Chiesa di Santa Maria Maggiore: An Historic Marian Church in Florence
Site at a Glance
- Rating
- 4.6
- Popularity
- Low
- Country
- Italy
- Primary era
- Medieval
- External website
- Open
- Eras represented
- Medieval, Early Modern, Modern
- Civilizations
- Grand Duchy of Tuscany, Republic of Florence
- Site type
- Religious
- Remains
- Church
On this page18 sections
History
Chiesa di Santa Maria Maggiore is a Roman Catholic church in Florence, Italy, dedicated to the Virgin Mary and standing in the city’s historic centre. One of Florence’s oldest churches and among its earliest Marian foundations, it occupies the corner of Piazza Santa Maria Maggiore and Via de’ Cerretani.
Early foundations and medieval development
A church with a different structure may have occupied the site as early as the eighth century, perhaps during the Lombard period. The church is first mentioned in 931, when a document referred to property near it, while an unequivocal reference dates from 1021. The tradition that Pope Pelagius II founded the church in 580 is not regarded as historically reliable.
Santa Maria Maggiore already stood in this area before Florence’s Matildine walls were built in 1078. A northern section of the reorganized late-antique Roman walls probably ran beside the church’s north side along present-day Via de’ Cerretani. This stretch of the walls appears to have predated the siege of Florence by the Gothic leader Radagaisus in 405–406.
In 1176 the church became a collegiate church, meaning that it was served by an organized chapter of clergy, and one of Florence’s twelve ancient priories, important ecclesiastical institutions governed by a prior. Its chapter included a body of canons. The archive preserves numerous notarial records from 1107 to 1520, including gifts and purchases of land and buildings that reveal the community’s considerable wealth.
Pope Lucius III placed Santa Maria Maggiore under direct papal protection in 1183, and Pope Urban III confirmed that arrangement in 1186. The protection continued into the following century. After the church passed to the Cistercians, a Catholic monastic order founded in the eleventh century that emphasized strict Benedictine discipline, it was rebuilt in Gothic form during the thirteenth century. Parts of the earlier external walls and vaults may have been retained. Giorgio Vasari attributed the rebuilding to Master Buono, an uncertainly identified master builder, while another tradition possibly connected it with Arnolfo di Cambio.
Decline and religious reorganization
The church’s finances and institutional importance declined during the fifteenth century. During a pastoral visit in 1514, Giulio de’ Medici described its condition as deteriorated. In 1515 Pope Leo X united it with the chapter of Florence Cathedral, and the prior resigned his office in 1520.
In 1521 the church passed to the Reformed Carmelites of the Mantuan Congregation. The Carmelites were a mendicant order associated with Mount Carmel, and the community had previously been established at the church of San Barnaba. Several confraternities also met in the church and its annexes, including the Company of Saint Joseph of the Woodworkers and the Company of the Nocentino.
Seventeenth-century remodelling
A major remodelling of the complex took place during the first half of the seventeenth century. Gherardo Silvani directed the interior work, probably following an earlier design by Bernardo Buontalenti. Silvani was a Florentine architect and sculptor associated with the transition from late Renaissance architecture to the Baroque, while Buontalenti was a Florentine architect, engineer, and designer.
The interior subsequently gained additional altars, altarpieces, stucco, and fresco decoration during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. The Carmelites abandoned the church in the early nineteenth century. In 1817 they were replaced by the Clerics Regular Ministers to the Sick, commonly called the Camillians, a Catholic order especially devoted to caring for the sick.
Restoration and later identity
Restoration campaigns in 1912–1913 and before 1916 removed the plaster that had covered the rough-stone facade and stripped much of the Baroque decoration from the interior. The presbytery decoration was dismantled, exposing fragments of medieval frescoes while disrupting the former unity of the interior scheme. After the Florence flood, the floor was completely rebuilt.
Chiesa di Santa Maria Maggiore forms part of the Historic Centre of Florence, which was inscribed as a UNESCO World Heritage Site in 1982. The church remains a parish church, and the former convent has also been used for exhibitions and other cultural activities.
A long-standing claim that the church contained the burial of Salvino degli Armati, traditionally credited with inventing spectacles, was disproved in 1920. Both the supposed inventor and the story of the invention were shown to be seventeenth-century fabrications.
Remains
The surviving complex combines a comparatively austere rough-stone exterior, a medieval bell tower, a sixteenth-century convent cloister, and a Gothic interior reshaped by later Baroque decoration. Inside, a nave and two aisles are divided into three bays and covered by groin vaults, formed where two barrel vaults intersect. Pointed arches rest on square-section piers, while the side aisles retain richer seventeenth- and eighteenth-century decoration than the comparatively bare central nave.
Exterior and medieval structures
Facade and portals
The exterior has rough stone walls and portals crowned by tympana, the triangular or curved panels above doorways. Alfonso Parigi the Elder designed a marble facade that was never built. The existing stone facade was formerly coated with plain plaster, which was removed during the restoration of 1912–1913.
The central western portal is Gothic. Its pointed gable contains an ogival lunette and a statue of the Madonna and Child, a copy of a fourteenth-century marble work from the Pisan school. Three partly legible coats of arms appear in the tympanum, including papal arms and those of the Florentine Cathedral Chapter. A Panciatichi coat of arms is visible higher on the right.
The Via de’ Cerretani elevation has another portal with an empty coat of arms in its broken tympanum and two tall Gothic windows. The vault key of the second window bears an Orlandini coat of arms. Beside the sacristy window, the canonry wall carries a Carnesecchi coat of arms, a 1929 inscription referring to the seventh year of the Fascist era, and another emblem of the Florentine Cathedral Chapter.
A plaque on the same wall quotes Dante on the enduring paternal image impressed on his mind by his teacher. A further portal on the Via de’ Cerretani elevation is surmounted by a Christogram within a broken tympanum.
Bell tower and Berta
The surviving Romanesque bell tower may have been built over part of a Roman defensive tower. A fragment of a Roman funerary inscription is incorporated into its fabric. Each side has two rows of arched single-light openings, whose brick arches are decorated above with brick circles.
On 20 March 1630 the upper part of the tower, including the belfry, began to be demolished because it was considered unsafe. The bells were moved to a bell-gable at the rear of the church. The demolition also required the relocation of an ancient head formerly set in the tower. Probably taken from a Roman funerary monument, the female head is now embedded in the wall along Via de’ Cerretani and is popularly called Berta.
Berta’s origin remains uncertain, and traditional stories became attached to the head. One concerns a vegetable seller who donated a bell; another tells of a sacristan supposedly turned to stone after confronting the condemned astrologer Cecco d’Ascoli.
Former convent cloister
The rear cloister of the former convent dates from the sixteenth century. Its two levels of round arches, some blocked, are supported by Tuscan columns and half-columns in stone. The vaulted portico is decorated with architectural frescoes.
Interior and liturgical spaces
Counterfacade and nave
The counterfacade was renewed in 1595–1596, probably following a design by Bernardo Buontalenti, and is faced with pietra serena, a fine-grained gray sandstone widely used in Florentine architecture. Above the entrance is a marble singers’ gallery with a balustrade. The former pipe organ survives through its case and facade.
The counterfacade includes Cigoli’s painting of Saint Albert the Carmelite rescuing Jews from the River Platano, made around 1596. It also has Pier Dandini’s Saint Liborius in Glory and a lunette of the Madonna and Child, Domenico Cresti’s Pentecost, and a fragmentary early fifteenth-century fresco of the Madonna of the Milk attributed to the Master of 1416.
Fourteenth-century frescoes of saints survive on the right half-pillar of the counterfacade and on the first square pier on the right side of the nave. They are attributed to Mariotto di Nardo and dated approximately 1390–1395.
Presbytery
The presbytery occupies the rectangular apse and rises several steps above the nave. Its rear wall contains a tall bifora, a window divided into two openings by a central support. The present high altar and ambo are made of stone. The altar is Neo-Gothic, with a table carried on pointed arches over small columns, and the pipe organ stands behind it.
Late fourteenth-century frescoes on the presbytery walls depict episodes from the Stories of Herod and the Massacre of the Innocents. They are attributed to Jacopo di Cione and dated approximately 1395–1400. The earlier decoration of the Cappella Maggiore included scenes from the lives of the Virgin and Saint Anthony Abbot, of which a fragment depicting the Massacre of the Innocents survives. Vasari also recorded a Coronation of the Virgin surrounded by angels by Agnolo Gaddi for the former high altarpiece.
Chapels and their decoration
Right-hand chapels
The first chapel on the right was founded by Bandino Panciatichi in 1370 and remodelled between 1629 and 1636. Its altar has Domenico Pugliani’s signed and dated 1636 painting of the Communion of Saint Mary Magdalene. Pugliani also painted the accompanying frescoes of Saint Albert the Bishop and Saint Teresa, the latter badly deteriorated. Giuseppe Pinzani painted the vault fresco of the Glory of Saint Mary Magdalene.
A Lamentation over the Dead Christ by Botticelli was associated with this chapel from about 1495–1500. It was probably the work now in the Poldi Pezzoli Museum in Milan.
The second chapel on the right belonged to the Orlandini del Beccuto family. Its former altarpiece, a Martyrdom of Saint Blaise begun by Ottavio Vannini and completed after his death in 1644 by Antonio Giusti, is now in the deposits of the Florentine Galleries. The present altar painting is Primo Conti’s signed and dated 1949 Saint Rita of Cascia. Vannini and Giusti also worked on the side paintings of Saint Michael the Archangel and Saint John the Evangelist around 1640–1645, while the vault contains a Glory of Saint Blaise.
The fourth chapel on the right was founded by Zanobi Carnesecchi and remodelled in the late sixteenth century. Bernardino Poccetti painted scenes from the Life of Saint Zenobius in the vault. Giovanni Caccini made statues of Saint Bartholomew and Saint Zenobius, and Pier Dandini painted the altarpiece of the Stigmata of Saint Francis.
Chapel beside the apse
The chapel to the left of the apse was founded by Bernardo Carnesecchi in 1449. Its eighteenth-century polychrome marble altar has a frame of two Corinthian columns supporting a broken pediment. At its centre is Giovanni di Francesco’s fresco of the Crucifixion.
The chapel also contains a polychrome relief of the Madonna and Child, made from a wooden panel covered with raised plaster that was painted and gilded. It was traditionally dated to the thirteenth century and attributed to Coppo di Marcovaldo, but restoration research has reinterpreted it as possibly a Byzantine work of the twelfth century.
An inscription found on a column in 1751 identifies the tomb of Brunetto Latini, a thirteenth-century Florentine notary, writer, and teacher traditionally regarded as an important mentor of Dante. The chapel also contains a sarcophagus with a recumbent effigy attributed to the circle of Tino di Camaino and dated to the beginning of the fourteenth century.
Left-hand chapels
The last chapel on the left, belonging to the Orlandini, was rebuilt in 1642. Senator Francesco Orlandini erected its marble altar to the Madonna of Mount Carmel, which is associated with the Madonna reliquary now in the Carnesecchi chapel. Baldassarre Franceschini, known as Volterrano, painted the chapel’s frescoes in the same year.
These works include The Chariot of Elijah in the vault, an early fully Baroque example of illusionistic ceiling painting in Florence, together with angels carrying scrolls. The lunettes depict the Old and New Law, while the front of the chapel represents Humility and Virginity. Early eighteenth-century statues of Purity by Lorenzo Merlini and Innocence by Giovanni Camillo Cateni also survive. The present altarpiece is Francesco Collina’s 1897 relief of the Crucifixion with Saint Camillus de Lellis, Saint Mary Magdalene, and Saint Michael the Archangel.
The second chapel on the left was founded by Paolo Carnesecchi in 1406. It formerly held the Carnesecchi Triptych, made around 1423 by Masolino and Masaccio, painters associated with the development of Renaissance naturalism. Its known surviving elements include a Madonna and Child, now stolen, Masolino’s Saint Julian in the diocesan deposit of Santo Stefano al Ponte, and a predella showing Saint Julian killing his parents in the Ingres Museum at Montauban. A frescoed Annunciation by Paolo Uccello was formerly positioned above the triptych.
The Carnesecchi chapel was renewed in the 1670s by Giovanni Buonaventura Carnesecchi. Giovanni Montini painted the side canvases of Saint Catherine of Alexandria and Blessed Margaret of Cortona in the early 1670s. After Montini’s illness and death, Onorio Marinari was commissioned in 1672 or 1673 to paint Christ Appearing to Saint Mary Magdalene of Pazzi. The work was probably completed in 1674.
The first chapel on the left belongs to the Boni family and preserves Matteo Rosselli’s signed and dated 1634 painting, The Virgin Offering the Child to Saint Francis.
Organ and dispersed artworks
The present pipe organ is Mascioni opus 893, built in 1967. It has a single body, a case limited to the base, and a facade of principal pipes with mitred mouths arranged in a palisade, with two lateral cusps and a central wing. Its console lies beneath the last arch between the central and right aisles. The instrument has two 61-note keyboards, a 32-note concave-radial pedalboard, and electric transmission.
Several important works formerly housed in the church are now elsewhere. Botticelli’s Saint Sebastian, painted around 1473–1474, is in the Gemäldegalerie in Berlin. His Lamentation over the Dead Christ, dated approximately 1495, is in the Poldi Pezzoli Museum in Milan. Elements of the Carnesecchi Triptych are associated with the diocesan museum of Santo Stefano al Ponte and the Horne Museum in Florence.
