Mornings in Florence : drawing at the Pazzi Chapel

On a trip to Florence some years ago I took a copy of Ruskin’s book Mornings in Florence thinking it might be interesting to follow in his footsteps. After all Florence has probably not changed that much. Following the great man's advice I spent the first morning at S.Croce : 'Wait for an entirely bright morning; rise with the sun, and go to Santa Croce...'

Out in S. Croce cloister is one of my favourite buildings; the Pazzi Chapel. I'd first been here on a trip in 1988 and it's been in my mind ever since. It's the first complete little building in Florence (and therefore in the whole of the Renaissance) to exhibit very clearly a rational, logical, mathematical, and Humanist approach to design. I thought: is there something about ideal proportion that can be discovered at the Pazzi Chapel (?) - and so I wrote to the Opera di S. Croce and got permission to make measured drawings there. Permission for this is always tricky in Italy but eventually they give way and once you're in you're in. Each morning they'd wave me in without paying and I was able to spend the day there.

What came out of this was no evidence of the so-called Golden Section or anything like that, but obviously some sort of mathematical relationship between the parts of the building. Eventually it dawned on me that I was using the metric system and in quattrocento Florence it was the braccio (meaning 'arm') that was the unit of measure. The dimensions translated into braccia suddenly revealed, like a time-travel insight, the clear intentions of the architect in whole numbers and proper fractions.

In 2015 I was awarded the FX Drawing Prize for this project.