We started the morning going to Santa Maria Novella, a church and convent belonging to the Dominican order. The members were friars which meant they did not have to stay enclosed within the complex.

Their activities included producing their own pharmaceuticals which has evolved into a perfumery producing and selling perfume, soaps and other scented products. It has become very popular to visit.

The church itself shows how the Renaissance display of status and wealth had gone to even further extremes from the statues of Orsan Michele as the Rucellai family commission Leon Batista Alberti to redo the facade and went so far as to put their family symbol (ship with sails billowing) and their name onto the front of the church.

Inside we looked at the so-called Spanish chapel built for Eleanora di Toledo, wife of Duke Cosimo I, who was Spanish.

The frescoes reflect many Dominican purposes of learning, education and stamping out heresy.

We also looked at Paolo Uccello who liked to show his mastery of single point perspective. His frescoes in the cloister were damaged by weather and even more by the flood of 1966. They have been detached from the walls and put inside a room.

There is also a Last Supper by Plautilla Nelli, one of the earliest known Renaissance women painters, who was a Dominican nun. Her large altarpiece is particularly unusual for the time.

Inside the church is the oldest known surviving painting using single point perspective, The Trinity by Masaccio, It is undergoing restoration but you can go up scaffolding to look up close.

The Strozzi chapel is post-Fra Angelico, painted by Filippo Lippi (a priest who had a baby with a nun, who grew up to be the painter Filippino Lippi)

Ghirlandaio painted the Tornabuoni chapel, another example of displaying family wealth and status

After lunch, we went to the church of San Lorenzo and the Old Sacristy. I had been before and forgot to take photos. We went to San Lorenzo to fill time before visiting the Accademia. Michelangelo’s David is not relevant to Fra Angelico but was literally an unavoidable giant in the room.

We went up to the upper floor painting gallery to look at works by Lorenzo Monaco, believed by some to have been Fra Angelico’s teacher.

Interestingly, Richard, the expert on this course, thinks one of the unfinished sculptures attributed to Michelangelo is not by him. In part because he thinks the composition is poorly done but more because the marble is from an ancient Roman capital, in other words, is from recycled marble. Michelangelo was known to spend long hours looking for just the right marble block to carve. He was never known to have used marble that had been carved previously for something else.