San Giorgio alla Costa
church in Florence, Italy
The church of San Giorgio alla Costa, called in earlier times also dei Santi Giorgio e Massimiliano dello Spirito Santo (of Ss. George and Maximilian of the Holy Spirit) is a small historical church in the Oltrarno district of the centre of Florence, situated on the steep slope of via Costa San Giorgio which runs uphill from Ponte Vecchio to Forte di Belvedere.
History
In earlier times there existed at this locality three small churches of which one was dedicated to the martyr Saint George, another to Saint Sigismund and the third to Saint Mamilian. The church of San Giorgio (St George) predated the year 1000 and was one of the main priorie (priories) of medieval Florence.
It was for this church that the young Giotto painted the altarpiece Madonna di San Giorgio alla Costa (San Giorgio alla Costa Virgin) known also as Madonna col Bambino in trono e due Angeli (Virgin enthroned with Child and two angels), formerly conserved in the Diocesan Museum at Santo Stefano al Ponte, Florence, but as of 2018 exhibited at the Museo dell'Opera del Duomo (Florence),. Not long after the completion of Giotto's commission, a convent was built on to the church, and this convent was enlarged and completely renovated in the course of the fifteenth century. The establishment belonged in turn to the Canons of Sant'Andrea a Mosciano, to the Dominicans and to the Silvestrines.
In the period when Silvestrines were in possession, around the year 1457 Alesso Baldovinetti was commissioned to paint in tempera on wood a depiction of the Annunciation now conserved in Florence's Uffizi Gallery. Giorgio Vasari mistaken attributed it to Pesellino. Some have seen in the painting's architectural background an allusion to the work of Michelozzo.
This brief starts where responsible research should: with the source description of “San Giorgio alla Costa” as church in Florence, Italy. Everything that follows is an evidence route, not borrowed authority.
Why this record matters
The subject matters to the places & architecture register because the source frames it as church in Florence, Italy. Its deeper value depends on whether names, dates, institutions and citations support that framing.
The strongest evidence will usually combine a dated visual record with documents produced by the authority responsible for the place. The source revision retrieved here is dated Nov 12, 2025. The linked authority identifier is Q3585340. VIAF identifies the subject as 173188921. Authority coordinates are 43.765, 11.255. None of the 3 selected statements returned an explicit reference. The first chronological checks are 1000, 2018 and 1457.
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This entry incorporates text from “San Giorgio alla Costa” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.