The Chapel of the Magi
Gozzoli's golden cavalcade โ the Renaissance's most gorgeous miniature pageant.
Sailko โ CC BY-SA 3.0 ยท Francesco Bini โ CC BY-SA 4.0 ยท Julian Lupyan โ CC0 ยท Julian Lupyan โ CC0
A sacred procession on the surface, a political statement beneath: the golden young king reads as idealised Lorenzo, with Cosimo, Piero and the turbanned Byzantine guests of the Council of Florence behind โ declaring the Medici the centre of both worlds. Gozzoli slipped his own face in, signature on his cap.
Its visit is shorter and cheaper than any of them, and its chapel has no equivalent in any โ if bewitching detail beats vast splendour for you, choose it, and it completes a Medici day with San Lorenzo and the Chapels next door.
Forty-five minutes: a quarter waiting for and inside the chapel, the rest courtyard and rooms โ perfectly sized between larger sights.
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This is the first Medici palace โ the house that invented the Florentine palazzo: built by Michelozzo for old Cosimo around 1444, rough stone below and smooth above, becoming the template copied down every street of Florence and then Europe. Lorenzo the Magnificent grew up here; the boy Michelangelo lived here in the family's keeping through his formative years. Its jewel is small and hidden: the Chapel of the Magi, whose walls Benozzo Gozzoli covered in 1459 with the Three Kings' procession in disguise โ the Renaissance's most gorgeous pageant, Medici faces and their Byzantine guests riding through fairy-tale Tuscan hills in costume and gold that bewitch the eye. Entry is in small groups, and the minutes inside are among Florence's most precious. The state rooms add Luca Giordano's exuberant late mirrored gallery and Michelozzo's grave, graffitied courtyard.
Gozzoli's golden cavalcade โ the Renaissance's most gorgeous miniature pageant.
The palace all Florentine palaces copied.
The late mirrored ceiling โ Baroque delight amid Florentine gravity.
Via Cavour 3, 50129 Florence