Pazzi Chapel

Andrea de' Pazzi, head of the banking family that would later conspire against the Medici, put up the funds for this chapter house at Santa Croce in 1429, though construction did not begin until around 1442 and dragged on, unfinished at Brunelleschi's death in 1446, into the 1470s. Tradition credits the whole design to Brunelleschi, and the plan — a domed square behind a six-column portico, its pietra serena pilasters and roundels laid over plain masonry like drawn lines rather than load-bearing members — is consistent with his other Florentine work. But the attribution has never been fully secure: contemporary scholarship increasingly separates Brunelleschi's initial scheme from the building actually executed and detailed, crediting the portico and much of the ornament to other hands, Giuliano da Maiano's among the names proposed. Luca della Robbia's glazed terracotta roundels of the apostles inside are certain, and independently dated later still. What survives regardless is one of the clearest statements of Early Renaissance proportion in Florence, a chapter house built for Franciscan business meetings that has outlasted every one of them.