WTI Magazine #31    2014 May, 22
Author : Enrico De Iulis      Translation by:

Florence, like many other Italian cities, never ceases to amaze: not only because of the many famous works of art and places of culture, popular all around the world, but also for not well known sites, lesser-famous but still beautiful, unusual and secluded at the same time. This is exactly the case of the former church of San Pancrazio in Florence.

Probably the structure has an early Christian foundation which has undergone many changes over the centuries, the two most important being the one of the fifteenth century, when the cloister, the dormitory and the refectory for the Dominican friars who had been assigned to the church were attached to the building; and the one in the mid-eighteenth century, when the architect Ruggeri included a painted dome in the center of the transept.

With the fall and the suppression of many religious orders during the Napoleonic reign, the church began a court, then a warehouse, then a tobacco factory and finally met a gradual period of neglect.

In 1976 the wind changes again for this beautiful place, which has accumulated all the traces of its history, of its changes and of the influential personalities who used it and modified it: starts in 1976 the project to make St. Pancrazio the site of the new museum dedicated to Marino Marini, one of the most important Italian sculptors of the twentieth century.

The interior space was remodeled in order to be able to set up all two hundred works by the artist with the criteria of size, history, exhibition of sketches, paintings, and a full immersion enjoyment of an amazing space, which shows so many things: walkways and contemporary paths, nineteenth-century industrial beams, frescoed domes of the eighteenth century, Renaissance building structures and substructures and a Romanesque crypt: something extremely rare to find altogether.

This rarity becomes unique when entering the museum you turn into the chapel immediately to the left. There you hold your breath, focusing your eyes and trying to skip the surprise in observing an object of abnormal shape and supreme decoration: the Temple of the Holy Sepulchre in the Rucellai chapel.

Giovanni Rucellai, whose palace is adjacent to the church, commissioned in the mid-1400s his tomb to Leon Baptist Alberti, in the image of what was then thought to be the form of the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem. Leon Battista Alberti, who had previously worked in the same neighborhood for the Rucellai family for the design of its building, the lodge and the church of Santa Maria Novella, outdoes himself in elegance and style.

The temple is one of the most representative artworks of the Florentine Renaissance, which was born also thanks to Alberti himself, his studies and his works of marble geometry. The entire outer perimeter of the walls of the tomb is divided into large white and dark green marble squares, each of which has a significant symbol for the Rucellai family: the entire "object" turns out to be as clean as possible in form and color, up to the limit of the ideal, an almost alien perfection hardly to believe at a first glance in a work dated 1476, the year of the ending of the Chapel. Inside the tomb, we find a small room with Rucellai's frescoed tomb: a visionary client with a sense of elegance and a taste as big as the wisdom of his favorite architect.