Pazzi Chapel
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Andrea Pazzi, the head of a wealthy banking family in the neighbourhood around Santa Croce, which included not only a large church but a Franciscan monastery, offered to build a chapter house for the monks as well as a structure that would function as a funerary chapel for his family. At this moment in time, Brunelleschi was the most admired and accomplished architect of the city, and had just finished working for the Medici family on the Old Sacristy in the church of San Lorenzo. The Pazzi Chapel was one of Brunelleschi's last commissions and much of it was built between 1442 and 1446, the year of the architect's death. But the building was nowhere close to completion by the time of the artist's passing. Work on the dome continued and finished in 1459, and parts of the interior decoration were supervised by Giuliano da Maiano in 1478. That year might have been one of celebration for the Pazzi family, except that they made the grave error of rebelling against the rule of the Medici family. The 'Pazzi Conspiracy', as it has come to be known, ended with the Pazzi family being exiled from Florence.
In this building Brunelleschi used several of the motifs he had experimented with at San Lorenzo, including the use of a classical architectural vocabulary (rounded arches, fluted pilasters with Corinthian capitals, proportional modular plan and elevations, semi-circular dome, and so on) and white stucco walls articulated with the rich gray stone known in Florence as pietra serena. The spaces between the pilasters and in the pendentives of the vault are decorated with circular framed reliefs in glazed terra cotta by Luca della Robbia. The reliefs in the four pendentives, following a conventional pattern, are the four Evangelists, Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John. Each tondo is supported by a shield motif bearing the Pazzi arms.
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