Ognissanti: Botticelli and the Vespucci
Why is it significant?
Piazza d'Ognissanti opens onto the river, and on its north side stands the church of Ognissanti, All Saints, with a Baroque façade and a glazed terracotta lunette over the door. It looks calm and a little provincial. Inside, it is crowded with famous neighbours.
Key Facts
| Place | Ognissanti: Botticelli and the Vespucci |
|---|---|
| Address | Borgo Ognissanti 42, 50123 Firenze FI, Italy |
| Geo Coordinates | 43.77260, 11.24570 |
| Part of Walk | The Medici Quarter of Florence: Palaces, Tombs and Rivals from San Lorenzo to Santa Maria Novella |
| Generated | Generated |
Piazza d'Ognissanti opens onto the river, and on its north side stands the church of Ognissanti, All Saints, with a Baroque façade and a glazed terracotta lunette over the door. It looks calm and a little provincial. Inside, it is crowded with famous neighbours.
The church was founded in the 1250s by the Umiliati, a religious order that worked wool and ran a cloth business by the river, so this was an industrial quarter as much as a pious one. The façade you see was added in the 1600s. In the fifteenth century this was the parish of the Vespucci, a family of merchants close to the Medici, and of a painter called Sandro Botticelli.
In a chapel on the right, Domenico Ghirlandaio painted the Madonna of Mercy for the Vespucci, around 1472, sheltering the family under her outstretched cloak. Tradition says one of the young faces is Amerigo Vespucci. Amerigo later worked for a branch of the Medici in Seville, sailed to the New World, and in 1507 a German mapmaker named the new continent America after him. So a whole continent is named after a boy from this parish.
Botticelli was buried here in 1510, under a simple round tombstone. In the same church lies Simonetta Vespucci, the celebrated beauty who died young in 1476. Legend says she was the model for his Venus, and that he asked to be buried at her feet... no document proves it, but Florentines have never stopped telling it. On the walls of the nave, Botticelli's Saint Augustine and Ghirlandaio's Saint Jerome, both painted in 1480, still face each other like rivals in a contest.
Giotto's great Ognissanti Madonna once hung here too, before it moved to the Uffizi. Now walk east along Borgo Ognissanti and on into Via della Vigna Nuova, to a palace whose façade looks like a lesson in geometry.