Remembering the Medici: Michelangelo's New Sacristy and the Memory of Medici Magnificence in Sixteenth-Century Florence Público
Hardi, Linda Prudence (2012)
Published
Abstract
The New Sacristy of the Florentine Basilica of San Lorenzo was commissioned from Michelangelo in 1519 by Cardinal Giulio de' Medici, in consultation with his cousin Pope Leo X (Giovanni de' Medici). It was built as a mausoleum for Lorenzo and Giuliano de' Medici, and for their descendants Giuliano, Duke of Nemours, and Lorenzo, Duke of Urbino. This study examines Michelangelo's methods in designing the New Sacristy in relation to the central mechanisms of Renaissance portraiture, which rehearse a socially legible representation of a particular individual's character and status by casting it in a fictional interaction with a willing audience. In order to demonstrate how the concept of portraiture frames the rhetorical apparatus of Michelangelo's New Sacristy, as a platform for the beholder's experience of the space, the following paper will review the components of the sculptural program, and the range of available models with which Michelangelo could expect his viewers to associate the posthumous memory of the Medici. This includes the various precedents available to Michelangelo in the tombs of other Florentines--and more specifically, the tombs of other Medici leaders at San Lorenzo--as the most immediate influence on the beholder's expectations for the tombs in the New Sacristy. Additionally, the precedent provided by the Medici in their patronage of the visual arts will be reviewed in order to assess Michelangelo's symbolic interpolation of the visual references in his New Sacristy tombs. This investigation must include a more specific definition of the terms and concepts attached to the study of the arts in Renaissance Italy, especially to the concept of portraiture at the time, and to the particular importance and character of visual culture in Renaissance Florence as the context for Michelangelo's New Sacristy.
Table of Contents
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