Museum of San Marco

The building

The museum is situated in the oldest part of the monastery, which occupies about half the total space. The building has expanded over time, now taking up a whole block, and part of it is still occupied by friars today. The oldest section of the building, built over the medieval Sylvestrian monastery, was constructed by the architect Michelozzo at the specific request of Cosimo il Vecchio de' Medici and his expense, to house the reformed Dominicans of Fiesole, an order at that time led by Antonino Pierozzi, the later Antoninus of Florence. Over about ten years (1436–1446) Michelozzo completed an extremely modern and functional monasterial building project which contributed to the glorification of Medicean patronage. Michelozzo made use of the pre-existent wall structures of the Sylvestrian monastery complex which date back to the end of 13th century.

Michelozzo ably linked together the ground floor rooms around a harmoniously proportionated cloister and raised the levels of these buildings to create the dormitories on the first floor with a large number of cells to suit an expanding monastery.

Sant'Antonino Cloister

The cloister is behind the church and it introduces the visitor to the sight of the splendidly poised architecture of the monastery, a typical example of a measured and orderly Florentine Renaissance architecture.

The sight of Saint Dominic Adoring the Crucifixion, painted by Fra Angelico opposite the entrance is uplifting. Originally this was the only painted image decorating the white cloister. The appearance of the cloister was changed during the 17th century, when the monks of San Marco decided to celebrate St. Antonino by commissioning the most famous Florentine painters of the time to paint a cycle of lunettes depicting Scenes from the life of St. Antonino.

Pilgrims' Hospice

The large room, which can be entered from the right side of the cloister, occupies all the part of the building onto Piazza San Marco and already existed in the Middle Ages when the monastery was inhabited by the Sylvestrian monks. When the monastery was rebuilt in the 15th century, Michelozzo covered the whole area with cross vaults and raised the building to construct the second friars' dormitory. Inside there was also a Pilgrims' Hospice, alluded to in the fresco painted by Fra Angelico on the second door, Christ the pilgrim welcomed by Dominicans. Today it is the home of almost all of Angelico's panel painting, coming from the churches and monasteries of Florence.

Museum

Like many establishments of its kind throughout Europe, the Dominican convent was seized by the civil authorities during the upheavals stemming from the French Revolution and the expansion of the Napoleonic Empire. San Marco met this fate in 1808, returned to Dominican hands after the fall of Napoleon, but then was confiscated in large part by a decree of the nascent Kingdom of Italy dated 7 July 1866 and became State property. This left to the Dominicans the church, the rooms opening on to the Saint Dominic cloister and the area that came much later to house the library containing over 10,000 books specializing in spirituality, founded in 1979 thanks to the bequest of the Catholic scholar Arrigo Levasti (1886–1973) and named after him.

In 1869, having been declared a national historical monument, the greater part of the complex reopened as a museum, following repairs and some adjustments to meet the new situation. It was in this period that the frescoes by Fra Angelico were restored by the artist Gaetano Bianchi. In 1906, the museum was chosen to house the remains of architectural value surviving from the buildings demolished by the urban planning measures of the previous century. This led to the creation of a distinct Museo di Firenze antica ("Museum of Old Florence"). In 1922 the museum managed to add to its collections a large number of works of Fra Angelico, having them transferred from the Uffizi Gallery or the Galleria dell'Accademia, an arrangement that has since remained unchanged.