Michelangelo's Laurentian Library: Drawings and Design Process

Re-examination of a key group of Michelangelo's sketches for the Laurentian Library, located in the monastic complex of Florence's S. Lorenzo, offers a new understanding of his design process and the project as it was built. While drawings by Michelangelo survive for all three of the library's intended spaces, this study concentrates on a number of drawings on four sheets for the entrance vestibule, orricetto, and the two drawings for what would have constituted the third space, the unbuilt rare books room. It offers a major revision of Rudolf Wittkower's pioneering study of the library's design stages, and will also allow for the identification and discussion of key precedents and their role in the development of Michelangelo's design. These included ancient Roman and Renaissance sources, as well as his own designs both for the unbuilt façade of S. Lorenzo, and for the Medici Chapel attached to the same church (Fig. 1). Consideration of the drawings for the Laurentian Libraryricettoin conjunction with letters written to Michelangelo from his Roman agent, Giovanni Francesco Fattucci, and the papal secretary Pier Paolo Marzi, recording Pope Clement VII's responses to a number of important design ideas, allows for a reliable reconstruction of Michelangelo's penultimate scheme for thericetto, which enables the recognition of a key ancient precedent that inspired Michelangelo, and throws new light on the genesis of the final design. It becomes clear, too, that Michelangelo would later rework certain design ideas that he developed in these Laurentian Library sketches for subsequent projects in Rome, including an early design for the Palazzo dei Conservatori, and also the final form of both this palace and the Palazzo Senatorio.