Pazzi Chapel

The Pazzi Chapel ( Cappella dei Pazzi ) is next to the Pazzi conspiracy another great legacy of the Pazzi family. The chapel was built under the direction of Filippo Brunelleschi in the Franciscan church of Santa Croce in Florence.

After several previous agreements, the construction was started in 1442. The chapel was one of the incunabula of Renaissance architecture, austere and unobtrusive. It is built serena -called gray stone from the pietra and decorated with white marble inlays; it is, fanned out in the Tondi in the interior by no other colors. A hemisphere as a dome ( Brunelleschi's death after his plans were completed ) covers a cubical sacristy for the Franciscan church: here it was the Pazzi allowed to bury their dead.

Specifications

At the edge of the first cloister on the south side of S. Croce is a building that was largely built after plans by Brunelleschi, the chapter house of the former monastery, the Pazzi Chapel in the years 1430-1461. At the start of construction Brunelleschi had but to live only four years, the chapel was completed only 15 years after his death, so that we assume that there is another architect must be held responsible for framing.

The Pazzi were a noble family which was subject to the Medici in the struggle for power. Your chapel is a central building, so follow in his plan the architectural ideal of the Renaissance architecture. The Renaissance tried, though at a Church of the layout was specified as the longhouse - to realize at least a part of the Church their idealized central building - as well as here in S. Croce. When Dom had been the entire eastern building with the huge dome. Here and in S. Lorenzo there are chapels.

The Pazzi Chapel is one of the ten years previous dome to the most important buildings of the early Renaissance. It begins with a portico, supported by six Corinthian columns. The vault of the porch repeated its coffered ceiling antique models - now consider the addition of Giuliano da Maiano, 1460 ( Jestaz, p 521). This porch is the symbolic rest of the cloister, was on the medieval chapter house. The Pazzi Chapel reached significant proportions, is so much greater than the chapter houses of the Middle Ages.

The interior design, which largely coincides apparently with Brunelleschi's plans, is not just an evolution of the basic and elevation of the Old Sacristy of S. Lorenzo of 1421 The whole room is extremely refined and delicate proportions determined ( Pilastermotiv at the corners. Mean rectangle is not only an extension and repeat to the right arm system, but also as the lower part to the inner arc design of the other wall. Simultaneously it is grouped with the left adjacent square to the wall design of the left wall, which in turn repeats the arch motif in the area. such geometric mesh interleaves the traditional impression of a simple four- walls -space is obscured ).

Especially in the Kapitellzonen can be seen, has worked with filigree which means Brunelleschi to blur the impression the corner. Some capitals are not flat, but so broken in that they belong to two walls.

The arc forms the main room to be repeated in the three walls of the two short lateral spaces and also draw on the ceiling above, so that the entire space is determined by the mesh - smoothing of these basic shapes. In addition to the arc is repeated according to this principle in different stages and the circle motif. It first appears in the dome of the vestibule and then in different variations in the main room. It will not - as in the Old Sacristy of S. Lorenzo - the wall designs side by side, but partially folded into one another, whereby the dome itself is included. Right at the entrance façade is clear that even here in the combination of vertical, slender columns and the entrance arch the central design principle of the interior is anticipated.