Basilica di Santo Spirito: Brunelleschi's Last Dream and Michelangelo's Crucifix
Why is it significant?
Look at the facade and enjoy the joke: the greatest church of the Oltrarno has no real front at all, just a smooth plastered wall with a gentle curved outline, as if someone had sketched a facade and never come back to finish it. In a way, that is exactly what happened.
Key Facts
| Place | Basilica di Santo Spirito: Brunelleschi's Last Dream and Michelangelo's Crucifix |
|---|---|
| Address | Piazza Santo Spirito 30, 50125 Firenze FI, Italy |
| Geo Coordinates | 43.76740, 11.24840 |
| Part of Walk | Florence Across the Arno: Oltrarno Artisans, Santo Spirito & San Frediano |
| Generated | Generated |
Look at the facade and enjoy the joke: the greatest church of the Oltrarno has no real front at all, just a smooth plastered wall with a gentle curved outline, as if someone had sketched a facade and never come back to finish it. In a way, that is exactly what happened.
The plan was Filippo Brunelleschi's, the man who had built the dome of the cathedral. He designed Santo Spirito in the 1430s as a perfect geometric machine: everything measured in one module, columns of grey pietra serena, a ring of nearly forty identical semicircular chapels all around the building. He even wanted the church turned round to face the river, so that boatmen on the Arno would see it. The neighbours would not give up their houses, and Brunelleschi died in 1446, with only the first columns in place.
Those who came after him changed his ideas, and he could no longer object. His rippling outer wall of chapels was hidden behind a straight one, and the debate about the facade lasted so long that it was simply never built. Step inside when the doors are open, though, and you will feel what he meant: a forest of columns, calm, grey and white, all in proportion.
Now the secret. Around 1492, a teenage sculptor named Michelangelo Buonarroti was allowed by the prior of the Augustinian convent to study the bodies of the dead from the convent's hospital. Dissection was risky, forbidden for most people, and he worked at night, by candlelight. In gratitude, the story goes, he carved a wooden crucifix for the church: a slender, naked Christ, young and almost weightless.
For centuries the crucifix was lost, overpainted, forgotten. It was identified in the 1960s and today hangs in the sacristy, a teenager's tribute to the men who let him learn anatomy. Leave the church, turn right along Via Sant'Agostino, then right again into Via de' Serragli, and follow it north to the river and the bridge at its end.