: [3:34] He is, he is using it as a kind of license to begin to construct a rationalism that was for his modern world. Now, Brunelleschi had gone to Rome and actually studied antique architecture. We can certainly see that influence. But you see nothing like this in Rome. This is a Renaissance room.
[3:50] [music]
