In the later thirteenth century, Florentines began to transform their city's churches with personal monuments to themselves, their ancestors, and their descendants. Parish graveyards had been the primary place of burial, with interment inside churches mostly reserved for upper clergy, nobles, founders, and prominent benefactors. The arrival of the mendicant orders in the early to mid 1200s and the construction and expansion of their new churches over the century increased opportunities for more people to exercise their right to choose their place of burial beyond the parish.2
Between the 1280s and 1350s Florence saw a dramatic increase in the number of citizens who sought to establish family graves inside one of the city's friaries, monasteries, or the cathedral, and Florentines would continue to install or embellish chapels, altars, tombs, and other memorials throughout the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries.3 Radical renovations to the city's churches in response to the reforms of the Council of Trent (1545-1563) offered later generations of Florentines the opportunity to sponsor new altars and tombs, some given to families whose older monuments had been destroyed with the removal of rood screens and the installation of modern, uniform altar chapels, others to newer arrivals to Florence or to families whose ancestors, whether for reasons of money or modesty, had not participated in the initial wave of Renaissance memorial building. The later sixteenth and seventeenth centuries saw a thriving business of tomb renovation either when descendants refurbished an ancient ancestral tomb or the families that originally owned tombs had died out, the gravesite reverting to the ownership of the church, whose custodians then sold rights to use it to a new family, who typically updated the floor slab with their own coat of arms and dedicatory inscription.
Though allowed by canon law, extra-parochial entombment reduced the steady source of income provided to parish churches for burying their dead. To make up for this loss, the quarta funeralis required one-fourth of funeral costs to be paid to the home parish of those who chose burial elsewhere.4 While priests were known to complain about these parishioners, their churches also saw the installation of new or renovated tombs, altars, chapels, and other memorials between the late thirteenth and late eighteenth centuries.
While the history of art tends to feature extraordinary wall monuments made for elites, humanists, and high-ranking clerics, Florence's memorial culture primarily consisted of floor tombs. Rectangular stone slabs, typically about nine feet long and a little over four feet wide,5 decorated with coats of arms, inscriptions, and occasional portrait sculpture carpeted the churches of Florence in every precinct of the city. The floors and walls of crypts, cloisters, and cemeteries carried the signs and names of a wide range of Florentines. Members of the cloth and banking industries were memorialized alongside judges, doctors, and notaries as well as stationers, slipper-makers, armorers, and other artisans as well as the keepers of shops, taverns, and inns to name only some of the various employments represented among Florence's memorials.
Tomb patrons sought to mark out private space in their city's churches and cemeteries not only to provide for proper Christian burial, but also to honor and remember their lineages and to ensure intercessory prayers for generations to come. Just as these men filled the halls of government and places of business in life, their tomb markers covered the floors and walls of parish, mendicant, and monastic churches in death, encouraging perpetual supplication for the souls of themselves and their kin. Tombs were most typically passed down through the generations of a family, though they were regularly recycled, with the rights of burial transferred from one family to another when lineages died out or could no longer afford to keep them.
Women were also allowed by canon law to choose their place of burial, but independent memorials carrying their names were in the minority. For example, a tomb marker simply labeled mulierum, “of the women,” marked a communal female grave outside the cathedral in a location where many men were honored by name with individualized markers. Women were frequently recognized generically in inscriptions as wives on the tombs of their husbands, as children on the tombs of their fathers, or as descendants on the tombs of their forebears. When women did have their own tombs, references to their birth families were often omitted in favor of their married names, while other memorials mention both husband and wife by name and include the coats of arms of the two families united by marriage.
Sepoltuario registers reveal that tomb patronage was much more abundant than surviving monuments indicate. For example, the pavement along the front of Santa Maria Novella once held five rows of tomb slabs under the arched coffins that still grace the church façade and cemetery enclosure.6 Even though Santa Croce retains many of its original slabs indoors, most of its 550-plus outdoor monuments are lost or survive only in small fragments.7 Surviving evidence does not always allow us to determine the identity, social status, or occupation of tomb owners. In addition to the sale or loss of memorial rights, many tomb inhabitants were forgotten to the ravages of time, weather, and foot traffic that wore away identifying arms and inscriptions. Renovation, restorations, and repaving have further disrupted the burial grounds described in surviving sepoltuari.
Tomb registries typically list the owner of a tomb (though not necessarily its original founder), a brief description of its form, and reference to the inscriptions it carried with varying degrees of accuracy. Many include sketches, sometimes in color, of the coats of arms that decorated the tomb or altar. Sepoltuari are organized spatially, usually beginning at the high altar (cappella maggiore) or with the first altar on the right as one enters the church, then approximating the sense of walking among the memorials, finishing the church interior before moving to outbuildings like cloisters and cemeteries. Numbering systems can be continuous through the entire register or restart numeration at each new building division. Authors sometimes list all chapels first and then tombs, while others are more topographical in their approach, writing as if they are stopping at each memorial on their path regardless of type to observe it and note its features.
When Stefano Rosselli took on the monumental task of compiling a city-wide sepoltuario, he turned to original church documents with organizational systems that were inconsistent from institution to institution. In each section of his Sepoltuario fiorentino, Rosselli identifies the buildings and building divisions of each church complex, but his patterns of movement from one memorial to the next are not consistent from complex to complex. His numeration of individual memorials sometimes corresponds to older sepoltuari, and other times are his own invention. Despite these inconsistencies, Rosselli numbers are useful not only to locate memorial records within the original manuscript and across its various copies but also to help reconstruct memorial placement where original floors have been renovated and tombs have been moved or destroyed.
The desire of individual Florentines to commemorate themselves transformed their cityscape. Stone monuments kept the dead ever present, on the minds and in the prayers of the living. Poignantly however, many markers, designed for permanence, have not survived. Some have had their inscriptions worn away; others were sold off by descendants to newcomers eager to take on the rights to a prestigious burial spot. As Digital Sepoltuario works to catalogue the full tombscape of Florentine burial as represented in Stefano Rosselli's sepoltuario, questions about how Florentines chose their tomb locations and decorations will become clearer. Though some will never be answered with satisfaction, we can conclude with certainty that Florentines were attracted away from their parishes in large numbers to the friars and monks of the city, inviting them to care for their remains and to pray for their salvation.
