The museum is located in the old Dominican convent of Santa Maria Novella which, together with the adjacent basilica, is one of the most prestigious complexes of monumental buildings in the city in view of the important historical events of both a civil and religious nature that took place here and the extraordinary quality of its artistic masterpieces.
The cloisters included in the visit show rare examples of fourteenth and fifteenth-century Florentine painting. The most famous is the Chiostro Verde, named after the colour dominating the unusual cycle of fifteenth-century frescoes that decorate the walls with stories from Genesis. The cycle includes important paintings by Paolo Uccello, including his famous masterpiece, the Flood.
The cloister leads to the convent’s old chapter house, known as the Spanish Chapel, after Duke Cosimo I de’ Medici assigned it to the Spanish retinue of his wife, Eleonora di Toledo, in the sixteenth century. The large chapel is decorated with a precious cycle of fourteenth-century frescoes by Andrea di Bonaiuto which celebrate the role of the Dominicans in the Church through a complex series of allegorical motifs.
The visit continues with the Cappella degli Ubriachi and the convent’s old Refectory, frescoed by a pupil of Agnolo Gaddi in the late fourteenth century and then again by Alessandro Allori at the end of the sixteenth. These two rooms host a permanent exhibition comprising a rich selection of goldsmith’s art, vestments and liturgical items belonging to the ancient treasury of the church of Santa Maria Novella, and a series of paintings from different parts of the complex.
P.zza S.Maria Novella
Tel. 055 282187
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