The Laurentian Library

The half-day lines to see Michelangelo's David at the Academia in Florence or his Sistine Ceiling at the Vatican Museums in Rome testify to the artist’s immense impact to arts and architecture. But even in the height of tourist season it is possible to walk into one of his architectural masterpieces, the Laurentian Library in Florence, and experience it alone(or nearly), but despite the short lines and the relatively unknown and unnoticed work by Michelangelo it should not be assumed that the Laurentian Library was insignificant in its time. In fact, his contemporaries were desperate to have a chance to study the Library and learn from the radical master that was Michelangelo.

The Laurentian Library was built between 1524 and 1559 in the cloister of the church of San Lorenzo for the Medici Pope, Clement VII, to house the powerful family’s collection of manuscripts. It was constructed on top of an existing convent, sponsored by the Medici family, adjacent to an existing courtyard, which connected the different programmatic elements of the church and monastery. The original structure was never intended to allow for an additional building above so Michelangelo was forced to adapt his project to be lighter and fit into the existing site. The Medici family up to this point in time had been an extremely successful family of merchants and patrons of the arts. They were, in fact, the “taste-makers” of Florence and much of the later Renaissance, but with the recent succession to the role of Pope by the Medici’s patriarch, the family wanted to assert its authority, not just in wealth but also in amongst the intellectual elite. So, the family commissioned Michelangelo to build a library, where books could be studied, transcribed and preserved by monks thereby insuring the family’s place amongst the institutions that supported these pursuits such as the Church. Michelangelo’s project comprised two connected parts: a two-story vestibule with a monumental staircase connecting to the upper story, a long reading room housing the books for quiet study. Despite the modest nature of the project, coupled with the fact it was a renovation, and that Michelangelo was forced to make many design sacrifices during the building process, it did not diminish the architectural worth of the Laurentian Library as Michelangelo was still able to create a stand alone piece of architecture that is decidedly his own, and one of his greatest works at that.

So the question remains: why is the general public today less receptive to Michelangelo's architecture, specifically less grandiose work such as Saint Peter’s, like the Laurentian Library; meanwhile, lines wrap corners stretching on for hours to see the tense, and tightly formed buttocks of The David? The primary reason is that his sculpture strikes an intuitive chord in its audience as Michelangelo manipulates the human form -something we intuitively know and understand, while his architecture is deceptively difficult to understand. Michelangelo was working in a time where the language of architectural design was inundated and rigid in it’s classical rules of proportion, order, structural systems, and orientation of program and forms. The Laurentian Library dared to break these systems, in an elegant, beautiful way, and it shook the architectural world as a result.

The Laurentian Library, too, has the power to move the unaware. Just as someone ignorant of the philosophy and intentions of Picasso and the early cubists can still be affected by the dynamic compositions and curious breakdown of the visual experience through painting, so can too the library visitor with no background in architectural history is still likely to experience a sense of tension and compression, while walking through the vestibule, and of tranquility and release while crossing into the reading room.

This sensation of tension and compression in the reading vestibule is achieved through a variety of curious means. At first when the visitor enters the space he or she is dramatically surprised first by a massive, overflowing, black marble staircase, then by the forty-eight foot ceiling height soaring overhead compared to the relatively small floor area of the room. Immediately, Michelangelo seems to say, to hell with the formal rules of proportion. The sculptural staircase is often described as a lava-flow as it descends down from the reading room and occupying a large majority of the floor space in the vestibule, while the remaining floor area is left relatively inept for anything other than paying tribute to the monumental staircase. Yet, the shear weight and intruding nature of the staircase does not seem to equal the scale of the space over head, and the visitor seems to be dwarfed, by the heaviness of this overbearing void overhead.

Then, on a deeper level, Michelangelo engages in dialogue with classical style—the columns, capitals, bases, while thumbing his nose to the order of which these elements must be organized. Until this point in time a column had a very specific place in architecture, as did all the other elements, and any variation other than the norm was not only nonsensical but architectural heresy. Michelangelo blatantly challenges the system’s dogma by turning these orders on their heads. He doubles columns, extends their bases far above floor level, partially submerges them within the wall while creating a niche within the wall, as if he had sculpted the space with a chisel and exposed the columns that were within the wall all along. Beyond this play on the particular elements, Michelangelo challenges the definition and appearance of the wall. While it is customary to see columns on the outside of buildings supporting the roof. He takes them inside, and transforms them into what appear to be decorations. Yet, Michelangelo fools the visitor into believing that columns are merely decorative and serve no purpose, while in actuality, the wall is filled with loose rubble and the columns are the true structural system.

He furthers this deception by taking commonplace elements, such as doors or windows, and toys with our expectations by making them enormously, needlessly complex, often using them in ways contrary to their nature. Often his windows are blind and his doors stretch and shrink in dimension when framed by their corresponding niche.

Michelangelo isn’t trying to be ironic for the sake of irony, rather he is challenging the generations of architecture that fetishized the roman tradition, thus freeing the architect to explore new concepts, all the while creating an environment where the visitor is forced to question the apparent reality surrounding.
— Have I mentioned that Michelangelo achieves all of this (plus many more symbolic, detailed elements unmentioned) just in the vestibule? The reading room has yet to be addressed. So, never underscore the architectural brilliance of Michelangelo when he can turn the entire architectural tradition upside down, and have his visitors questioning life and reality with just one room. With the vestibule, Michelangelo revitalized the potential for the next generation of architects, freeing them from the need to slavishly imitate models from the past and allowing them to arrive at their own forms of expression. Before I ramble on further and discuss the elegant, subdued reading room, I instead prompt the reader to look for the next cheapest flight on Kayak to Florence and experience this piece of architecture themselves. 

Ackerman, James S. The Architecture of Michelangelo: A Catalogue of Michaelangelo's Works. Baltimore, Etc.: Pelican, 1971. Print.Spiegel, Nany. "Humanities & Social Sciences News." The University of Chicago Library News. N.p., n.d. Web. 05 Dec. 2016.


note: this is by far my favorite building I have visited so much of this text is my own ramblings mixed with idea presented in the preliminary research