This landmark volume of thirty-two essays encapsulates the current state of knowledge about this major parish church and opens up new paths for research into its economic, political, ecclesiastical, and artistic history, from late antiquity to the Second World War. Arising out of the San Lorenzo project initiated in 2007 by Joseph Connors, then director of I Tatti, the book is an invaluable resource for students of Florentine culture.
Robert Gaston's illuminating introduction reviews the volume's contents, signals crucial issues raised in individual essays, and foregrounds the project's aim to make fuller use of San Lorenzo's rich but underexploited archive. His own essay, on the sources detailing the institutional history of the church and its place in the community, balances traditional emphasis on the Renaissance with perspectives from 1600 to 1944, showing particularly how the history compiled by its nineteenth-century canon, Domenico Moreni, shaped modern research. George Dameron asserts San Lorenzo's continuing contribution to Florence's late medieval preeminence, despite its displacement by 987 as the main sacramental and spiritual center of the city, with the transfer of the relics of its first bishop, San Zanobi, to the cathedral. William Day examines its economic foundations in this period in urban property holdings. David Peterson's absorbing narrative of the cooperation of the laity in the clergy's ambitions for renewal, setting the Renaissance church in the context of the ecclesiastical establishment, reframes the vexed question of the aims of Medici patronage as Medici takeover or parochial handoff.
As Gaston observes, liturgical history and devotional practices are among subjects inviting further investigation. John Stinson examines the content, music, and notation of early liturgical books, and Laura and Marco Battaglia establish that before Medici patronage, liturgical manuscripts were mainly in-house products. Peter Howard admits “how little we know about the regular content of what was said to parishioners,” but asserts the importance of preaching at San Lorenzo and the star power of the highly educated preachers most sought after by its Medici patrons. Robert Black notes that the curriculum of the school of San Lorenzo established by Cosimo in 1459, second only to that of the cathedral, was secular, not religious.
Surveying excavations from 1912 to 2008, Francesco Baglioni advocates for a more informed recovery and conservation process when dealing with objects from the site of San Lorenzo, arguing especially for non-invasive investigations. Three essays are devoted to the epic rebuilding, begun in the Quattrocento, that replaced the Romanesque basilica. Jack Wasserman examines its dimensions and the topography of the site to highlight problems in the construction of the church. Pietro Ruschi, reconsidering Brunelleschi's sources and the transformation from auctoritas romana to rinascenza fiorentina, evokes the spirit of his trips to Rome with Donatello to measure classical buildings. Marvin Trachtenberg gets down to tin tacks, examining Brunelleschi's fabrication of classical detailing in the joins in the corner pilasters of the Old Sacristy, noting that the architect used examples from the Pantheon and from Florence's Baptistery, which he regarded as equally authentic.
Christa Gardner von Teuffel's magisterial and exhaustive survey of the altarpieces of San Lorenzo, surviving or lost, shows that patrons of chapels, often Medici allies pressured to finance them, adhered in their construction to Brunelleschi's prescriptions for uniformity, promulgated by the chapter in a decree of 1434. While some patrons distinguished themselves in their decoration of chapels by embracing the new altarpiece form, square and unadorned, others transferred their gabled golden altarpieces from Old San Lorenzo. Most parishioners perpetuated their own memory by dedicating altarpieces to the patron saints of their lineages. Riccardo Pacciani documents the use of curtains and other partitions to divide the internal space of the church, while Matthew Cohen's acute observation of Antonio Rossellino's friezes of angels on the nave capitals discerns a reference to the agnus dei and seven-sealed book of the Apocalypse, which appears in the fresco above the entrance to the Medici chapel. Paul Barolsky links the apocalyptic lamb to the iconography of Giovanni di Bicci de’ Medici's Old Sacristy.
A trio of essays considers the great sixteenth-century additions to the church by Michelangelo. In her study of the Laurentian Library, commissioned by the Medici pope Clement VII, Sylvia Catitti considers the impact of patronage on its unique design, demonstrating that although it adheres more closely to Michelangelo's ideas than any other of his buildings, it is a vibrant collaboration between patron and artist. William Wallace sees 1520 as a turning point in Michelangelo's career, with the artist's attention shifting from Medici pope Leo X's cancellation of the commission for the facade of San Lorenzo, and his subsequent disappointment and humiliation, to the challenge of creating the New Sacristy. Wallace's account of the sculptor's business, the practical problems of quarrying and transporting marble, of theft and broken boats, is fascinating. Jonathan Nelson takes up the story of Michelangelo's first creation, in the New Sacristy, commissioned by cardinal Giulio de’ Medici, later Clement VII, of an architectural framework for sculpture, where contemporaries saw a heroic beauty in the same contrasting themes of day and night, life and death, that Michelangelo explored in his poems.
Sheryl Reiss discusses praise and blame for these commissions in her essay, spanning five centuries, on the patronage of the Medici popes at San Lorenzo, observing that just as nowadays images of Michelangelo's drawing for the unfinished facade are projected onto it, for the 1515 visit of Leo X a life-sized relief with Medici emblems was hung on the facade like a billboard, to encourage the patronage of the popes. Moving to the patronage of the Medici grand dukes, Emanuela Ferretti sees Cosimo I asserting the continuity of the Medici role as protectors of the basilica, embracing the Tridentine program in conserving its early Christian and Renaissance elements, even though his family had no actual ius patronatus. Alessandro Cecchi also discerns, in his commission to Pontormo to fresco the choir, a desire to demonstrate continuity with Cosimo il Vecchio. Cecchi reconstructs the frescoes, painted over after their Mannerist figures and esoteric program fell out of fashion. Barbara Furlotti sees both a tribute and a challenge to the patronage of his Medici in-laws in the festival staged by Paolo Orsini in the piazza before San Lorenzo, where Francesca Fantappiè tells us the Medici of Lorena distributed dowries.
The Cappella dei Principi was the last really ambitious building begun in Medici Florence, by the extraordinarily wealthy Ferdinando I. Andrew Morrogh traces two centuries of its construction in his authoritative account of this highly original building and its decoration in hard stones of unparalleled richness. Cristina Strunck notes the contribution of Ferdinando's wife to this enterprise, particularly after his death. Francesco Martelli discusses the mediation between court and chapter by Duke Cosimo III's secretary, a canon of San Lorenzo, and Elena Ciletti describes how the eruditi advised the last of the Medici, Electress Palatine Anna Maria Luisa, on the preservation and rehabilitation of San Lorenzo in the mid-eighteenth century.
After the grand duchy of Tuscany passed to the house of Lorraine, its members took particular pride in the Biblioteca Laurenziana. Paschalis Kitromilides surveys its readership, while Monica Bietti locates the Sagrestia Nuova and the Cappelle Medicei, with their collections of Medici treasures, between museum and sacred space after 1864, when, following the unification of Italy, they were classified as national monuments.
The last essay, by Sonia Caruso, ends where the first began. Despite profound transformations in church and state and the rise of new radical parish associations, the chapter and lay confraternities continued to succor their people. During the terrible years of war, the church offered material, moral, and spiritual aid to its parishioners. Among them was Count Ginori Lisci. The omnipresence of the church resonates in the title of his 1975 autobiography, A settant'anni suonati.
