Santissima Annunziata

Just inside the door, on the left, stands a small marble shrine, and Florentine brides still leave their wedding bouquets at it. It holds a medieval fresco of the Annunciation. Legend says the friar painting it despaired of making the Virgin's face beautiful enough, fell asleep, and woke to find it finished by an angel. In 1448 Piero de' Medici, son of Cosimo, paid for the shrine, designed by Michelozzo, the family's architect, and had it recorded that the marble alone cost 4,000 florins.

This is first of all a working church, the mother church of the Servite friars, and the art came with the pilgrims. Those who felt their prayers answered left offerings, and the richest left life-size wax portraits of themselves, some complete with horses. The forecourt known as the Chiostrino dei Voti was built in 1516 partly to hold them. By the late 18th century there were about 600, and in 1786 they were melted down for candles. The forecourt's walls kept their frescoes, among them scenes by Andrea del Sarto and two young painters from his workshop, Pontormo and Rosso Fiorentino.

Inside, two pictures in the side chapels have stories of their own. In the Feroni Chapel, Andrea del Castagno's fresco of Saint Julian before Christ, painted in 1451, spent more than 150 years behind a later altarpiece until builders uncovered it in 1857. In the Chapel of the Assumption hangs Perugino's Assumption of the Virgin, once the back of a double-sided high altarpiece. When it was unveiled in 1507, younger Florentine artists mocked him for reusing figures from earlier pictures, and according to Vasari, the painter and biographer, he never won another major commission in the city.