Church of Ognissanti, Florence

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The Church of Ognissanti, Florence (Chiesa di Ognissanti), in piazza d'Ognisanti,^[1] is a Franciscan church founded by the lay order of the Umiliati, who devoted their lives to physical labour, producing cloth and glass for the glory of God, and to strict personal poverty, which brought them into uneasy friction with the Church.

The church was dedicated to all the saints and martyrs, known and unknown. It was completed during the 1250s, but almost completely rebuilt on Baroque designs of Bartolomeo Pettirossi, about 1627, with a façade— by Matteo Nigetti, 1637^[2]— that conserved the grand glazed terracotta lunette in the manner of the Della Robbia, now attributed to Benedetto Buglioni, over the doorway: Ognissanti was among the first examples of Baroque architecture to penetrate this Renaissance city. Its two orders of pilasters enclose niches and windows with fantastical cornices. To the left of the façade is a campanile of thirteenth and fourteenth century construction.

The Umiliati, by the dedication and probity of the lay brothers and sisters, gained a reputation in Florence, and dedicated works of art began to accumulate in their severely simple church. Giotto's celebrated Madonna and Child with angels, now in the Uffizi, was painted for the high altar, about 1310. During the sixteenth century the Umiliati declined in energy, and the Franciscan order assumed control of the church in 1571, bringing precious relics such as the robe Saint Francis of Assisi wore.

Saint Jerome in his Study, fresco by Domenico Ghirlandaio, 1480

In the interior, the Baroque remodelling, which provided a completely rebuilt apse with a pietre dure high altar^[3] and a sotto in su perpective (1770) on the vaulted nave ceiling, preserved quattrocento frescoes in the nave chapels, by Ghirlandaio and Botticelli, who is buried in the church.^[4] Botticelli's fresco of Saint Augustine in his Study, balances Ghirlandaio's Saint Jerome in his Study in the chapel facing it across the navel, both executed in 1480. Perhaps the greatest of Ognissanti's frescoes is Ghirlandaio's Last Supper in the refectory between the two cloisters, a work with which Leonardo was intimately familiar.

In the Vespucci chapel, a fresco by Domenico Ghirlandaio with his brother David (about 1472), of the Madonna della Misericordia protecting members of the Vespucci family, is reputed to include the portrait of Amerigo Vespucci as a child.

Over the door to the sacristy is a crucifix in wood by Veit Stoss.

[edit] Notes

^ It gives its name to the borgo, one of the traditional divisions of Florence.
^ It was restored in 1872.
^ Built to a design by Jacopo Ligorio
^ A small round stone in a chapel of the right transept marks his resting-place