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Around the year 1480 a surge of architectural and artistic activity began at the church of the Cistercian order in Florence, Santa Maria Maddalena di Cestello (now Santa Maria Maddalena dei Pazzi). It started with relatively modest repairs on the church roof and the addition of a cappella maggiore, which had been lacking. But over the next decades this activity went on to turn the little rectangular Gothic building into a new Renaissance church with a beautiful Ionic forecourt, and to fill the church and convent with works by most of the prominent painters in late Quattrocento Florence.
The church of Santa Maria Maddalena dei Pazzi in Florence is a major ecclesiastical building in Florence by Giuliano da Sangallo. The interior, with an aisleless flat-roofed nave and side chapels opening from semicircular arches on square piers, can be seen as a transition between SS Annunziata and San Gallo. Giuliano and his brother Antonio were paid for a wooden model in February 1491, almost certainly for the Ionic cloister between the church and the street. This, most unusually for Florence, has trabeated columns, interrupted only on the main axes by arches carried on square piers. The effect is similar to the Romanesque portico of the cathedral at Civita Castellana, but in an Albertian, all'antica mode, emphasized by the distinctive Ionic capitals with their droopy volutes.
The photo shows the entrance with the portico.
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