We're in the complex of San Lorenzo, and we've walked through to an inner courtyard, up a staircase.
We've entered into a vestibule designed by Michelangelo for Pope Clement VII as an entryway to his library, the Laurentian Library, one of the most architecturally unique and intense spaces I've ever entered.
It's a square, it feels claustrophobic, and it is almost a museum of architectural elements.
The Medici Pope, Clement VII, actually said to Michelangelo use your imagination, create something new.
And so, unlike another space that Michelangelo designed in the San Lorenzo complex, the new sacristy, which is a funerary chapel, this space has no function except as a grand entranceway.
Since the purpose of this vestibule is so straightforward, Michelangelo took the opportunity to create an architecture that was not a backdrop, that was instead itself sculpture, that was itself the thing to pay attention to.
There are no figures, there's no sculpture.
Normally, Michelangelo is creating spaces, as in the new sacristy, where the architecture acts as a frame.
So, for example, on one side you have three blind windows.
If there were sculptures there, these would not be seen as windows, they'd be seen as niches, and our visual attention would be focused on those figures.
Instead, we focus on the frame itself.
It's as though the columns, these strong vertical forms, almost become the figures within the architecture.
It's a double column, and so these engaged columns are almost in conversation with each other, but they're inset in a niche as if they were figural sculpture.
They're on a kind of entablature below which we have these long scrolling brackets.
Those are corbel-like forms.
Corbels are used in architecture to support something above it.
And so for a second, our eye is tricked.
Oh, those are brackets that support something.
But in fact, they support nothing at all.
And then, above those blind windows, we find these very strange forms that consist essentially of outlines of frames.
On every level, there is alternation.
It's very obvious on the second level.
You have the alternation of blind windows and columns.
And even within those blind windows, you have arcing pediments and triangular pediments.
And then, if you look at the second story and compare it to the third, you have below rounded columns that are engaged and then above pilasters or flattened columns that are engaged.
You have squares that are replaced by circles.
And so there is this variety of geometries.
Well, everything lightens as one moves up.
Those heavy brackets that are on the very bottom story become these decorative loops on either side of the window.
The pilasters seem really emphatic in their flatness, in the same way that the columns below them feel very emphatic in their roundness.
It's almost as if we go from sculpture to drawing, from the three-dimensional to the nearly two-dimensional.
The blind frames just below the third story also read like drawings and provide a transition between those two zones.
One of the most curious elements in the vestibule are at the corners where we have inset engaged columns that face each other, separated by a pilaster.
That is given a kind of integrity because it's seen on edge in the corner.
And so we begin to imagine that rectilinear central triangle as continuing in space beyond the walls.
And it is almost, I think, unique in architecture.
And then one of the most radical elements is the way in which Michelangelo handles the capitals which have, at their top, abacuses that have gentle concave arcs that seem to join, creating a half circle.
And so there is this wonderful, playful invention, this collision of architectural elements.
Now, all of this is a frame for the main work in the vestibule, and that is the grand staircase.
And I admit that everything about this space feels as if it is intended to ennoble those who walk up this grand stairway and enter the reading room.
And Michelangelo has taken this opportunity to create not simply a functional element, but a work of sculpture.
And I think it's worth spending just a moment reflecting on what a library represented in the 15th century.
Libraries were rare things.
There had been the great libraries of antiquity in Rome, in Alexandria, but Florence was the site of perhaps the very first publicly accessible libraries in the early modern period.
Libraries were filled with singular manuscripts collected the same way that the Medici family and other wealthy families in Florence collected antiquities.
The base of the stairway is situated almost exactly in the center of this square room and it almost flows down like a fountain.
That's most evident in the gentle curves of the center part of the staircase that seem almost like the concentric pools of a fountain.
But there again we have another inversion, because we would expect the staircase to draw us up and instead it seems to pull down toward us.
And then on either side of this rounded grand central stair, you have squared stairs which are short and then join the central stair midway up.
And so those outer stairs force you to make the right angle.
And so you do have a sense that they are subservient to that central stair.
There is a kind of hierarchy that has been built into this structure.
The stairway confounds all expectations of a stairway.
And in fact, when I climb them, I feel unstable.
And I've noticed others who seem to feel the same way.
And the banisters have this odd squat appearance to them as though they're being compressed.
The entire room, with the exception of the flooring and the ceiling, are two colors.
A lighter plaster, which creates a kind of flattening of the space.
And then you have Pietra Serena, this local greenish-gray stone that had become a major part of Florentine architectural vocabulary thanks to the earlier work of Brunelleschi.
The stairs are Pietra Serena, but they were originally intended to be walnut, and so the staircase would have originally felt more a part of the reading room where we can see this elaborate wooden ceiling, and it would have felt as if the reading room itself was pouring down into this stone space.
So let's talk for a minute about the entranceway.
The doorway is framed by inset double columns with these capitals that curve outward from the center.
And then above the doorway, we see a broken pediment that is the center is inset.
And that pediment is very thick.
It draws our eye toward the doorway.
Vitruvius, the ancient Roman architect, had written a very famous book, the Ten Books of Architecture.
And throughout the Renaissance, architects had sought to understand the rules of classical architecture and to follow them, as laid out by Vitruvius.
Michelangelo is clearly interested in something entirely different.
He's interested in those fragments as fragments, not trying to understand how they were originally put together, but instead using them as a kind of architectural vocabulary that he can construct poetry from.
Well, we know, in fact, that Michelangelo was studying ancient Roman architecture through a book of drawings, of fragments, since that's primarily what was left of ancient Roman architecture.
So he seems to have this proclivity for seeing ancient forms in isolation and rearranging them and looking at them from different orientations and at different scales, all allowing for a kind of free play.
Now, what's interesting is that the manuscript that Michelangelo was referencing would have been commissioned to express the patron's erudition, his wealth and his interest in the ancient world.
And so when Michelangelo then gives actual architectural form to these elements, as we see here, it does convey that same set of values upon Clement VII, his patron.
We've walked up the stairs into the long hall that is the reading room.
What we're seeing could not be more different than the vestibule.
Instead of a tall, compressed space, we have the longitudinal space divided into regular bays.
But when we look toward the walls, we see many of the same elements that we saw on the vestibule.
We have these flattened pilasters without fluting.
We have these blind, frame-like spaces above the windows.
And that's a reversal, because outside, in the vestibule, the lights were actually above and here the blind spaces are above, which of course, is practical because it emits light directly down to the readers.
And then, as we look toward the doorway, we see a very deep pediment with a rounded top and then, on either side, blind windows with those same brackets that don't have a supporting function but are beautifully decorative.
And then above is this densely carved wooden ceiling that gives us a sense of what the staircase might have looked like.
And in that ceiling you can see references to some of the elements that we saw in the vestibule, including garlands and a general ovoid shape very much like the stairs.
Let's head out, down the staircase and out into the cloister.
In fact, if we have time, let's go visit the old sacristy and say hello to Brunelleschi.
