San Marco Museum and Cenacle S.Apollonia, Cycles of Florentine Renaissance frescoes - Private Tour

  • Up to 8 Participants

What you will find

San Marco Museum includes most of the ambiences of the Dominican convent designed by Michelozzo - one of the greatest architects of the Renaissance - and commissioned by Cosimo I de 'Medici. The convent, where the Dominican monks still live, is one of the most distinguished examples of Florentine architecture of the 15th century.

The museum is developed in various evocative halls, containing one of the world's most famous cycle of paintings by the Dominican monk Beato Angelico, one of the greatest exponents of the Florentine Renaissance.

The tour begins in the elegant Cloister of St. Anthony, place of peace and spirituality and center of the monastic life, where we find some doors with frescoed lunettes that lead to the ancient halls hosting many wonderful works on wood and frescoes by Beato Angelico.

The visit proceeds with the Great Refectory, the old Kitchen and the services areas which display the paintings of Fra Bartolomeo, another important painter and Dominican monk who lived in the convent in the early '500. In the Small Refectory is instead preserved a magnificent fresco by Domenico Ghirlandaio, a great artist of the ‘500, depicting the Last Supper.

Upstairs it is waiting for us the “not to be missed” visit of the monks' cells in which you can admire the incomparable frescoes that Beato Angelico painted for his confreres monks. Among the few not painted cells, particularly worthy of interest is the one where the famous friar Girolamo Savonarola lived: passionate speaker, he preached against the corruption and decay of morals of the clergy, ending his life hanged and burned at the stake in Piazza della Signoria.

The visit of the museum will end in the suggestive ambiences of the Library, famous for the incomparable purity of its Renaissance architecture

Your visit experience will be further enriched with the visit of the Cenacle of Sant’Apollonia, the first Renaissance cenacle of Florence: in the Benedictine monastery of Sant'Apollonia Andrea del Castagno frescoed the back wall of the refectory with the Last Supper, the Crucifixion, the Deposition and the Resurrection. In the Museum of the cenacle of Sant'Apollonia there are also other fifteenth-century works from the former monastery and the hospital of Santa Maria Nuova, by Paolo Schiavo of Neri di Bicci, Andrea del Castagno and the rare traces of the frescoes and the sinopias of Domenico Veneziano

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Where / Meeting point

Firenze centro 3 - 50100 Firenze (FI)