Filippo Brunelleschi, the Pazzi Chapel in Santa Croce, Florence

The building gives us insight into the ambitions of Renaissance architects in their struggle to bring coherence to the architectural language of columns, pilasters, arches and vaults. Between the pilasters in the transept there are tall, blank, round headed panels and, above them, roundels, common Renaissance decorative motifs. The architectural elements of the interior are all in pietra serena, a high quality, fine grained sandstone.°

Mary McCarthy:

«The interior is a simple rectangle with four high narrow windows and bare white walls and at the end a small apse. In the four corners tall closed arches are drawn in dark-grey pietra serena on the white walls, like the memory of windows. Fluted pilasters with Corinthian capitals, also in pietra, are spaced along the walls, marking the points of support, and in the same way, the lunettes and supporting arches of the chapel are outlined in dark ribbons of stone against the white plaster, and the binding arches have stone rosettes enclosed in rectangles drawn on the white background. Arch repeats arch; curve repeats curve; rosette repeats rosette. The rectangles of the lower section are topped by the semi-circles of the lunettes and arches, which, in turn, are topped by the hemisphere of the cupola. The continual play of these basic forms and their variations – of square against round, deep against flat – is like the greatest music: the music of the universe heard in a small space.»[6]

Mary McCarthy:

«In the blue cupoletta, above the little apse, with its plain altar, like a table, there is a Creation of Man and the Animals. The chapel is not large, but it seems to hold the four corners of the earth and all the winds securely in its binding of pietra serena. No more exquisite microcosm than the Pazzi Chapel could be imagined, for everything is here, in just proportion and in order, as on the Seventh Day of Creation, when God rested from His labours, having found them good.»[6]