Marbles Banished and Unearthed. (Im)materiality in the Sacristy of San Lorenzo, by Brunelleschi

White stucco for the walls and pietra serena for the pilasters, entablatures, and mouldings: these were the materials used by Brunelleschi in the Sagrestia Vecchia in the Basilica of San Lorenzo, Florence. With these materials, he invented modern art and introduced a way of interpreting the world in which disegno imposes its incontestable intellectual power over a contingent materiality associated with craftsmanship. The commission to build the sacristy came from Giovanni di Bicci de’ Medici, undoubtedly the most powerful man in Florence, who preferred the power represented by Brunelleschi’s abstraction to that embodied by the tangible richness of the polychrome walls. In the history of intellectual work—in the recently founded modernity—this work of Brunelleschi, a veritable manifesto of art as a “necessary avant-garde”, sentences marble, especially multicoloured, and pulsating marble, to exile and barbarism. This chapter addresses the material and symbolic aspects of this sacristy and the architect’s radical proposal.