Overview
The Dominican Convent includes the San Marco Museum. While in the English-speaking world a convent is a place for nuns, in Italy it can be for either nuns or monks, depending on their religious mission. This convent is for monks. San Marco has housed two famous brothers, Fra. Savonarola and Fra. Giovanni da Fiesole, better known as Fra. Angeleco. The latter was a great painter, whose works decorate many of the monks’ cells and other walls of the convent.
History of San Marco
The oldest section of the current building was a monastery for the medieval Sylvestrian order. In the early 1400s, a combination of Medici power and money, along with the pope, took the building and its location from the Sylvestrians and gave them to the Dominicans. The current complex, built by Michelozzo, an early architect, began in 1436. Construction lasted for a decade.
Since Napoleon’s time, ownership of the convent has changed hands a few times. Currently, the San Marco Museum is owned and operated by the Italian government. Still, the cloister and church remain the property of the Dominicans.
San Marco Museum Art
There are artworks by several artists; two outshine the others. Fra Bartolomeo and Fra. Angeleco, both Dominican friars, painted many of the most famous frescoes in the museum. Fra. Giovanni da Fiesole was known as Fra. Angelecio reportedly because only an angel could create such art.
Entering the museum, before you is the fresco of Christ on the Cross Adored by St. Dominic, created by Fra, Angelecio. The first of numerous frescoes by the master. Every friar’s cell, or living quarters, contains frescoes by either Angelico or Bartolomeo.
Two of the most interesting cells are those of Savanrola and Cosimo de’ Medici. The latter had two rooms for his use, even as he lived in the Medici Palace, and was a layperson. Both contain frescoes by Angelico, a Medici favorite. Many artists created their version of famous biblical stories. While visiting the friar’s cells, different versions of the Annunciation, the Crucifixion, and the Descent from the Cross appear in multiple locations. In the visitor’s dining hall is Domenico Ghirlandaio’s interpretation of the Last Supper, which is different from the more famous one by Da Vinci in Milan. One room in the San Marco Museum has a series of two paintings by the same artist of the same subject.
Savanarola
A warning of how quickly a charismatic religious leader can take over a city, the story of the rise and fall of Fra. Girolamo Savonarola can still be a valuable lesson today. His strict adherence to his concept of religion foreshadowed that of others, such as Martin Luther and Oliver Cromwell. Savonarola did not want to destroy the Catholic Church, but reform it from within. He felt the church worshiped idols rather than God.
Savanrola felt that the people were sinning in vanity with expensive adornments and art. He also criticized the secular as well as Church leadership as despotic. When his first prophecy, the death of Lorenzo de’ Medici, occurred, he became more powerful. He further predicted the death of Pope Innocent VIII and the ‘saving’ of Italy by Charles VIII of France.
He is best known for gathering and burning symbols of excess, known as the Bonfires of the Vanities. This happened in Palazzo de Signori in 1497. Savanarola fell out of favor with the pope and the people of Florence. Just over a year after his bonfire, Savonarola was burned at the stake in the same spot where he burned books and works of art.
Visiting the San Marco Museum
When I visited in March of 2026, the famous library was closed for renovation. However, the remainder of the museum was open. The friar’s cells are located along two corridors on the second floor of the building. The first floor includes the cleric’s dining hall as well as the visitor’s dining hall. Both have monumental frescoes.
A little-known aspect of the museum is that, in the early twentieth century, a collection of parts of buildings destroyed in urban renewal is displayed here. However, they are just hung up on walls with little curation.
