Basilica of Santa Croce

Francis of Assisi came to Florence in 1211, travelling the via Cassia, and between 1226 and 1228 a group of his followers settled in the city. The ground they took was inhospitable: an islet formed by two arms of the Arno that parted near what is now piazza Beccaria and rejoined in front of the walls along the line of via Verdi and via de' Benci, marshy land beyond the city about 800 metres south-east of the Duomo. There the friars founded an oratory, which legend credits to Francis himself. As the community grew the oratory was enlarged, and from 1252 it was rebuilt outright. Those works set the friars arguing among themselves, between those who wanted a spare and poor building in keeping with the Rule and those who wanted a wider architecture.

The rebuilt church was soon plainly too small, and in 1294 the decision was taken to start again from nothing, to a grand design probably drawn up by Arnolfo di Cambio, the architect then employed on the Comune's most ambitious projects. No written document confirms his authorship; the traditional attribution has been upheld on the quality of the complex and on its likeness to his other work. The chronicler Giovanni Villani recorded the foundation on 3 May of that year, before bishops, prelates, the podestà, the captain of the People, the priors and all the good people of Florence, men and women, "with great festivity and solemnity"; the twelfth of May is given elsewhere. Building began at the apse, so the friars could keep the old church in use as long as possible, and the cost was borne by the population of the Florentine Republic, some of the city's wealthiest families among the contributors.

The design was austere, reflecting the Franciscan approach, and on a scale that puts the church among the largest the order has anywhere. Instead of the usual three chapels at the crossing it aligns eleven, with five more at the ends of the transept, laid out for the burial of the donors and given very rich wall painting by the leading masters of the day. By Arnolfo's death in 1302 the choir and transept with their chapels are reckoned to have been finished, and by 1320 the basilica was usable, but crisis, flood and plague then slowed the rest badly; nobody knows exactly when it was completed, perhaps around 1385. The convent went up almost in step with it, the first nucleus soon joined by a sacristy, dormitory, infirmary, guest quarters, refectory and library, and over the centuries the house sheltered Bonaventure, Peter of John Olivi, Anthony of Padua, Bernardino of Siena and Louis of Anjou, and received popes among them Sixtus IV, Eugene IV, Leo X and Clement XIV. Consecration came only in the following century, in the presence of Pope Eugene IV: at Epiphany 1443 at the hand of Cardinal Bessarion by one account, in 1442 at the pope's own hand by another.

Burial and patronage here became a Florentine habit, some of it in chapels owned by wealthy houses such as the Bardi and the Peruzzi, and monuments went on being raised in the church for five hundred years. Bernardo Rossellino cut the tomb of Leonardo Bruni, chancellor of the Republic, in 1444 and 1445, its inscription dictated by Carlo Marsuppini, who succeeded Bruni in the chancery and was buried facing him under a monument by Desiderio da Settignano of 1453. Railed slabs in the floor mark condottieri in the Republic's pay: Milano d'Asti, Giovanni Acuto and, a little beyond, Biordo degli Ubertini. Another covers Francesco Nori, who died saving the life of Lorenzo il Magnifico during the Pazzi conspiracy. Cosimo il Vecchio commissioned Michelozzo to build the novitiate vestibule and the Medici chapel around 1445, and Filippo Brunelleschi, who had designed and built the dome of the Duomo, finished the inner cloister in 1453 and had a hand in the Cappella dei Pazzi, put up as the chapter house and completed in the 1470s.

The interior was recast for the Counter-Reformation at the will of Cosimo I de' Medici, an intervention dated to 1566 in some accounts and to 1560 in others, with Giorgio Vasari in charge of the programme. The tramezzo dividing the friars' area from the lay one was pulled down along with the friars' choir, and the chapels and funerary monuments set against the aisle walls were cleared away; most of the altars that had stood on the screen were lost. In their place came fourteen large stone altars, made from 1566 by Francesco da Sangallo to Vasari's design, carrying a linked series of Passion pictures by various painters. Fourteenth-century frescoes on the nave walls were whitewashed, among them work by Andrea Orcagna of which fragments are now shown in the basilica's museum, and the Bardi Chapel, which held a cycle of the life of St Francis, was plastered over at Cosimo's behest.

A ciborium designed by Vasari replaced the high altar's polyptych and was inaugurated in 1569. Vasari's Pentecost, the first of the new altarpieces to be executed, was painted between 1567 and 1568 for Agnolo Biffoli, treasurer to Cosimo I. Two matching marble choir lofts were built during the same works; the right one stood empty, while the left was given an organ built by the Tuscan organ-maker Onofrio Zeffirini between 1575 and 1579, in a case of Vasari's design, and inaugurated on 6 June 1579.

The bell towers had a troubled history of their own. An original structure collapsed in 1521, falling on the church; what followed was partial or left unfinished, and a late sixteenth-century project entrusted to Francesco da Sangallo got no further than its base, which Florentines called il masso di Santa Croce, the boulder of Santa Croce, and which was demolished when the new front was built. The slender tower now on the church dates only from 1842 to 1845, the work of Gaetano Baccani, and reaches 78.45 metres. Six large bells were cast for it in 1843 by the Pistoian founder Terzo Rafanelli, some of them recast since.

The façade had been left bare, as at many Florentine basilicas: pietraforte raised on eight steps, its only ornament, in a niche at the centre of the simple main portal, Donatello's gilt bronze St Louis of Toulouse, brought over from a niche at Orsanmichele and now kept in the convent refectory. In the fifteenth century the Quaratesi came forward to pay for a front and gave the design to Simone del Pollaiolo, called Il Cronaca, on condition that the Quaratesi arms appear prominently at the centre of it; the condition discouraged the friars from accepting, and the family turned instead to embellishing another Franciscan church, San Salvatore al Monte. By the middle of the nineteenth century the prevailing taste wanted the great unfinished buildings of the past completed, and the façade of Santa Croce was the subject of heated argument. Niccolò Matas, an architect from Ancona, worked at the design from 1837; his first two projects were neo-Gothic, but in 1854, to harmonise the new front with the Renaissance Pazzi Chapel beside it, he produced a third, which was the one built, and for which he declared he had taken Il Cronaca's design as his model. It was finished in 1863, with the sculptor Giovanni Duprè working alongside him, and Matas set out his reasoning in a pamphlet, S. Croce a Firenze e la sua facciata, published in Florence that year and echoed in his inaugural address.

Most of the money came from a wealthy English Protestant, Sir Francis Joseph Sloane, who put up 330,861.62 lire towards a total cost of 488,107.83 lire and asked to remain anonymous. The work cost the complex a good deal that has been little studied since: the palazzo dell'Inquisizione to the right of the façade was demolished and its courtyard destroyed, absorbed into what was left of the first cloister in front of Brunelleschi's Pazzi Chapel, leaving a cloister whose ground plan recalls the letter P. The Star of David worked into the tympanum has sometimes been read as an allusion to Matas's Jewish faith, though that is not proven, and the symbol belongs to the Christian repertory as well. By one account he had wanted to be buried with his peers and was not allowed to be, because he was Jewish; the Italian Parliament decided in 1886 to place his burial beneath the entrance threshold of the basilica, where an inscription honours him.

Michelangelo's tomb, the best known in the church, was designed by Vasari after the artist's remains reached Florence from Rome in 1564. Galileo Galilei lies at the start of the left aisle, set symmetrically opposite Michelangelo a century and a half later, and in the same tomb lie his pupil Vincenzo Viviani and a woman, most probably his daughter Sister Maria Celeste. Innocenzo Spinazzi's monument to Niccolò Machiavelli followed in 1787, bearing the inscription TANTO NOMINI NULLUM PAR ELOGIUM, and Antonio Canova's monument to Vittorio Alfieri in 1810. Space was granted in time to notable Italians from elsewhere as well as to Florentines.

It was in the nineteenth century that the basilica turned into a national pantheon in earnest. Ugo Foscolo, in Dei sepolcri, made it Italy's famedio and called its tombs the urne dei forti, the urns of the strong, and the name he gave it, Tempio dell'Itale Glorie, stuck. Foscolo had died in 1827 at Turnham Green; in 1871 he was buried here at a crowded public ceremony, in keeping with his own wish to lie beside other great Tuscans such as Michelangelo, Machiavelli and Galileo. Others were moved here afterwards, Gioachino Rossini in 1887 among them. Dante got only a monumental cenotaph, put up in 1829, because Ravenna refused to give up the remains of the poet who had died in exile; Giacomo Leopardi took the cenotaph as the occasion of his canzone Sopra il monumento di Dante. Requests arrived from all over Italy once the church's standing as keeper of the urne de' forti had spread, and Santa Croce came to hold fifteen thousand bodies. Each request was examined by a commission appointed for the purpose and approved by the Grand Duke in person, who also fixed the size of the donation in each case.

A good many of the commemorated lie elsewhere. Leonardo da Vinci, buried in the Château d'Amboise, has a commemorative plaque of 1919; Guglielmo Marconi is buried at Sasso Marconi near Bologna and Enrico Fermi in Chicago; the engraver Raffaello Morghen has a cenotaph raised by his pupils, his grave being elsewhere in the city. Foreign names are among them: Louise of Stolberg-Gedern, countess of Albany and wife of Charles Edward Stuart, lies under a slab in the Cappella Castellani; Julie Clary, wife of Joseph Bonaparte, and her daughter Charlotte Napoléone Bonaparte are in the Cappella Giugni; and Florence Nightingale is remembered by a monument in the cloister, in the city she was born in and named after, alongside one to Giuseppe La Farina. The First World War left its own marks: the former Cappella Capponi was rededicated in 1926 to the mothers of the Italian fallen, with a Pietà by Libero Andreotti, and the Parco della Rimembranza, inaugurated in 1923 in piazza Santa Croce and moved beside the façade in the early 1950s, sets ten cypresses for ten soldiers of the comune of Florence who died in the war and were decorated with the gold medal for military valour. Antonio Berti carved Foscolo's tomb in 1939. The floor still carries 276 marble slabs with reliefs and inlaid arms, and many wall monuments survive between the Vasarian altars, despite a thinning-out at the start of the 1960s that shifted most of the nineteenth-century aristocratic tombs to a corridor under the loggetta of the Chiostro Grande.

Under the French occupation Vivant Denon took a San Francesco and the Miracolo del moribondo painted by Pesello Peselli out of the convent to be sent to France, part of the Napoleonic spoliations. In 1940, while works were being moved into safe hiding during the Second World War, Ugo Procacci noticed the Badia Polyptych being carried out of the church, and reasoned that it had been removed from the Badia Fiorentina during the Napoleonic occupation and reinstalled in Santa Croce by mistake. The convent's rooms had begun to be secularised at the end of the eighteenth century and put to other uses. In 1866 the whole complex became public property in the government's suppression of most religious houses, following the wars that gained Italian independence and unity. The Biblioteca Nazionale Centrale of Florence stands on land that was once the convent's, and among the trades now housed in the old cenobio are a primary school and the Scuola del Cuoio, a leather school in the friars' former dormitory.

The nineteenth-century restorations took the sixteenth-century altars and plaster off the Bardi Chapel and brought Giotto's frescoes of the life of St Francis back into view. The Death of St Francis, missing the sections where an altar had been fixed to the wall, was heavily repainted at that time, and the repainting was later stripped out again to leave only what is definitively Giotto's. Between 1958 and 1961 Leonetto Tintori lifted layers of whitewash and overpaint from Giotto's scenes in the Peruzzi Chapel. The most monumental part of the complex, the former refectory with its Cenacolo, had been fitted out as a museum on 2 November 1900 under Guido Carocci, on a spot already used to store works of art, some of them salvaged from the demolitions of the old centre during the Risanamento; it was enlarged and reopened with a new arrangement on 26 March 1959 as the Museo dell'Opera di Santa Croce, taking in the two cloisters, the main refectory and a few other rooms.

On 4 November 1966 the Arno flooded much of Florence. The basilica and convent sit in the lowest part of the city, and the water came in carrying mud, pollution and heating oil, reaching 4.88 metres in the museum; it destroyed the organ's console and electronics, and the basilica's floor gave way, which is how the remains of the church that preceded Arnolfo's were located. The complex became known as a symbol of the artistic losses the city suffered, above all through the damage to Cimabue's Crucifix, and afterwards of its recovery from the mud through painstaking restoration and conservation; the repairs took decades. The museum did not reopen until 1975, and the Crucifix was carried back into it in 1976, on the tenth anniversary of the flood. From about 2000 the whole basilica complex was run as a single museum on one paid ticket, which reduced the pressure of mass tourism on its treasures and drew the familiar objections to putting a consecrated church to museum use; 837,575 people visited in 2008. In November 2006, just after the fortieth-anniversary commemorations, nineteen paintings of great value went back on display in the refectory after a meticulous restoration, and for the fiftieth anniversary Vasari's huge Last Supper, cut into large segments and in store for forty years, was rehung once the Opificio delle pietre dure had finished with it. A multi-year restoration programme has run with the help of Italy's civil protection agency. On 20 October 2017 the building was closed to visitors after falling masonry killed a tourist from Spain, and it stayed shut during a survey of the church's stability, the Ministry of Culture stating that "there will be an investigation by magistrates to understand how this dramatic fact happened and whether there are responsibilities over maintenance." The basilica belongs to the Order of Friars Minor, is an Italian national monument and part of a UNESCO World Heritage Site inscribed in 1982, and has held the rank of minor basilica since 20 December 1933.