The beautiful green and white marble façade, with its classical
pediment and elegant scrolls, was designed by the Florentine
humanist Leon Battista Alberti, one of the most brilliant men
of the Quattrocento. The spacious Gothic interior is a treasure
house of Renaissance art. The finest works of art are Masaccio's
monumental and sombre fresco of the Trinity with the Virgin and
St John, halfway up the left aisle, Brunelleschi's Crucifix in
the left transept, which so surprised his friend Donatello when
he first saw it that he dropped the basket of eggs he was carrying,
and Domenico Ghirlandaio's charming frescoes of the Lives of
St John the Baptist and the Virgin in the chancel, where the
scenes are transposed into the streets of Florence in the 1480s.
Filippino Lippi's frescoes next door, painted a decade later,
after the Medici had ben overthrown, are much more anguished.
The Chiostro Verde (Green Cloister) adjoining the church contains
Uccello's an extraordinarily powerful fresco of the Deluge, dating
from the 1420s, and the Spanish Chapel, with Andrea da Firenze's
depictions of the triumph of the Dominican order.
