The story
Up a staircase inside the palace is a chapel not much bigger than a living room, and every wall is crowded with a procession. Benozzo Gozzoli, a Florentine painter, finished these frescoes of the Journey of the Magi around 1459, and the riders winding through the hills wear the silks and furs of the family who paid for them. Members of the Medici are among the crowd, and one of the three kings has long been read as the Byzantine emperor John VIII, who had come to Florence for a church council 20 years earlier.
The house was the Medici family home. Cosimo the Elder, the banker who steered Florence without holding a title, had it built from 1444 by his architect Michelozzo, with rough-hewn stone at street level that grows smoother floor by floor. It set the pattern for Florentine palaces for generations, and Donatello's bronze David once stood in its courtyard.
In 1659 the Medici sold the palace to the Riccardi, a wealthy Florentine family, who lengthened the facade and later brought in the Neapolitan painter Luca Giordano to cover a long gallery ceiling with an Apotheosis of the Medici. Today it is the seat of the Metropolitan City of Florence and open as a museum, which also shows a Madonna and Child by Filippo Lippi, the Carmelite friar-painter. Lippi had painted the chapel's original altarpiece, an Adoration in the Forest that left long ago for Berlin, and a copy now stands in its place over the altar.
