Michelangelo Buonarroti
Cappella Medicea

Between 1520 and 1534, Michelangelo worked on the Medici Chapel (New Sacristy) in San Lorenzo. These were years of intense turmoil both for the artist's personal history and the political history of the peninsula. Work in San Lorenzo was interrupted in 1527, the year of the Sack of Rome and the expulsion of the Medici from Florence. Michelangelo then placed himself at the service of the republic and participated in the city's fortification projects. 1530 was the year of the Medici restoration in Florence, and Michelangelo had to resume work on the chapel in San Lorenzo, which would then be definitively interrupted by his departure for Rome.

Born amidst such contrasting events, the Medici Chapel remains a radically innovative work, an exemplary realization of Mannerist poetics. Michelangelo's innovations were perceived even by his contemporaries, as Vasari could claim that Buonarroti had created an “ornament very different from what men made in terms of measure, order, and rule according to common use.” Michelangelo introduced substantial innovations to the structure of the chapel, tripartitioning the walls vertically as well, by interposing a plane between the main order and the hemispherical dome, and articulating the dome, inspired by ancient Roman architecture, into coffers that decrease in size near the lantern. An absolutely new architectural element, precisely because it was not assimilable to any recognized order, in an era when respect for the classical canon had not yet been questioned, is the niches resting on the eight entrance doors to the chapel. The autonomy of the individual parts, which traditionally compose these elements (niche, cornice, and tympanum), is overcome by the penetration of the cornice into the space of the tympanum according to a daring expansion both horizontally and vertically.

The problem of the relationship between the chapel's architecture and the sculpture of the funeral monuments in the Medici house was solved by Michelangelo by placing the latter against the wall, embedding them within the central compartments delineated by the stone pilasters of the lower order. The contrasting use of white marble in the architectural members of the tombs restored autonomy to this system, depriving it of any structural role, consistent with the tradition of the wall tomb monument. The tombs of Lorenzo the Magnificent and his brother Giuliano, unfortunately, were never executed, while the burials of the dukes of Giuliano de' Medici and Lorenzo of Urbino were placed along the lateral walls of the chapel. The statues, representing the two prematurely deceased members of the Medici family, face each other in an elevated position, in two niches embedded in the central area of each monument. These are idealized effigies, not true portraits. The dukes are presented in the attire of military captains with ancient armor and without beards. The triumph of the Medici family over Time, and for them of the two effigied members, is represented by the allegories of the four parts of the day (Dawn, Day, Dusk, Night) laid out in pairs on the sarcophagi isolated in front of each monument.

These statues, which seem to slide from the sarcophagi, tormented and melancholic, iconographically derive from the figures of ancient river gods, but are a completely new invention, laden with spiritual and formal tension emphasized, in the figures of Day, by the use of the unfinished. Fundamental to understanding the novelties of these Michelangelesque sculptures is the anticipation of a diagonal viewpoint allowed by the breadth of the chapel, realized through corner framings specifically studied by the artist. This means dynamically conceiving the appreciation of the work in space, no longer in a static and frontal manner. In fact, the dukes are turned toward the spiritual center of the chapel: The statue of the Virgin and Child. For Michelangelo, the restless images of earthly glory (the dukes) and time (the parts of the day) tend to find peace in a higher and eternal spiritual harmony, both Platonic and Christian.

Sublime.