Chapel of San Luca, Renaissance chapel in Santissima Annunziata, Florence, Italy.
The Chapel of San Luca, also called dei Pittori, opens off the north side of the Great Cloister of the Santissima Annunziata. Its square plan is covered by a groin vault on corbels; ten niches hold full-size stucco prophets, and the altarpiece is Vasari's fresco of Saint Luke painting the Virgin, painted 1569–1570, in which the evangelist is a self-portrait of Vasari.
The Servite friars ceded the former chapter room to the Accademia del Disegno by notarial deed in 1565, with decoration to be completed within five years. The sculptor Giovanni Angelo Montorsoli, with Vincenzo Borghini and Giorgio Vasari, planned the chapel under Duke Cosimo I de' Medici. Originally entered from the north and dedicated to the Trinity, it was reoriented between 1812 and 1813 by Luigi de Cambrai Digny, who opened the present entrance from the Great Cloister.
The chapel takes its name from Saint Luke, patron of painters, though it was originally dedicated to the Trinity. Every 18 October the Accademia delle Arti del Disegno opens its academic year with a solemn mass here, and the academy still holds funeral services for its members in the chapel.
The chapel is reached from the north side of the Chiostro Grande, through a door leading into a former sacristy; the entrance was moved here between 1812 and 1813. The Academy of the Arts of Drawing still uses it, celebrating a solemn mass each 18 October for the opening of its academic year.
The marble-rimmed well at the chapel's centre, carved with bones and scrolls and attributed to Montorsoli, covers the crypt entrance. There the dead were once seated in wall niches; after the flood their remains were gathered into a central ossuary. Rodolfo Siviero, buried in 1987, was the last to receive the privilege, granted in 1983.
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