Michelangelo by Martin Gayford

Author:Martin Gayford
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780141932255
Publisher: Penguin Books Ltd
Published: 2013-10-15T04:00:00+00:00

The deaths of Giuliano and Lorenzo de’ Medici had blasted the hopes of the family. By the summer of 1519, apart from the Pope and the cardinal, the senior branch of the Medici boasted just one legitimate child: an infant girl named Caterina, born on 13 April; her mother, Madeleine de la Tour d’Auvergne, followed her husband Lorenzo to the grave a fortnight later. No one at that time could have imagined that this female orphan would eventually become one of the most powerful rulers in Europe.

Lorenzo and Giuliano died so young and had such a negligible impact on history that it is easy to forget how much was once expected of them. Machiavelli – who dedicated The Prince first to Giuliano, then, after his death, to Lorenzo – had seen in them the best chance for Italy to escape from being a chaotic battleground of foreign armies, as had been its fate since Charles VIII first invaded in 1494.

The minds of the Pope and cardinal began to turn from the triumphant façade of San Lorenzo towards the building of a family mausoleum. One day in June 1519, the month after Lorenzo’s death, Cardinal de’ Medici outlined the idea to a canon of San Lorenzo named Giovan Battista Figiovanni. He wanted to build a new funerary chapel to contain ‘our fathers, and our nephew and brother’. That is, his own father, Giuliano de’ Medici, murdered in the Pazzi plot of 1478, and Leo’s father, Lorenzo the Magnificent, plus the two princes who had more recently died (also, confusingly, named Lorenzo and Giuliano). He also outlined a second scheme at San Lorenzo: a library to house the family’s superb book collection. Nothing was done about this for another five years, but work on the funerary chapel – or New Sacristy – began almost immediately, in November 1519.

Michelangelo was appointed capomaestro, for which he was first paid the following June. Initially, however, his role may not have been very exacting nor his ideas particularly daring. The ground plan and exterior walls would have been agreed early on – probably before the cardinal left Florence at the end of September 1519. However, these would not have required a huge amount of thought, because the plan was to build a near-duplicate of Brunelleschi’s Old Sacristy on the other side of the church. This contained the tombs of four earlier Medici, including Giovanni, father of Cosimo the Elder.

The outside walls of the new building blended seamlessly with those of the church. Inside, the initial designs by Michelangelo for the architectural members in pietra serena – the beautiful grey-green sandstone quarried around Settignano and Fiesole – were different to those of Brunelleschi, but they were still quite conventionally in the idiom of Giuliano da Sangallo and Cronaca.

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