FLORENCE:
A PORTRAIT
By Michael Levey

On Brunelleschi's Interior of the Pazzi Chapel, Santa Croce

"How poor the Pazzi must be, might have run the first thoughts of some resurrected fourteenth-century member of those great, still-flourishing families (one of the Peruzzi then actually being called Giotto) on entering Brunelleschi's chapel. There is no sense of the illimitable, or of mystery. Walls bare of frescoes, even of simulated marble, and windows mainly without colored glass, might suggest the building is unfinished--or conceivably not intended as a chapel at all. Even with its altar and its della Robbia roundels of the Apostles, it is indeed devoid of any sense of sectarian religious awe, though not--as one gazes up into its dome--of a sense of the eternal. Logical, light-filled, calm and yet exhilarating--almost, daringly, a space liveable-in--the Pazzi chapel is unprepared-for, except by Brunelleschi's own earlier buildings. Certainly it is not pagan, whatever knowledge of antique architecture contributed to its creation. Yet it is something of a temple--a tempietto, rather--not only to God but to man."