Michelangelo Buonarroti (1475–1564). Italian poet, painter, and sculptor of the first half of C16, he was also the most original, inventive, and influential architect of the time. His architectural career did not really start until he began work on the façade of the Chapel of Pope Leo X (1513–21), Castel Sant'Angelo, Rome (1514), followed by his connection with San Lorenzo, Florence, starting in 1516, when he prepared designs for the façade of the Church (never realized). His first actual building was the New Sacristy (1519–34), the
Mortuary Chapel of the Medici, the shell of which already was built. For this interior he modelled the wall-surfaces with
cornices and
pediments resting on
consoles without
friezes or
architraves, panels breaking through open-bedded segmental pediments, and other
abuses of architecture. These
elisions and distortions created a dynamic tension unknown in the Early
Renaissance.
Aedicules seem to press down on the architectural elements below, and each many-layered wall is framed by a
triumphal arch (defined by
pietra-serena Orders) over which the
coffered dome rises on
pendentives that only begin above the cornice over the great arches, with an extra storey slotted in at pendentive level. The darker pietra-serena work is conventional, resembling treatment by
Brunelleschi, but Michelangelo erected the walls of white marble, seeming to crowd and break out of the areas framed by the Orders.
He was commissioned to design the Biblioteca Laurenziana (1524–71), in which
pilasters seemed to carry the structure of the ceiling, the pattern of which was repeated in the design of the floor, unifying the room in a manner not previously seen. In the vestibule, columns were set in recesses and appeared to sit on consoles, while the
blind aedicules in the wall-panels between the Orders were designed with shafts tapering towards the bases. The vestibule stair (completed by
Ammannati after 1559) is extraordinary, with two external flights and a curious arrangement of steps. The whole structure occupies the centre of the vestibule, and was the very first grand stair of the Renaissance period to be treated as a major feature of architectural design. Both the New Sacristy and the Laurentian Library vestibule are examples of
Mannerism.
In 1534 Michelangelo departed from Florence and settled in Rome, where he painted the Sistine Chapel ceiling for Pope Paul III (1534–49). His Florentine architecture had been mostly interiors, with
Quattrocento treatments of colour, but in Rome his architecture was public, grand, and on a huge scale. He set up the
Antique statue of Emperor Marcus Aurelius (161–80) on a new base in the centre of a space in front of the Palazzo del Senatore on the Capitoline Hill in 1539, and designed the genesis of the trapezoidal Piazza del Campidoglio as a setting for the statue, though this was not completed until the mid-C17 by the
Rainaldis. He planned a new façade for the Palazzo dei Conservatori (completed 1584) which was set at an angle to that of the Palazzo del Senatore, and, to balance it, an identical façade on the other side of the Piazza that became the front of the Capitoline Museum (completed 1654). In these façades he used a
Giant Order, a device that was to be widely employed thereafter, with a smaller Order carrying the first floor, and an even smaller one in the aedicules. The piazza itself was designed to look like a rectangular space, and in the centre is an elliptical pattern around the statue: both devices are read as a circle and square, and the elliptical element is the first use of this figure in Renaissance design. Both the trapezium and ellipse were precedents for the area in front of the basilica of San Pietro in Rome.
In 1546 Michelangelo was appointed to complete
Sangallo's Palazzo Farnese, and he first designed the huge
cornicione over the
astylar façade and redesigned the upper storeys of the
cortile, introducing some of his perverse Mannerist devices (such as consoles with pendent
guttae that seem to have slipped down the window-architraves). In the same year Michelangelo was appointed to complete St Peter's in succession to Sangallo and
Giulio Romano, and immediately began to undo some of Sangallo's work in an attempt to return to
Bramante's Greek-cross plan, but in a much more powerful version. His work was largely confined to the outer and upper parts of the building, although he simplified and clarified the basic geometry. For the exterior he unified the façades with a Giant Order based on the one he had used at the Capitol and designed a sixteen-sided drum with paired columns. As built by della
Porta in 1588–90 the dome is higher and more pointed, and the vertical lines of the paired columns are continued in the ribs of the dome and the
lantern. Michelangelo's proposal for a giant
portico was never realized, as
Maderno built the nave and façade that muddied the clarity of the great architect's design.
At the Porta Pia, Rome (1561–4), named after Pope Pius IV (1559–65), Michelangelo's Mannerist tendencies became more extreme: a broken segmental scrolled pediment with
swag was set inside a triangular pediment, while oversized guttae hung below blocks on either side of the
tympanum;
Ionic capitals, freely interpreted, became copings for the
battlements; aedicules and frames around openings were deliberately oversized and blocky; and panels had broken scrolled pediments holding broken segmental pediments between them. The gate, which faces towards the city at the end of a newly straightened street leading from the Quirinal, anticipates the beginning of
Baroque town-planning.
Pius IV also commissioned Michelangelo to remodel the
tepidarium of the
thermae of Diocletian as a church, using the ancient vaulting and eight monolithic granite columns of the Roman building. It was called Santa Maria degli Angeli, and was begun in 1561, remodelled in C18.
Bibliography
Ackerman (1986);
Argan & and Contardi (1993);
Heydenreich (1996);
Lotz (1977);
Millon & and Smyth (1988);
Placzek (ed.) (1982);
Portoghesi (1964);
Jane Turner (1996)
