Medici Chapel

from Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Aerial view of the Medici chapels within the San Lorenzo complex with the dome of the princely chapel
Board at the entrance

The Medici Chapels ( Cappelle Medicee ) in Florence are the grave bands of princely bad the Medici at the Church of San Lorenzo . These are the New Sacristy and the Princely Chapel (members of the Medici are also buried in the Old Sacristy). They are not accessible from the church, but only through a separate entrance.

The New Sacristy

history

The Medici Pope Leo X wanted to erect a memorial to his deceased relatives when he commissioned the construction of the New Sacristy in 1520. It is considered to be one of the most important works of Michelangelo , who designed sculpture and architecture.

Art history and architecture

In Michelangelo's new sacristy from 1521, the forms of structure have become much more extensive and dynamic compared to the old sacristy from 1418, and the trend is rising again. The windows in the top center are partially blind, so only decoration, but they pull the view up and make the room bigger. These are tendencies that slowly herald the baroque .

Many details of the plastic forms are reminiscent of antiquity. The wall is by no means left as a smooth surface, as it was with Brunelleschi in the old sacristy of the early Renaissance , the upper windows are also crowned with clearly profiled triangular gables, etc. These are the art forms of the High Renaissance .

Michelangelo's sculptures

The tomb of Giuliano di Lorenzo de 'Medici
The tomb of Lorenzo di Piero de 'Medici

Michelangelo not only determined the architecture of the room, but also created the three-dimensional program from 1524 (until 1533), which is not quite complete. But what is there is enough to make this whole room one of the most important of the Italian High Renaissance (Toman, p. 224). This mausoleum is the first example of recent art history in which the architecture and furnishings were designed by an artist.

Michelangelo provided the tombs of the two Medici Lorenzo di Piero de 'Medici (Duke of Urbino) and Giuliano di Lorenzo de' Medici (Duke of Nemours) with a special and completely new figure program. Each group consists of three figures, the idealized deceased at the top and two assigned deities at each of his feet.

Overall, they symbolize the times of the day: the evening and the morning with Lorenzo, the night and the day with Giuliano, i.e. the creation and the beginning of life through female figures, the active side of the day and evening through male figures. A total of four groups were planned, one for each wall. The ones for Lorenzo, the splendid , and for Giuliano, his brother, are missing . This large-scale conception was intended to expressly document the claim to power of the House of Medici, who had meanwhile attained princely and even papal rank.

The Medici sculptures above are not simply replicas of the deceased. Michelangelo wanted to make the whole program into a great symbolic work of expression and of course there are various interpretations of the individual figures and the relationship between the figures.

With Lorenzo, for example, Michelangelo simultaneously represented the vita contemplativa , that is, the contemplative life (which is why the statue is also called "Penseroso" and is compared to the god Saturn). And with Giuliano the vita activa , the acting life (and symbol of the god Jupiter). The resemblance to Roman portraits can be clearly felt, especially to the ancient portraits of the emperors, which were certainly not reluctantly seen as models here.

Statue of the aurora

It was already noticeable then that the figures at the feet of the Medici princes are characterized by a serious, burdensome heaviness and show no trace of any hero worship. Instead, Michelangelo created impersonal symbolizations of inescapable time, which also triumphs over princely splendor.

In the case of the statue of the Aurora (dawn), Michelangelo gave a female figure a very muscular body, as is so often the case, and found a strikingly clumsy and inharmonious shape in the design of the breast. The breasts appear to have been attached and show a somewhat strange 'constriction'. The fact that women's bodies don't look so feminine has led to various theories, including those about Michelangelo's personality. But it can also - at least in part - be due to the fact that he used male models (Toman, p. 318), which anyway more suited his body ideal. Michelangelo could not or would not design nude women, neither painterly nor sculptural.

As little as 'feminine' this allegory of the dawn may seem, for Michelangelo's contemporaries this figure - and the allegory of the night on the other hand - was a revolutionary innovation on the way to the representation of the naked female body, which only appeared in the second third of the 16th century Century was seen as something common.

The Giuliano Group

Statue of "Night" by Michelangelo in the New Sacristy

In the head design of the female figure of “Night”, Michelangelo clearly takes up classical Greek models, but only here. The rest of the body has little to do with Greek art.

In contrast, this sculpture of the “day” also shows the almost agonizing tension with which the massive figure “rests” in its material and seems to explode, so to speak, wants to leave its material bondage. A whole series of different motifs of movement are summarized here in a single figure, which can be roughly compared with the shape of a serpentine, i.e. a twisted figure, similar to the previous Pietà. Here, too, a “Figura serpentinata”. Michelangelo dealt with such studies of movement again and again in the second half of his life.

Madonna and Child

The group “Madonna and Child” is unfinished. Here too, Michelangelo created a spiral upward movement in this group of two, whereby the two movements of the child and those of the mother were interwoven as an expression of a particularly close connection. The Madonna's legs are laid one on top of the other and the child rides on the thigh in a manner that suggests a movement to drink. While she supports the child with one hand, she supports herself with the other hand.

The Princely Chapel

Dome of the Princely Chapel
Tomb of Cosimo III. in the princely chapel

In the prince's chapel ( Cappella dei Principi ), a large, vaulted octagonal hall built in 1605 by Matteo Nigetti and the Medicean house architect Bernardo Buontalenti , there is the burial place of those later members of the family who found no more space in the old and new sacristy of the basilica . It dates from the time after the Medici were elevated to the rank of grand duke. The furnishings in marble inlays ( pietra dura ) are considered a masterpiece of the Florentine stone cutting school Opificio delle Pietre Dure . Almost fifty minor family members are buried in the crypt .

Grave monuments in the princely chapel

literature

  • James S. Ackerman: The Architecture of Michelangelo. Volume 1: Text and plates (= Studies in Architecture. Vol. 4, ISSN  0562-3588 ). Zwemmer, London 1961, pp. 71-96.
  • Renzo Chiarelli: San Lorenzo and the Medici Chapels. Becocci, Florence 1976, pp. 36-66.
  • Alessandro Nova : Michelangelo. The architect. Belser, Stuttgart et al. 1984, ISBN 3-7630-1798-4 , pp. 37-112.
  • Klaus Zimmermanns: Florence. A European center of art. History, monuments, collections. 6th edition. DuMont, Cologne 1990, ISBN 3-7701-1441-8 , p. 252, figs. 87-92.
  • Rolf Toman (ed.): The art of the Italian Renaissance. Architecture - sculpture - painting - drawing. Könemann, Cologne 1994, ISBN 3-89508-054-3 , p. 224.
  • Edith Balas: Michelangelo's Medici Chapel. A new Interpretation (= Memoirs of the American Philosophical Society. 216). American Philosophical Society, Philadelphia PA 1995, ISBN 0-87169-216-3 .
  • James Beck , Antonio Paolucci, Bruno Santi: Michelangelo. The Medici Chapel. Thames and Hudson, London et al. 2000, ISBN 0-500-23690-9 .
  • Peter Barenboim: Michelangelo Drawings. Key to the Medici Chapel Interpretation. Letny Sad, Moscow 2006, ISBN 5-98856-016-4 .
  • Peter Barenboim, Alexander Zakharov: Мышь Медичи и Микеланджело. Капелла Медичи. = Il topo dei Medici e Michelangeio. Capella Medicea. Letny Sad, Moscow 2006, ISBN 5-98856-012-1 .
  • Peter Barenboim, Sergey Shiyan: Загадки капеллы Медичи. = Michelangelo. Mysteries of Medici Chapel. Slowo, Moscow 2006, ISBN 5-85050-825-2 .

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ a b c d e f g The Tombs of Guiliano & Lorenzo de'Medici. Renaissance Masters, accessed August 30, 2015 .
  2. ↑ Herbert A: The Medici Madonna Michelangelo . VS, Wiesbaden 1973, ISBN 978-3-322-98680-1 .

Web links

Commons : Medici Chapel (Basilica of San Lorenzo)  - Collection of images, videos and audio files

Coordinates: 43 ° 46 ′ 30.5 ″  N , 11 ° 15 ′ 12.9 ″  E