Basilica of Santa Maria Novella
— — a façade Alberti made out of geometry.
Not only on a wall.
“The Dominican basilica that faces the long piazza on the north-western side of Florence. The marble façade was completed by Leon Battista Alberti around 1470, layering green-and-white geometry over an older Romanesque front. Inside is the church Masaccio painted his Trinity for in the late 1420s — the first true linear perspective in Western painting — and the side chapels of Ghirlandaio and Filippino Lippi.
Basilica of Santa Maria Novella, on ceramic.
Each tile is finished by hand in our Knoxville studio. Artwork is slowly infused into the ceramic surface under high heat and pressure, and rests beneath a thin glossy finish. The colour lives in the surface, not on top of it.
Pick any four 4-inch tiles — National Parks you've been to, a Smokies set, the four seasons of one place. $ for a set of , cork-backed, ready to live on the table.
The place, in three passes.
Santa Maria Novella is the principal Dominican church in Florence, on the north-western edge of the historic centre. The present basilica was built between 1279 and 1357 on the site of an older oratory, Santa Maria delle Vigne, that the Dominicans took over in 1221. Leon Battista Alberti completed the inlaid marble façade around 1470 for the Rucellai family. The interior is roughly 100 m long, T-shaped, with a Gothic plan softened by Tuscan light. The basilica gives its name to the adjoining piazza and to Florence's central railway station.
The façade is the canonical statement of Florentine Renaissance proportion. Alberti unified the older lower zone — finished by 1360 in striped green Prato serpentine and white Carrara marble — with an upper register of his own design, harmonised by a system of squares and circles described in his treatise De re aedificatoria. The inlaid geometry of the great roundel, the volutes flanking the pediment, and the inscribed frieze for Giovanni Rucellai together set a template that Renaissance church façades elsewhere in Italy would borrow from for the next century.
The basilica is open daily for ticketed visit, with weekday hours running roughly 09:30 to 17:30 and shorter weekend hours; Mass-only access applies on major feasts. Standard admission includes the nave, the cloisters, the Spanish Chapel, and the Tornabuoni Chapel behind the high altar with Ghirlandaio's 1485–1490 fresco cycle. Masaccio's Trinity, on the north aisle wall, can be viewed without a queue early in the morning. The entrance is on Piazza della Stazione, about 50 m from Firenze Santa Maria Novella station.