The Laurentian Library (Biblioteca Medicea Laurenziana) in Florence, Italy, contains more than 11,000 manuscripts and 4,500 early printed books. Built in a cloister of the Medicean Basilica di San Lorenzo di Firenze under the patronage of the Medici pope Clement VII, the library was built to emphasize that the Medici were no longer just merchants but members of intelligent and ecclesiastical society. It contains the manuscripts and books belonging to the private library of the Medici family……The Laurentian Library was commissioned in 1523 and construction began in 1525. The two-story quattrocento cloister remained unchanged by the addition of the library. Because of this, certain features of Michelangelo’s plan, such as length and width, were already determined.
........Michelangelo's practice of amalgamating several prototypes, as most ambitiously demonstrated in the Laurentian ricetto, has no obvious precedent in previous Renaissance architecture..........In designing the ricetto, Michelangelo continued to use prototypes but he selected and adapted them to be congruent in various ways with anthropomorphic forms and principles. From an interpretational point of view, he succeeded in linking and reconciling the concept of the composto* with an ideal of imitating from nature.....Both in the realm of figures and of architecture, the effect of Michelangelo’s method was to create works that read as assemblages of individual parts……
* Assumptions of proportional systems in the Ricetto thus served as the basis for various narratives about the room: narratives of composto, ordine, and varietà, of novelty and originality, and fitness for purpose…….The square dimensions of the Ricetto suggest that there may be easily perceptible relations between dimensions on a very basic level. But as the various attempts to account for its uniqueness show, there is no evident, consistent or even logical relation between the proportions as observed and the conclusions drawn from them. Rather, it seems as if the proportions viewers think they observe here function as the first guide to making sense of what they see. They have a function in making the viewers think and reformulate what they see in terms of Aristotelian teleology, rhetoric or the questione della lingua, but there is no inherent quality in the observable relations between measurements to connect them in a necessary or sufficient way to these interpretations……..That is, they have a hermeneutic or epistemological role in the process of the viewer’s perception, but they are not inherent aesthetic qualities of the design……
………..In the process of investing architecture with the expressive capacity of the figure, Michelangelo developed a lexicon of forms poised between classical morphology and geometrical abstraction……The forms were largely drawn from his earlier projects, as well as from existing buildings, both ancient and modern. The maneuvers by which he transformed these precedents – inversion, reversal, scale shift, and displacement – mimic those carried out with figures to generate new poses for the Sistine nudes……..
……The overall composition of the vestibule and reading room does not adhere to a conventional architectural logic but to Michelangelo’s own rules. This logic is characterized by multiplicity and complexity, but if it had to be reduced to one principle, it might be described in terms of contrasts, or to use a period term, contrapposto, a way of referring to the pose, often used in Roman sculpture and taken up again in the fifteenth century, of weight unevenly distributed on one side of the body. Visually, the pose conveys both tension – because of the asymmetry – and relaxation. But the term relates to the concept of antithesis, and was derived from rhetoric.……The formal strategy of contrast, and the conceptual problem of truth, both come into play in the Library. Contrast surfaces through the opposition of extrusion and recession, presence and absence…….
...........In the Laurentian Library, the design barely contains planar surfaces; the architecture of the vestibule in particular defies the traditional conception of the wall as static........in the context of the library, Michelangelo broke from the paradigm of the wall as a surface for linear composition.......perspective prizes the single view, while Michelangelo’s architectural compositions (much like his figurative ones) generate multiple points of interest. Just as in painting, Michelangelo avoided landscape and perspective not out of inability but from lack of inclination........The library resists easy categorization because Michelangelo’s vestibule lacks framed views, but it does emphatically feature movement..............in this regard it is worth heeding his insistence that he was fundamentally a sculptor – because in sculpture there is no horizon, no recession, and no single point of view..........
………….Architectural frames are employed, but without the presence of actual architectural orders. This ambiguity is typical of Michelangelo, whose orders are often difficult or impossible to categorize according to strict typologies such as Doric, Ionic, or Corinthian………..including the orders meant fixing a large number of other features, not just the morphology of the capitals or bases, but also the height of the column shaft and the distance between the columns. The only explicit sign of classical vocabulary is the pediment of the window niches, but even these are made to appear as geometric flourishes……..Without the system of the orders to govern them, architectural elements become even more fluid than the human figures, which at least in their internal proportions—the size of head relative to the height of the body, for example—are relatively fixed……..Michelangelo’s architecture draws ironic attention to certain elements of the architectural tradition, bringing into question an entire set of conventions regarding how architecture signifies. At the same time, he demonstrates how architecture can match both the formal flexibility and the expressive capacity of painting and sculpture, as well as its paradoxes and perplexities…….By creating puzzling disruptions of function and meaning in the definition of architecture, Michelangelo proposes ambivalent new solutions to traditional architectural problems…...Michelangelo suspends certainties and conventions and thereby establishes a new basis for knowledge and, in his case, artistic invention……..
……..Its multiple layers demonstrate that Michelangelo has not given primacy to either the figural or architectural components, but instead allowed their morphology and scale to evolve in relation to one another. Perhaps as an effect of the layers of ideas contained in the single sheet, the development of these ideas appears as an organic, dynamic process, in which the vertical architectural elements push on and constrain the figures, while the figures, leaning on the architecture, react to the pressure by pushing back………The figures defy the architecture through their own skeletal structure: they lean, they lie, and they bend as they withstand the architectural thrust. The drawing demonstrates how the binary relationship between figure and frame could generate a productive tension……….
The Capitoline Hill is the smallest of Rome's seven hills, but it was the religious and political center of the city since its foundation more than 2500 years ago. Today the hill is also known as Campidoglio, the Italian name for the hill. During the Middle Ages, the site became the center of civic government and several palaces were built on the hill. But when Emperor Charles V planned a visit to Rome in 1536, the muddy Capitoline Hill was in such a bad shape that pope Paul III Farnese asked Michelangelo to design a new square, the Piazza del Campidoglio. The project also included a redesign of the existing buildings surrounding the square…….Michelangelo came up with an original design for the square with an intriguing ground pattern. He rebuilt the Palazzo Senatorio, seat of the Roman senate and made designs of a new facade for the Palazzo dei Conservatori…….Additionally a new building, the Palazzo Nuovo, was to be built just opposite the Palazzo dei Conservatori. Finally a monumental staircase, the Cordonata, leading from the bottom of the hill to the new square, was also part of Michelangelo's ambitious plans for the hill………Construction of the Piazza del Campidoglio started in 1546 but only the staircase at the entrance of the Palazzo Senatorio was realized when Michelangelo died in 1564. The project was only completed in the 17th century, but most of Michelangelo's designs were implemented.
