The story
In one fresco inside Santa Trinita, Saint Francis brings back to life a boy who has fallen from a palace window. The miracle is set right outside the church door. The square behind the crowd is Piazza Santa Trinita as it looked in the 1480s, and the Palazzo Spini, the palace the boy is said to have fallen from, still stands across the street.
That scene belongs to the Sassetti Chapel, painted by Domenico Ghirlandaio, then at the height of his career, for the banker Francesco Sassetti, a manager of the Medici bank. Sassetti wanted his city and his patrons in the pictures. In the scene of the Pope confirming the Franciscan rule, the setting moves from Rome to Piazza della Signoria. Lorenzo de' Medici stands with Sassetti and his family, while Lorenzo's young sons climb a staircase behind their tutor, the poet Angelo Poliziano.
On the altar is Ghirlandaio's Adoration of the Shepherds, dated 1485 and still in the chapel it was painted for, with frescoed portraits of Sassetti and his wife Nera Corsi kneeling on either side. Its weathered shepherds answer a Flemish altarpiece by Hugo van der Goes that had arrived in Florence two years earlier.
A few chapels away, the Bartolini Salimbeni Chapel keeps an older taste intact. Lorenzo Monaco, a Camaldolese monk and painter, decorated it in the 1420s with scenes from the life of the Virgin and an Annunciation on the altar, its gold ground and long, swaying figures still in the Gothic manner.
