Issues on the Architectural Language of Michelangelo Buonarroti

The volume brings together four essays devoted to the architectural language of Michelangelo Buonarroti. Its principal thesis is that Buonarroti’s architecture constitutes an entirely autonomous form of expression, independent from the visual arts, and particularly from sculpture; contrary to what is still commonly maintained today, it may be argued that Michelangelo was, in his own time, one of the rare masters – if not the only one – who sought to separate the expressive principles of architecture from those of painting and sculpture. According to the hypothesis advanced in this volume, Michelangelo acquired the principal rules of the ars aedificatoria during his youthful apprenticeship with Domenico Ghirlandaio, and from his earliest architectural experiments – beginning with the architectura picta of the Sistine Chapel vault – he followed the fundamental principles of the modern classicist order. Throughout his long life, Michelangelo explored the linguistic possibilities of classicist architecture, intervening first on its syntax (the façade of San Lorenzo, the New Sacristy) and shortly thereafter on its lexicon, where his interest in the examples offered by the Codex Coner becomes explicit. The case of the herm order is particularly significant in revealing Michelangelo’s desire to purge architecture of every figurative residue, in order to achieve a language of pure abstraction. The first chapter reconstructs the origins of the major historio-graphical misconception surrounding Buonarroti, still widely accepted today: namely, the view that considers Michelangelo’s architecture as a stylised form of anatomical sculpture. The cliché has precise histori-cal origins, which are reconstructed here in detail. The second chapter reconstructs Michelangelo’s architectural forma-tion, tracing it back to architectura picta and to the so-called opera del quadro in late-fifteenth-century Florentine and Roman contexts. The fundamental concepts of classicist architecture (its structural lo-gic, its principal sequences, proportions, and alignments, as well as its potential symbolic representational capacity) were widespread notions possessed by any artist or craftsman of the period, with varying de-grees of proficiency. Michelangelo absorbed these principles long before copying certain sheets of the Codex Coner, whose influence should be understood solely at the lexical level. The third chapter seeks to identify Michelangelo’s distinctive inter-pretation of the architectural order, understood as the linguistic code of classicist design culture. Contrary to what has been maintained for centuries, it can be demonstrated that Michelangelo not only respected the fundamental principles of the architectural order, but also develo-ped its meaning and logic in depth, becoming one of the greatest vir-tuosos of the classicist language. The order of the ricetto is particular-ly significant: its anomalies of bases, capitals, and entablatures can all be traced back to the study of the Codex Coner, which Michelangelo adopted as a reference lexicon, capable of being expanded and modi-fied according to logic and necessity. The final chapter is devoted to the herm order, to which Michelan-gelo made an essential contribution. Unknown to antiquity, the mo-dern herm order is an anthropomorphic linguistic motif, in which the abstraction of architecture merges with the figuration of the visual arts. It is particularly noteworthy that Michelangelo himself—the greatest painter and sculptor of his age—began with an anthropo-morphic herm order, endowed with precise allegorical meanings, in order to distil it into a purely aniconic order, as befits the abstraction inherent in the architectural art.