Episode 54: Florence: Santa Maria Novella – Strozzi Chapel

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. In today’s podcast, we’re actually heading back into the church of Santa Maria Novella in the city of Florence, which of course we know is the seat of the Dominican order in this particular city. Santa Maria Novella, one of the most important churches in Florence overall. And we’re looking specifically at one chapel, which is the chapel owned by a family named Strozzi, hence the name Strozzi Chapel. So if you’re standing inside the church, looking at the high altar, which is the main altar there, and the very center of the transept arm, you essentially turn left and at the far end of the transept, and you remember in ecclesiastic architecture that cross arm of a church is known as the transept. At the far left-hand side of the transept at the top of a set of stairs you will find the Strozzi Chapel.

Now, technically it is referred to as the chapel of the Strozzi of Mantova, the Strozzi di Mantova in Italian, because the descendants of the original patron of the chapel, a man by the name of Rosso di Gerio Strozzi, were actually exile to the city of Mantova in the 15th century and so it became known as the Capella of the Strozzi of Mantova, which if you don’t know is a city in Northern Italy and will be the subject of several podcasts later on once we get into 15th century art. It is also a very helpful way to distinguish this particular chapel from the other Strozzi Chapel inside the church, which is the one located directly to the right-hand side of the high altar and it’s surrounding capella Maggiore. In other words, the central chapel of any church is the major chapel, the capella Maggiore, and just to the right-hand side, is another chapel owned by the Strozzi family that was decorated in the late 15th century by an artist named Filippino Lippi.

Well, this chapel is not the one that we’re talking about. We’re talking about, again, the one on the far left-hand side. In fact, if you remember my discussion when we were talking about the Bardi and Peruzzi chapels in the Franciscan Church of Santa Croce in Florence we talked about this phenomenon of odd Santos, of this desire to be buried near or in proximity to holy objects in the attempt to, of course, increase chances for salvation. Well, when you look at the layout of the chapels in Santa Maria Novella, it doesn’t take a rocket scientist to realize just which family living in this particular neighborhood was the wealthiest and most important. Because not only was the main chapel, meaning the principal chapel after the capella Maggiore, that is the one located immediately to the right of the high altar.

If you remember from my discussion of the Bardi Chapel, we talked about how that chapel located to the immediate right when looking at the high altar because it’s to the liturgical right of the priest who would have been standing with his back to his audience. That first chapel to the right-hand side is the most important, as I just told you, was owned by the Strozzi. Well, consider that the chapel to the immediate left of the high altar was also originally owned by the Strozzi family. Instead, today it is owned by the Gondi. In fact, if you look into the chapel, you’ll see this distinct coat of arms of the Gondi family, which is a pair of overlapping maces. The Gondi, very much involved in something called the St. Bartholomew’s Day Massacre in Paris later on the 16th century. But that is the stuff for a future podcast.

And so the chapel, as I mentioned in previous podcasts, can change hands. And this particular chapel essentially went from the Strozzi then to the Gondi. And then as I mentioned as well in previous podcasts, if you can’t get one of the chapels located closest to the high altar, the next best thing is a transept end chapel, which very much like a corner condo, essentially affords to the owner less neighbors. And in fact the two chapels at the ends of the transepts in Santa Novella are owned by pretty important families. One the Strozzi and that’s the one we’ll be talking about in just a sec.

And at the other end of the transept arm, the Rucellai Chapel, the Rucellai family, a very prominent family, again from the quarter of Santa Maria Novella, responsible not only for the patronage of the chapel, but also of the facade of Santa Maria Novella, which will be a subject for future podcasts. It’s the only Renaissance-style facade in the city of Florence. And if you’re walking by Santa Maria Novella, you’ll see that name Rucellai or Rucellarius as it’s spelled on that facade as well. So again, it’s a very easy and a very direct way for a visitor, for a student of history, to figure out which families were the most prominent by figuring out which families own the principal chapels in the principal churches in these various cities.

Now, the decoration of the Strozzi di Mantova chapel, in other words, the chapel that we’re talking about today, was all executed in the middle of the 14th century by a pair of brothers. When you walk up to the top of the stairs and into the chapel, I think the first work of art that will capture your attention is in fact the altarpiece, this large Gothic-style painting sitting directly on the alter. And as you’re hypnotically drawn towards this altarpiece, at a certain point, you’ll notice just below it, just in front of the alter, there’s this sort of oval stone slab. And that of course is the slab that leads into the crypt area where the members of the Strozzi family are entombed.

So the principal function of these family chapels inside of churches was burial. And so these spaces, these crypts technically, which functioned literally as ossuaries, bodies, were inhumated long enough for the flesh to decay and then bones were dismembered and pushed over to make room for successive generations. And so, essentially if you try to get an idea of what this chapel looked like when it was in use 700 years ago, the priest, essentially standing directly on top of the place where the members of the family were entombed, and saying mass for the redemptions of their souls. All of this in the context of this extraordinary decorative program of free-standing altarpiece and then frescoes on the walls as well. And as I mentioned, the artists here are two brothers.

The more famous of the two was named Andrea di Cione, C-I-O-N-E. But Andrea di Cione is better known to posterity by the nickname of Orcagna. Orcagna is sort of a 14th century Florentine pronunciation of the word arcangelo, and arcangelo being archangel. So Andrea di Cione, known by the nickname of Archangel, which in the 14th century was pronounced Orcagna. And he is celebrated not only as a painter but also as a sculptor and as an architect. In fact, his most probably well known a work of art in absolute is the tabernacle in the Church of Orsanmichele. If you remember back to my podcast about the grain market turned church, that marble shrine or sanctuary that surrounds and protects the painting that saved Florence from the Black Death was actually designed and executed by this artist Orcagna or Andrea di Cione. And in the chapel, the Strozzi Chapel, Orcagna was responsible for the altarpiece.

Whereas his brother whose name was Nardo di Cione, less celebrated but important as a 14th century artist, was responsible for the decoration of the walls, the murals which decorate the surrounding walls of the chapel. And it’s a pretty extraordinary thing to see a 14th century chapel survive in its entirety. In other words, this chapel looks today like it did some 700 almost 800 years ago. And that’s a pretty extraordinary thing, because again, what we want to do is to see this art in situ. We want to see this art in its original context. We want to see how people eight centuries ago saw and interacted with this art. And that is, again, one of the most extraordinary things about the City of Florence in that so much of the art is still sitting where it always has and it offers a visitor a pretty extraordinary experience.

Now let’s have a look at the altarpiece first, an altarpiece which simply screams Gothic in style. In fact, if you may remember from my podcast a couple of podcasts ago about the medieval paintings in the Uffizi collection where I gave you the criteria by which to measure Gothic paintings, and this painting in particular fills just about all of those criteria because you’re looking essentially at an altarpiece which has in a polyptych format. Although it’s not physically divided into sections, into different panels, the architecture in fact does suggest a certain amount of division. So we talked about elaborate frames on Gothic paintings, and when you see Orcagna’s altarpiece, you’ll see it is an incredibly elaborate frame which is covered in gold and that the frame actually does organize the picture. It’s divided up essentially into five arched bays in the painting. In other words, there’s a large central arch space which contains the figure of Jesus Christ surrounded by seraphim and then to his left and right two smaller arched bays containing pairs of saints.

And so we talked about compartmentalization being symptomatic of Gothic painting and that’s exactly what we have here. We talked about how gold gilding in the background is symptomatic of Gothic painting. And the background of this painting is completely covered in gold leaf. We talked about two dimensional halos, also characterizing Gothic painting. All of the halos in this painting are in fact two-dimensional. So just about everything about this painting of course screams Gothic, which is not surprising considering, again, we are in the middle of the 14th century.

Now, Christ in the center of the painting looking rather pantocratic. In other words, less human and more divine. I’m not going to go off into this tangent, but it is worth mentioning that this is one of these paintings used to support this post Black Death theory in art. In fact, if you remember back to my discussion of Giotto’s Madonna and child painting in the Uffizi, the Ognissanti Madonna, I talked about how one of the major innovations was the humanizing quality, that the Madonna and the Christ child were looking much more human than they had in previous representations. Yet here, some 40 years later, Christ is returning back to that more Byzantine sort of omnipotent and divine figure.

Now, whether or not this is the result of the Black Death, will probably never be known, but it is curious that the artwork produced certainly after the Black Death, had a tendency to do so. Christ in this very psychedelic kind of context. It’s not quite clear where he is. He seems to be sort of floating in the scene, surrounded by these seraphim, angels. We talked about the fact that they were so close to God that they had no bodies. And so you see these little putti heads surrounded by crossed-over wings, and Jesus actually breaking through the architectural boundaries of the painting in the sense that he extends his right and left hands so that they break the vertical planes of his arched bay. Now, this would of course essentially suggest that although this is kind of an old-fashioned painting in style, obviously the artists had no problem kind of breaking through that hieratic organization that was so typical at the time.

And those figures who surround Jesus. Now you can put your knowledge to the test, right? In my last podcast we talked about saints and symbols and how to recognize certain saints by their various attributes and the symbols that are associated with them. So let’s start with the figure to the lower left of Jesus Christ, who is wearing a black cape and a white rope. Well, the clothing he wears identifies him as a Dominican. And again, you’d have to figure out which one of the Dominicans this is. And you may remember the criteria that I gave you, that a Dominican holding a lily with a red star is St. Dominic, a husky or chubby Dominican is St. Thomas Aquinas, whereas a Dominican friar with a machete knife or conspicuous bloodstain on his head is St. Peter Martyr. Well, this Dominican who’s receiving a book is in fact St. Thomas Aquinas. And I failed to mention at the very beginning of this podcast that the dedication of this chapel is in fact to this celebrated Dominican friar and theologian named St. Thomas Aquinas.

Well, how else could you recognize this Dominican saint? Well, by simply reading the inscription. In fact, the saints are all identified in these sort of cartouches just down below with writing, actually identifying him as San Tommaso d’Aquino. Right? So again, use your eyes, try to read these inscriptions because I think you’ll be amazed at how much of this stuff you can figure out. Now standing above and sort of presenting Aquinas to Jesus Christ is a figure dressed in sort of dark black with a crown on her head. And she of course is none other than the BVM herself, the Blessed Virgin Mary, sort of acting as an intercessor between Aquinas and Jesus Christ. To the left of this group, in the next architectural bay, in other words, in the next vertical section of the painting, we have two saints, both of whom look female, but only one is actually female.

She is holding a large spiked wooden wheel, which if you remember from my last podcast is the defining attribute of Saint Catherine of Alexandria. And then next her, this androgynous looking figure, I said female, but more androgynous, is armed. It’s a winged figure with a sword standing over this slain dragon or beast-like creature below. And that is St. Michael, the Archangel. And St. Michael the Archangel, represented usually as militant and as standing over a defeated dragon because supposedly Michael fought and defeated same in battle.

Okay, let’s go all the way back to Jesus. And with his left hand, Jesus is handing off a set of keys to an older gentleman wearing a yellow toga over a blue robe. And you remember that the keys are the symbols of St. Peter. All right, St. Peter, the keeper of the keys, the first Pope, the petrous, the rock upon which Jesus built his church. And presenting Peter to Jesus, we have this rather hippy looking figure, long hair, long beard, looking rather dazed and confused, dressed up a bit more than he usually is in this painting, but inconfutably of course, SJB, St. John the Baptist, presenting Peter to Christ.

And in the next bay, the next section to the right, two more saints, both of whom are male, one of them standing in the background holding a grid iron or barbecue grill, which I believe you probably never forget, of course, is the symbol of St.Lawrence. You may remember from my last podcast, Lawrence, the patron saint of cooks and chefs because his means of martyrdom was being cooked alive. And then standing in front of him in red is a male figure holding a sword and a bunch of letters. These are the symbols of St. Paul who was martyred by beheading, hence the sword, and who was the author of the famous epistles or letters that were written to various early Christian groups.

And so this assembly of saints looking rather iconic upon this majestic altarpiece, it’s quite large in scale, on the high altar of the chapel itself. Beyond the altarpiece, we look now at the murals, at the wall paintings. And really, all you have to do is step back from the altar, look up. You’ll see the stained glass window, which was actually designed by Nardo di Cione, the same artist who was responsible for the fresco decoration and which you have the Madonna and child above a representation of St.Thomas Aquinas. But because of this tall, what we call a lancet window, because it sort of looks like the top of a lance, it made the disposition of the subject of the wall paintings quite challenging for the artist because the subject of all three walls of the chapel is collectively the Last Judgment, right? A subject that we’ve already seen in several occasions up on the ceiling of the baptistry in the pulpit by Nicola Pisano.

Well, that window is going to make the placement of the central figure of the Last Judgment quite difficult. In fact, if you look at the very top, just above the window and below the pointed arch, you’ll see the figure of Jesus Christ kind of crammed in there, barely any room for him at all. It’s kind of ultimately a pretty reasonable solution to this kind of spatial limitation that you have. So the figure of Jesus, essentially in judgment. And then to either side of him you have angels sounding trumpets, because according to revelation, that will of course be the signal that the end of time or Armageddon is at hand. And then to the left and right of them, further angels, more angels carrying the instruments of the Passion. Remember from our discussion of the baptistry mosaics, these were of course the tools, the instruments used to torture and crucify Jesus Christ. And so just like we saw there and the baptistry ceiling, here too Christ to be reminded of his suffering.

Now if we start to read down on the left-hand side of the window, you’ll see a female figure in a white robe. Now this is the Virgin Mary as she’s described in the Book of Revelation, and again, an apocalyptic Virgin Mary, recognizable because she’s dressed in the moon as the Book of Revelation tells us. So she’s in her sort of uniform for the end of time. And to your left of the Virgin Mary, we have six figures, which of course are six of the 12 Apostles. Now in the corresponding place, to the other side of the window, we’ll have our hippy looking St. John the Baptist also flanked by six figures and these are the remaining six. And so the 12 Apostles, they are bearing witness to the Last Judgment.

Now if we work our way down, let’s stay on that side, the side of John the Baptist, and you move all the way to the bottom of the wall, some of which is actually obstructed by the altarpiece. So it’s not the most elegant, let’s say, of arrangements. But again, the idea that one would have to walk behind the altarpiece to actually see, you’ll beginning to see essentially the separation of people who were going up and those people who are going down. And so of course if we are to Jesus’s left-hand side, we are on the side of the damned. And if you look into the scene, you’ll see various types of figures. But perhaps most surprisingly you’ll see clerics, you can clear the see a Cardinal in the group of the damned, wearing his red distinct flat Cardinal hat. There are bishops in there as well.

Now after Dante wrote the Divine Comedy, it became quite common for clerics, for priests to be depicted in hell. But of course, the Black Death also supported this idea, the Black Death, the great equalizer because it did not distinguish between rich, poor laymen or cleric. And so the idea that just because again you are a priest does not mean that you are a virtuous person. And so you see these clerics grouped in with those figures going to hell. Now to the other side of the window, again, we have this grouping up or separation and you’ll see people crawling out of the ground. This of course, the resurrection of the flesh. So again, those of us who have already died will regain our physical forms so that we can stand in judgment.

Now let us turn our attention, turn all the way to your left-hand side so you’re looking at the wall that forms a corner, forms an angle with the wall that we’ve been looking at so far. So the wall to your left-hand side, which represents paradiso, which represents heaven. And heaven is a very structured and orderly place. And the place of honor at the top of the wall you will see Jesus who is crowned, sitting on a throne, flanked by the Virgin Mary. We didn’t talk about them, but the frescoes in the Campo Santo in Pisa actually look quite similar to these as well. And so Jesus depicted almost as king with his queen at the side. And then the figures around him who are all haloed. They are the blessed, many of them saints who have already entered into heaven.

And I remember seeing this painting for the first time years ago and I immediately thought that the scene of heaven in this particular Last Judgment looked very much like a English soccer stadium. Just everyone’s standing in perfectly ordered rows because the idea of salvation of heaven being an ordered place, that order is something that is divine. Organization is something that is divine. And you see this here where again, this limited number of people going up into heaven, many of whom again are already saints and martyrs who have been given access inside.

So again, if heaven is limited in number, that means a vast majority of us are going to that place on the opposite side of the chapel. And if it’s any consolation, considering what heaven looks like, well hell will be painful, but at least it’s not going to be boring. That is one thing for sure. And so if you turn all the way around and look at the opposite wall now, you can see Nardo di Cione’s representation of hell. And we can immediately recognize this as a post-Dante in hell. Because if you remember from our discussion of the mosaics up on the ceiling of the baptistry where all sinners suffered one punishment, and that was to be eaten by Satan, digested by him, then excreted by him only to have it repeated infinitely over time.

Well, now instead, after Dante published the Inferno first book of the trilogy known as the Divine Comedy, essentially Dante gave architecture to hell. He gave it form, so that different sinners in different places suffering different punishments, all based upon their sins, usurers and alchemists and adulterers and sycophants and what have you as well. And you can clearly see the consequences of this literary work because Nardo di Cione’s hell image in this chapel is very much an architectural and structured one. Now the chapel is kind of a victim of its own dimensions because it’s so narrow that it’s almost impossible for you to get far enough away from the wall to actually see the punishments in the upper registers. But in the lower registers you can see them clear as day. And the stone borders that actually separate the different compartments or sections indicate, they label for you, who exactly is there and why they are there.

So if you’re standing up very close to the wall just to the right of center, you’ll see this compartment with these nude figures sitting down. One of them sits on a stone and clearly legible on the stone is the word alchimisti, in other words, alchemists. This is the section reserved for alchemists. In the stone border just above the alchemists you’ll see in legible Italian it says qui sono puniti di impostori e li indovini so here are punished the impostors and the tricksters. And then coming down in the stone border descending upper left to lower right it says qui si punisce coloro che dettero consiglio fraudolente here are punished those who gave false counsel. And then just below you’ll see another little label with a word ipocriti so hypocrites punished here as well. It’s a very distinct way to essentially teach. It’s a very didactic type of artwork, essentially saying that if you are guilty of this particular sin, this is the type of punishment that you will receive, a very effective way of course to deter people from committing those sins.

And so seeing this hell image, which is not perfectly preserved, you’ll see that there is quite a bit of decay on the wall. Again, considering it’s almost eight centuries old, it’s miraculous that it has been preserved so well. Now curiously, at the very center lowest part of the painting, you’ll see the devil himself and below him you’ll see these three figures. Now this is one of the great debates in history in that the greatest sinners of all are the traitors, those who betray others. And the greatest, the most celebrated traitor of course of all time is Judas, the Apostle of Jesus Christ who turned him in for a mere 30 pieces of silver.

And the debate was whether or not two other very well known traitors should be punished for what they did or it should instead be rewarded. And those traitors were named Brutus and Cassius, those two men responsible for the murder of Julius Caesar. And the interesting thing is that in this hell imagery, there are three people in the deepest circle of hell, which means that of course this artist, following on Dante’s opinion that in fact Brutus and Cassius were traitors, were not tyrannicides. In other words, instead of thinking that what they did was to try to eliminate a bad person in the person Julius Caesar, they instead are seen as traitors to a great cause and murderers nonetheless. And so three represented in this particular scene and more proof that obviously works of art were, across media, whether literary or pictorial or musical or what have you, influencing each other. And you see it here in the visual manifestation of the hell image in this particular chapel.

So the Strozzi Chapel surviving perfectly intact over the eight centuries from when it was created to where we are today and giving us a really good example of a medieval 14th century decorative complex in situ, seeing how the art actually interacted with its surroundings. And with that we’ll finish up our discussion of the Strozzi Chapel in Santa Maria Novella. And in my next podcast, I’ll actually be addressing some of the questions that you sent to me in our last call for questions. Very intriguing, new and challenging questions for me as well. So stay tuned for more.

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