Dr. Rocky Ruggiero

Celebrated as the first-ever Renaissance-style church, the Basilica of San Lorenzo was a milestone in the history of architecture. Although largely completed after the death of its revolutionary architect, Filippo Brunelleschi, the design of the church resurrected an architectural language that had been dead for a millennium and re-established that language as the foundation of Italian architecture for the next two and a half centuries. And while some scholars have interpreted Brunelleschi’s intervention at the later church of Santo Spirito as a potential fulfillment of his abandoned intentions at the more famous, Medici-sponsored church of San Lorenzo, Santo Spirito was instead a church that, in many ways, anticipated the architectural trends of the later High Renaissance period. In the words of Brunelleschi’s earliest biographer, the Basilica of Santo Spirito was a church “without peer in Christendom.”