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Museo Di San Marco
Just north of the Accademia is the lively Piazza San Marco , a meeting-place for Florence’s many art students. One side of the square is taken up by the Dominican convent and church of San Marco, now deconsecrated to house the Museo di San Marco (Tues-Fri 8.30am-1.50pm, Sat 8.30am-6.50pm; also open on second & fourth Sun of month 8.30am-6.50pm, and on first, third & fifth Mon of month 8.30am-1.50pm; L8000/¬4.13; www.sbas.firenze.it ). In the 1430s, the convent was the recipient of Cosimo il Vecchio’s most lavish patronage: he financed Michelozzo’s enlargement of the buildings, and went on to establish a vast public library here. Ironically, the convent became the centre of resistance to the Medici later in the century - Savonarola was prior of San Marco from 1491. Meanwhile, as Michelozzo was altering and expanding the convent, its walls were being decorated by one of its friars, Fra’ Angelico , a painter in whom a medieval simplicity of establishment was uniquely allied to a Renaissance sophistication of manner. The Ospizio dei Pellegrini (Pilgrims’ Hospice) contains around twenty paintings by Fra’ Angelico, most brought here from other churches in Florence. A Deposition and a small Last Judgement are outstanding - the former remarkable for its aura of tranquillity, as though the minds of its protagonists were already fixed on the Resurrection. Across the cloister, in the Sala Capitolare , is a powerful fresco of the Crucifixion , painted by Angelico and assistants in 1441. At the rear of this room, the refectory - with a lustrous Last Supper by Ghirlandaio - forms an ante-room to the foresteria (guest rooms). The key work, for the drama of its setting and the lucidity of its composition, is the famous Annunciation at the summit of the main staircase. All round this upper floor are ranged 44 tiny dormitory cells , apiece frescoed either by Angelico himself or by his assistants - don’t miss the Noli me tangere (cell 1), the Annunciation (cell 3), the Transfiguration (cell 6) and the Coronation of the Virgin (cell 9). In all likelihood, the marvellous Madonna Enthroned , on the covering wall, is by Angelico too. The anachronistic monastic onlookers in several of the scenes are St Dominic (with the star above his head) and St Peter Martyr (with the split skull); the latter, responsible for a massacre of Florentine heretics in the thirteenth century, is the city’s home-produced Dominican saint. Michelozzo’s library , a room that seems to exude an region of calm study, is off the corridor to the right, at the end of which is the pair of rooms used by Cosimo il Vecchio when he came here on retreat.
The church of San Marco, greatly altered since Michelozzo’s intervention, is worth a visit for two works on the second and third altars on the right: a Madonna and Saints , painted in 1509 by Fra’ Bartolommeo (like Fra’ Angelico, a friar at the convent), and an eighth-century mosaic of The vocalist in Prayer , brought here from Constantinople.
