Episode 16: Florence – The Basilica of Santa Croce

Buongiorno! I’m Dr. Rocky Ruggiero. Join me in rebuilding the Renaissance and making art and history come to life.

Welcome to the Rebuilding the Renaissance podcast, your guide to the art and history of Italy from the glory of Rome, to the magnificence of the Renaissance.

And now here’s your host, Dr. Rocky Ruggiero.

Buongiorno everyone. The topic of this podcast is the great Basilica of Santa Croce in the city of Florence. The architect of the church is generally believed to be unknown, although you will often hear the name Arnolfo di Cambio associated with the church.

The date of construction is 1294. The patron was the Commune of Florence.

The architectural style of the church is Gothic and Santa Croce is the seat of the Franciscan Order in the city of Florence. It’s our most important Franciscan church.

Let me just unpack all of this information for you. All the way back up to the top into the name of the church, Santa Croce, which translates into English as the Church of the Holy Cross. Why? Because since the Middle Ages Franciscan Friars have been the custodians of the largest piece of the alleged True Cross, which is kept in the Church of the Holy Sepluchre in Jerusalem.

Now the architect I mentioned, technically we generally believe that the architect of the Santa Croce is unknown, but you will hear some architectural historians instead attributing it to this Arnolfo di Cambio, who I like to nickname Super Arnolfo di Cambio.

Now Arnolfo you may or may not have heard of, but he was the original architect of Florence Cathedral And many believe that he may have been the architect of Palazzo de la Senoria, aka, the Palazzo Vecchio and at that point why not just throw in Santa Croce as well. So he would have been a very busy person at the beginning of the 14th century.

Now as I encourage all my students, what I hope that you’ll do is look at the buildings that you know were by Arnolfo, look at Santa Croce and then formulate your own decision. But I generally believe that we don’t know who the architect was.

The fact that Santa Croce was built in 1294 puts it into this massive building program that’s going on in Florence. I just mentioned the Cathedral and Palazzo Vecchio going up at exactly the same time, and if you consider that the great Dominican church of Santa Maria Novella was being constructed beginning in 1279 and the great grain market-turned church of Orsanmichele going up in 1337.

So just try to imagine what Florence looked like around the year 1300 with cranes just dominating the skyline, and this enormous building campaign taking place.

And in fact, this leads me to the next important piece of data, and that is that the patron of Santa Croce was the Commune. Now the myth in Florence is because the city was a republic in the Middle Ages, that a majority of the major buildings are public buildings. They were built for, and they were built by the people of Florence, communal.

The fact that it is a Gothic church, now our next podcast I’m actually going to break down the nomenclature and the terminology for the different historical and art historical styles that we’ll be discussing. But for now Gothic, I think many of you are familiar with, has the style of art and architecture that begins around the year 1200 or so and lasts up until about 1400 or so A.D., where essentially the two main qualities or themes were very simple height and light. The emphasis essentially on making structures more vertical so that we could increase the amount of illumination that was allowed within.

Well, Santa Croce is perhaps the most Gothic of all the churches in Florence. But I do need to warn you that the term Gothic itself was invented in Florence during the Renaissance as a derogatory way to describe Northern European art and architecture. Gothic is the adjective form of the word Goth. When I ask my students what a Goth is, they respond by saying their friend who has jet black hair, black nail polish and piercings all over various parts of his or her body.

When in reality, historically a Goth was another way of saying barbarian. Remember the Ostrogoths, and the Visigoths that we discussed in my podcast way back about The Fall of the Roman Empire. Well Goths were barbarians. So when the Italians were referring to it as Gothic art and architecture, what they were saying in reality was barbaric art and architecture.

Italians never liked the Gothic, and the reason is simply because: a) it’s not Italian, right? Gothic architecture was born in a place called Paris, right, at the Church of Saint-Denis; and 2) because there is not link between Gothic architecture and classical architecture. Right? There is no basis technically speaking.

So we resisted as long as we could, and I’ve already mentioned that really the only Gothic structures in Italy that could stand up against the Northern European cathedrals are Siena Cathedral, Orvieto Cathedral, and Milan Cathedral. In fact, if you go sort of church for church you’ll see that they really don’t hold a candle to Strasbourg and Cologne and Notre Dame and Chartres.

Now this is important, because when you walk into the Gothic churches in Florence what you need to know is that the majority of them have been Renaissanced. Now we usually don’t use the word Renaissance as a verb the way I just did, but that is in fact what they did to Santa Croce. In other words, they tried to make the church look more Renaissance. Look more like, let’s say, San Lorenzo. All right, if you’ve been inside the first ever Renaissance-style church it was just very austere and minimalist.

So how do you Renaissance a Gothic church? The first thing they did was to whitewash the walls. All right? In Renaissance architecture, less is more. The architecture stands for function and decoration.

In Gothic architecture it seems that more is never enough. Right? They just couldn’t saturate the buildings with enough decoration and what have you. And most Gothic churches, particularly these Mendicant Order, let me just clear this up. We refer to churches associated with Monastic Orders that took vows of poverty as Mendicant Order churches because the word mendicant simply means begger. In Italian mendicante is the word for begger.

So the idea that these are churches associated with orders that have taken vows of poverty, we call them Mendicant Order churches. Most of these Mendicant Order churches, one of which we’ve already discussed and that’s the Basilica of San Francesco in Assisi, had their side aisle walls covered in Fresco decoration. And the normal arrangement was that you had Old Testament scenes on one wall, and New Testament scenes on the other.

Aside from just decorating the church, they were also very functional important for the preaching. The Mendicant Orders like the Augustinians and the Franciscans and the Dominicans and the Carmelites and the Servites were all preaching orders. So what they could do is to illustrate their sermons using the frescos on the wall. In fact, we often refer to these medieval fresco cycles as the poor man’s Bible at a time when the literacy rate was hovering around one percent or so. Most people knew these religious stories by hearing them, or now at the beginning of the 14th century with these Mendicant Order churches by seeing them on the walls as well.

Well in Santa Croce, all of those Gothic style frescos were covered up. They were whitewashed. Then over the whitewash there were a series of Renaissance-style tabernacles that were inserted as well, these large graystone columns with these alternating triangular and curvilinear pediments on top.

These tabernacles housed Renaissance-style paintings. So the more Renaissance art you put into the church, the more Renaissance obviously it appeared.

But the most important modification to these Gothic churches was the removal of something called a rood screen. R-O-O-D, rood, which is an old Saxon word for crucifix, because all of these screens … A rood screen essentially was a large dividing wall or screen that ran across the church and separated the laity, regular people, from the clergy or the priests. All of these dividing walls had crucifix paintings or statues on top. And again, rood is an old Saxon word for cross or crucifix. So it was a screen that supported a cross, a rood screen.

All Catholic churches had rood screens in them. A majority of them were taken down after the reforms of Vatican Council II, right, back in the 50s and 60s.

In Florence, we ripped down the rood screens 500 years earlier for aesthetic reasons. In other words, Renaissance churches are unified churches. So the idea that technically they had to take this wall down so that they could unify the entire space.

In Santa Croce, we don’t know exactly what the rood screen looked like, but we do know that it was approximately 20 feet tall and extended all the way across the nave, right, which is a pretty extraordinary thing.

So Gothic, but watered down through the Renaissance.

And lastly, the church is Franciscan, right? It is associated with the order that adheres to the philosophy of the great Francis of Assisi and if you have not listened to my earlier podcasts there are several that are dedicated to the great revolutionary Saint Francis.

This is important, because Francis actually told his follower that there was really no reason for them to build churches. As a preaching order what they should do is essentially go to a city, preach the good news, beg for some scraps of bread, sleep under a public bench or in a stall if someone was generous enough to offer it. Then the next day they would wake up and they would move on. They are an apostolic order. They’re imitating the Apostles in moving from place to place and preaching the good news.

In fact, Francis said that they should follow Jesus’s words, right? Where Jesus says, “My temples are not made of stone and glass. Wherever there are two or more of you who believe in me, that is my temple.” This was the philosophy to which Francis adhered.

But it seems that Francis, like most great men, know us better than we know ourselves. So he told his followers that if for some extraordinary reason they were to build churches, he discouraged them very much from including paintings and statues and stained-glass windows inside of those churches. Because he saw them as manifestations of the material, that which could distract the congregations from the simplicity and the simple beauty of what was Jesus’s message.

But when you walk into the Church of Santa Croce I think you’ll realize that something has gone drastically wrong, because you’ve just walked into the greatest complex of paintings, and statues, and stained-glass windows in the city of Florence, and one of the greatest in the entire world. Well what happened?

What happened is this kind of perfect historical storm. If you consider that they’re building the Basilica of Santa Croce in what was then, at the end of the 13th century, essentially the second wealthiest city in Europe. Right? That being Florence, of course.

Two, they’re building that church in what was the wealthiest private neighborhood in Florence. Consider that just outside, when you walk up to Santa Croce there’s that large rectangular piazza in front. Well at the Western end of it, that street that’s there that today is the Via Verde, that was where there was once a 12th century wall. Okay?

So the Franciscans were quite good, because they actually purchased real estate which at that time was outside the city proper, but would very soon become part of the city as the walls kind of wrapped around it and what have you.

And there were two families living just inside, one of which was named Bardi, B-A-R-D-I, and the other family was named Peruzzi, P-E-R-U-Z-Z-I. And the Bardi and the Peruzzi families, respectively, owned Europe’s number one and number two banks. Okay? They were the wealthiest private citizens in Europe.

Consider that the assets of the Bardi Bank at the beginning of the 14th century were worth more than double what the assets of the Medici Bank would be in the 15th century. The Bardi were arguably the wealthiest private family to ever have walked the streets of Florence. It’s just that their bank went under because of the Black Death of 1348 when Kind Edward III defaulted on a massive loan that he’d taken from them. But otherwise they were the wealthiest family.

So when these two families, the Bardi and the Peruzzi, found out that there was a church being built practically in their backyard and dedicated to the hottest saint in the Catholic world, right, Francis of Assisi, whose popularity today is to the stars. Could you imagine his popularity three quarters of a century after he died when he was this celebrity. A contemporary one as well.

So the Bardi and the Peruzzi turn an investing eye to the Church of Santa Croce. And the question is how does someone invest privately in a church in the Middle Ages? And the answer is through purchasing the rights over a chapel inside of the church. Okay? What purchasing the rights over a chapel did was allow you and successive generations of your family to be buried inside of the chapel.

The notion of course was that the closer you were to something holy, the better your chances for salvation. Right? We refer to this phenomenon as Ad Santos, or towards holiness. Now we’ve already discussed this in a couple of earlier podcasts when we were talking about this phenomenon of pilgrimage in the Middle Ages.

So imagine that essentially if you were buried close to the high alter, let’s say at Santa Croce. Every time that priest raised that host and Transubstantiation occurred you could almost imagine this positive radiation coming out of that host and impregnating the bones of the people buried around them.

So in fact, the properties that they’re buying are those chapels that you see. Right? Whenever you walk into medieval churches they kind of look like alcoves or kind of cubby spaces, right? Around the high alter there are a series of other recessions. They are like spacial box units technically speaking, and the rights of which could be purchased by a family.

So the most important chapels of all were, not surprisingly, those closest to the alter and consider that up until 1963 a Catholic priest would say Mass with his back to the audience. So technically the most prized chapel of all was the one to the liturgical right of the celebrate, of the high alter.

So not surprisingly, in Santa Croce that chapel was purchased by the Bardi family, and then the one just next to it by the Peruzzi as well.

Now you buy the chapel, but you’re not really buying the property. You’re buying the rights over the property. And in fact, in the contracting there is also an endowment involved so that you must pay to have a priest come into your chapel once a day, five times a day, ten times a day.

In fact, when the Medici family consecrated the new sacristy at San Lorenzo, they had priests saying Mass uninterruptedly 24 hours a day for something like two weeks. Now why would you do that? One because obviously you’re bettering the chances of salvation for the deceased inside of the chapel, but two, because you can. You have that kind of money. So it was a kind of conspicuous consumption.

So the idea that whenever you walk into these medieval churches the Beverly Hills was in fact the area located by the high alter itself.

Now this is what I do my research on. This field of the sort of economics of building and patronage as well. And the chapels were expensive. And so consider that most of these chapels were actually bought before the church was begun.

So that when I’m talking about these buildings as public monuments, the public money or subsidizing that they received was essentially what we would call start up money today. It was enough to get the foundations laid. It was enough to get perhaps some standing architecture seen. What that did was, of course, to reassure investors.

So once they saw that the building was going up, okay now when I look at that blueprint and I see the disposition of these chapels I feel confident enough to invest significant amounts of money to purchase these particular chapels.

Now over at the Basilica of Santo Spirito in Florence, which is the church about which I wrote my dissertation, the average cost of family chapels was 500 florins per chapel. I know most of you probably have no idea what a florin is. But consider that a gold florin, which was the currency used in Florence and consisted of 3.5 grams of gold, was to the medieval and Renaissance economy what the US dollar essentially was to the global economy as well. In other words, everyone traded in florins.

In my research I actually convert the 500 florins per chapel cost to about a half million dollars per chapel. But consider that over at the Basilica of Santo Spirito, which was designed by Brunelleschi, there are a total of 38 available chapels. Whereas at Santa Croce, not including the high chapel of the church, there were only ten.

So they were more valuable. They were more prized. They were more limited technically in number. So Santa Croce, not surprisingly, became the sort of Mecca if you will for the Crème de la Crème of medieval Florentine society. In other words, having the Bardi and the Peruzzi buried in the same church would be roughly the equivalent today of having Bill Gates and Jeff Bezos I guess being buried as well.

What it did was to sort of set off this chain reaction. In fact, those chapels that you see around the high alter at Santa Croce sold out long before they were built. So families began looking for other ways to bury themselves inside the church.

So floor tombs became another option and when you walk around Santa Croce you’ll see that the pavement is just littered with these floor tombs, usually these large rectangular slabs. Just to give you an idea of how these things actually worked, if you look at one of these funerary slabs on the ground, there is usually a kind of oval shape that looks like it’s cut out of the marble slab. That essentially is the door into the crypt or burial space underneath the pavement.

In other words, if you look carefully at one of those oval sort of pieces, you’ll see that there are usually bronze kind of latches or hooks inside. So the idea is that you would just pull up that sort of piece with hooks opening up this hole leading into the underpavement space and then bodies were essentially inhumated, when you put a whole body into the ground it’s inhumation, with just burial shrouds around them. No coffin. Then you’d simply put the door or the latch back on, and you’d seal the whole thing up.

Now consider that it takes the better part of two years for a human body to decompose far enough along that you can then go back down and dismember those bones and kind of push them all over and make room for successive generations.

So effectively these floor tombs are what we call ossuaries or containers of bones. And it’s very important in the Catholic religion to keep your bones in close proximity to each other because Catholics believe that on Judgment Day we will all reconstitute, something called the resurrection of the flesh where we all come back together again so we can stand before our Maker. I guess that the general philosophy is the more quickly that process happens, the better the mood that Jesus will be in as he’s judging us. If you’re at the back end of that long line of people to stand for judgment, presumably he won’t be in such a great mood.

In fact, that’s why the Catholic church has such a major problem with cremation. Right? You’re going to have one hell of a time on Judgment Day looking for little ashes and pieces of yourself scattered throughout the world.

Anyway, not surprisingly those more expensive tombs were also the ones located by the alter.

So what it does is set off this kind of chain reaction where Santa Croce becomes the most in demand place for burial in Florence. And if it was the most in demand, it was also therefore the most expensive place as well.

And all of that money went to then grandizing the structure because you don’t want to be buried in some little just secondary dilapidated little structure. If you are Bill Gates and Jeff Bezos you want something extraordinary. So the size of the church increased, the quantity of the decorations increased, and eventually so too did the criteria for burial. In other words, it wasn’t just money that qualified you for burial inside of Santa Croce. It was also celebrity status.

If you don’t know, we have what I believe to be the most impressive collection of celebrity tombs anywhere in the world inside of Santa Croce.

So stay tuned for my next podcast where we’ll actually talk about those celebrity tombs that characterize the great interior of the Franciscan church for Santa Croce.

For more information on lectures and programs in the United States, art history tours in Italy, and for online video lectures, visit RockyRuggiero.com.