Understand Michelangelo's Architecture

Michelangelo's art was revolutionary because he embedded multiple layers of meaning into each of his works, often by exaggerating qualities such as proportions, balance, and symmetry, such as distorting the proportions of the Virgin in the Pietà or the proportions of David's head and hands and making his paintings ambiguous and moving away from balance. This act of exaggerating qualities So while Leonardo da Vinci, Raphael, and other Renaissance artists sought balance, symmetry, and clarity in their works, Michelangelo sought tension and instability. But Michelangelo also applies this sensibility to architecture, this interest in playing with scale, playing with the roughness of materials, and disrupting the order-syntax of elements. Lorento de' Medici, the most powerful man in Florence, wanted to keep the great traditions of the Renaissance alive. So he asked the masters of the sculpture studios in Florence to send their best students to live in the house with de' Medici and to be present in discussions of the Platonic Academy of Florence, a gathering of scholars aiming to blend ancient philosophy with Renaissance ideals. Among the students invited was Michelangelo, who, as a result, was trained as a sculptor while also receiving a very classical education rooted on the ideals of the ancient world, an experience that set the stage for his later architectural innovations. Therefore, many of Michelangelo's early commissions came from de' Medici. He got his first architectural commission relatively late in his career, at the age of 41, and he was to work on a couple of projects for this church. This is the Basilica of San Lorenzo, one of the largest churches in Florence. His first task was to design the interior of the new sacristy, this small space. There was an old sacristy on the opposite side designed by Filippo Brunelleschi, the first architect of the Renaissance. Both sacristies are about the same size, so Michelangelo had the opportunity to play with the architectural language of Brunelleschi. Brunelleschi deserves immense credit for being the first to integrate elements of ancient Roman architecture into his designs. However, if you compare the two, the walls in Brunelleschi's sacristy look very flat compared to the walls in Michelangelo's sacristy. Michelangelo, as a sculptor, has a very three-dimensional understanding of the surface, and you can see that in his walls, which have much more depth. They're carved with niches and have attached plasters, and the elements look much more Roman. Even the dome has a covering just like the covering in the Pantheon, as opposed to Brunelleschi's ribbed dome. Within the chapel, Michelangelo also crafted sculptures for the tombs of Lorenzo and Giuliano de' Medici, creating this moment of tension in the statues, which appear like they're about to slide off the curved sarcophagi. The most significant project that Michelangelo did for the Church of San Lorenzo was this building attached to the church's cloister, known as the Laurentian Library. It's a library destined for scholars to consult ancient and medieval manuscripts in Latin and Greek that belong to the private collection of the Medici family. The Medici commissioned its construction to emphasize that they were no longer just merchants, but members of intelligent and ecclesiastical society. The entrance to the library is through a small door at the upper level of the cloister. From here, you can see the great dome of Florence Cathedral. As you enter, you'll notice that the library is preceded by a vestibule of great height, but regardless of the great height, as you enter, you feel in a pretty tight and compacted space. Michelangelo is creating this tension on purpose. He's approaching the space more as a sculpture rather than an architect. He is sculpting the space. Classical Roman forms, such as columns and pediments, are not really of interest to him as a system of proportion or measurement, but rather as a purely visual system. Most of the elements in the room are made to visually stimulate you. Take the stairs, for example. While the central section functions as the main staircase, the lateral sections are purely sculptural and visual. They're made to fill up the entire space of the plan rather than having any practical purpose. It's a strange space because you enter from the sides, but it's all very frontal. So as you enter, you feel pushed towards the walls by this giant staircase. Even as you climb it, you feel repelled and pushed outwards by these cascading curves on each step, amplifying this sense of discomfort. But at the same time, you feel a grand empty space above you because of how tall this is. The space gets even stranger when you look at how the walls are articulated by the columns. Columns in ancient Greek architecture were structural elements. The only purpose of a column was to support the building. By the time you get to the Romans, columns became decorative for the most part, as structures relied more on arches. You see engaged columns and pilasters everywhere just to visually emphasize the proportions of the buildings but not to support their structure. What Michelangelo does here is that he starts to play with the walls and the columns, making the structure ambiguous, whether the wall is doing the job or the column is doing the job. So he carves niches in the walls and stick the columns in there. The wall and the columns are constantly competing for dominance here. And this double column rhythm allows to have a corner that makes sense. If you see how Renaissance architects were dealing with the corner previous to Michelangelo, it's almost funny because they never knew what to do and the result is just bad. So Michelangelo solves this problem by playing with the positive and negative space of the wall. He's using the same materials and colors that Brunelleschi used in his architecture, but at his own terms. If you see the section of the building, you'll notice that the grand vertical scale of the vestibule is even higher than the space of the library. And that's another thing Michelangelo does. He translates everything to the vertical as if everything was starting to float up. He has the columns appear to be supported by these consoles so that weight seems to be carried on rather weak elements. He introduces these support elements called estipites, which are thinner on the bottom and thicker on the top. The pediments are detaching from the niches. The sides of the frames of these niches are flying up. And at the same time, in plan, these stairs are just pushing you outward. It's important to remember that Michelangelo's architecture is all about creating tension. That same tension of incompletion that you saw on David's expression and veins on his sculptures of day and night almost sliding to the sides of the curved sarcophagus or in the creation of Adam in the Sistine Chapel. It's all about the anticipation, what's about to happen. And so as you climb up the stairs and leave the vestibule behind, you'll notice again the tension between the verticality of the vestibule and the horizontality of the library itself. The sculptural drama of Michelangelo's vestibule is only a prelude to the principal space, the reading room for Greek and Latin texts. Here he abandoned his preferred tension and dynamics in favor of a balanced order suited to the space's function. By contrast, the library's reading room is serene, quiet, and restful, entirely appropriate for research and study. It's a long room lit by evenly spaced windows set between pilasters in the side walls. This way, the reading desks, arranged perpendicular to the side walls, are well illuminated by natural light. In 1534, Michelangelo left plans and instructions for other architects to complete the new sacristy and the Laurentian Library, and he left Florence for Rome, where he remained until his death in 1564. One of his great architectural commissions there came from the local government authority, which decided to reestablish the grandeur of Rome by developing the Campidoglio, the ancient seat of government on the Capitoline Hill. Occupied since the 12th century by a communal palace, would have a great impact on the city of Rome at an urban level. He took the bronze statue of Marcus Aurelius and he placed it right at the center to be the focal point of the square, through which a geometric pattern on the pavement creates a unity between the statue and the surrounding buildings. If we see the plan of the piazza, we can see how Michelangelo creates the tension here, not towards the vertical, but this time towards the Roman Forum, which is behind the piazza. From the base of the Cordonata, the long stair that gives access to the square, to the end of the square itself, it all appears to be opening up towards the Roman Forum, creating these trapezoidal shapes that correct the optical effect of the perspective. This was the first time that an architect was commissioned to design a great civic plaza in the city of Rome, and it would become a model that was replicated during the next centuries in other important squares in the city. As we have seen, Michelangelo likes to take classical elements such as columns and pediments and transform them as he pleases without following the rules, without following a normative canon like his predecessors. He stretches the columns and make them span two stories rather than one, known as colossal order, and he then makes the columns tiny to create this rhythm in the lower level of the buildings. For the windows, he superimposes almost every single classical element that there is. He places a pediment, but he also breaks the pediment to place an arch. He adds little columns as supports, but also a couple of pilasters and volumes, all these elements that are certainly not needed for the structure, but that make the wall incredibly dense and three-dimensional. Taking that plasticity from the walls of the Laurentian Library one step further, it almost looks like this is a volume coming out of the wall rather than just a flat enframement of the window. He does the same thing when he's commissioned to finish the Palazzo Farnese that was started by a Renaissance architect, Sangallo. You can see the middle windows made by Sangallo are pretty normative and canonical, as the entire pediments are perfectly supported by columns, and the columns stand on plinths. This is definitely something you would see in an ancient Roman building. But if you take a look at the top windows, Michelangelo's windows, they tend to verticality by having the columns stand on consoles and having an arch and a broken pediment on each window. Michelangelo takes this practice even further and becomes crazy in one of his later projects, Porta Pia, where he had to make a gate to Rome's wall. Now, in all his previous projects, he kept playing with the order of elements and superimposing them so as to make the structure ambiguous. However, in this project, he begins to deform these elements and reorder the pieces in redundant ways. Just look at the door. Every possible classic arrangement is happening at the same time. There's a triangular pediment, there's a round pediment that's broken in half but joined by this giant hanging garland, there's a round arch, there's an angular arch, but there's also a lintel supported by the pilasters, there are consoles on the sides and a giant keystone in the center. But he also places pieces of architecture where they don't belong, a tiny keystone in the pilasters, ionic column capitals on top of the battlements, and even this. What exactly is this supposed to be? Even the small windows have these ears and these broken pediments. No architect before Michelangelo was this playful with the vocabulary of Roman architecture. Probably the most important work of architecture in Michelangelo's career was his project for St. Peter's Basilica. Many people believe that Michelangelo only contributed with a dome, but he in fact had a whole plan for the basilica, most of which was built. The previous plan was that of Antonio da Sangallo, which featured a huge scale basilica composed by small superimposed columns. It was so large and detailed that according to Michelangelo, it looked as if built by Germans, associating it with a heavy Gothic architecture from Northern Europe, considered barbaric by Renaissance Italians. The coherence of Sangallo's project was lost in the details. So when he died, Michelangelo took over the construction and changed Sangallo's project. The whole scheme of Michelangelo's redesigned basilica was a complete unity. For the apses, he used the same height and proportions of the Colosseum, but instead of stacking the columns, he used his colossal order to articulate the surface, making the design more cohesive. And for the facade, he made a reinterpretation of the facade of the Pantheon with a great transitional element between the basilica and the square, which is this grand stair. For the dome, Michelangelo dismisses the designs of his predecessors and attempts to emulate the design of a dome that he admired in his hometown. Michelangelo corresponded with his nephew in Florence to learn the dimensions of Brunelleschi's dome in Florence Cathedral, the greatest cupola ever built. "'I am going to make it, sister, bigger, yes, but not more beautiful,' he wrote. He proposes a dome that consists of three parts, a drum, a double-shell ovoid structure, and a lantern at the top to illuminate the interior. The whole structure is visually reinforced through a series of ribs. It's just like the one in Florence. However, this dome proposes a much more plastic and sculptural scheme. It features 16 ribs, as opposed to the eight-ribbed design in Florence, to make the structure completely rounded. You can compare the flatness of the surface in Brunelleschi's dome with the plasticity of the colonnaded surface in Michelangelo's. Michelangelo made an enormous wooden model of his design for the dome that could be split into sections, offering a perspective of what it would feel like inside. The pope could walk through this model, getting a preview of what the finished dome would look like from within. Unfortunately, thanks to thoughtless popes dismissing Michelangelo, his original façade was never built. Instead, the design of the building was altered with an enlarged nave and a different façade by Moderno, which blocks the view of the dome from St. Peter's Square. Bernini's colonnade and Moderno's façade are beautiful in their own right, but they have no relationship to the dome. The real aim of the building was the dome. Michelangelo understood that it should be visible not only from inside, but also from the exterior. The dome is an urban element and it was obscured by the façade. Similarly, the apses, which were originally in harmony with the dome, have also been hidden. Now you can only appreciate these beautiful relationships when viewing the Basilica from the Vatican Gardens behind. Not a very accessible place. Michelangelo's portico was a solid mass integrated into the shape of the building, but with its final design, the façade has become merely a front. Michelangelo's dome would profoundly influence the design of later domes built across Europe in the following centuries. While in Rome, Michelangelo also undertook a highly unconventional project. He transformed the tepidarium, a room within the ancient Roman baths of Diocletian, into the Basilica of Santa Maria degli Angeli e dei Martiri. In a striking departure from traditional church design, he established the main axis based on the width of the hall, rather than its length, as if the side chapels were stretching the width of the space. Michelangelo ingeniously utilized the existing ancient structure, reconstructing the vast Roman vault to create an expansive interior. The surrounding spaces that once formed part of the Roman baths were reimagined as chapels, seamlessly integrating the old with the new and enhancing the spiritual atmosphere of the Basilica. Michelangelo's last project, begun when he was 87 years old, just two years before his death, was his most adventurous project spatially. This is the Sforza Chapel inside the Basilica of Santa Maria Maggiore. Like the Laurentian Library, this chapel is both dynamic and ambiguous. The central space features four detached columns rotated 45 degrees, with an altar projecting beyond. But to either side are recesses with gently curving rear walls, and in the vaults above are extraordinary tapering windows. Observe the tension between the vault and the columns. The vault seems to be pulled down by the columns rather than resting upon them. There was no more revolutionary Renaissance building than this one, and it's almost prophetic of the Baroque architecture that would develop throughout Europe over the next 150 years. Through his work, Michelangelo transcended the rules of the Renaissance, the rules of classical architecture, to create something new, something that would define the direction of architecture and art for centuries. Michelangelo was an architect who changed the course of history. But if you really want to understand his sculpture and his painting, then I recommend you watching my video explaining Michelangelo's art. Please like this video, subscribe to my channel, and I'll see you very soon in the next episode. Goodbye.