Michelangelo Buonarroti #4

Secret room under the new sacristy of the Medici chapel in the Basilica di San Lorenzo in Florence. (bron: The History Blog, foto's: Claudio Giovannini)




(bron: National Geographic, foto's: Paolo Woods)

"For centuries its existence was unknown, but a secret underground room in Florence in which Michelangelo hid from his enemies and drew sketches on the walls
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Michelangelo sought refuge in the tiny cell in 1530, when he was on the run after betraying his patrons, the Medici, by supporting a popular revolt against their rule.

During the two months he spent cooped up in the room, he fought boredom by drawing with charcoal and chalk on the walls, producing exquisite sketches of human figures.

The cell lies beneath the Medici Chapels, a mausoleum for members of Florence’s most powerful Renaissance family.

Ironically, it was Michelangelo himself who had been commissioned to build the Medici Chapels. After hiding beneath them, he was later pardoned by the family and was allowed to complete the project.

“I hid in a tiny cell, entombed like the dead Medici above, though hiding from a live one. To forget my fears, I filled the walls with drawings,” he later recalled.

The room in which he hid remained undiscovered until 1975, when it was found by chance when custodians came across a trap door hidden beneath a wardrobe. The trapdoor revealed a flight of narrow stone steps which led down to a rectangular room.
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(bron: The Telegraph)

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Under Dal Poggetto’s direction, experts spent weeks meticulously removing the plaster with scalpels. As the coating disappeared, dozens of drawings emerged, many of them reminiscent of Michelangelo’s great works—including a marble sculpture of a human figure adorning the tomb of Giuliano de’ Medici in the New Sacristy above, which Michelangelo himself designed.

Dal Poggetto concluded that the artist took cover inside the chamber for about two months in 1530 to hide from the Medici family. A popular revolt had sent the city’s Medici rulers into exile in 1527, and despite their previous patronage of his work, Michelangelo had betrayed the family, aligning himself with fellow Florentines against their rule.

With their return to power a few years later, the 55-year-old artist’s life was in danger. “Naturally, Michelangelo was afraid,” says Bietti, “and he decided to stay in the room.”

Bietti suspects that Michelangelo spent his sequestered weeks taking stock of his life and his art.
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After the 1975 discovery, a prominent Renaissance art authority hailed the collection of sketches as one of the major artistic finds of the 20th century. But William Wallace, a Michelangelo scholar at Washington University in St. Louis, is sceptical.

Wallace believes that Michelangelo was too prominent to have holed up in the lower-level room, and instead, he would have been taken in by one of his other patrons. He also suspects that the drawings were completed earlier, sometime in the 1520s, when Michelangelo and his many assistants would have taken respites from laying brick and cutting marble for the New Sacristy they were building above.

Several of the drawings might be Michelangelo originals, Wallace says, but others were likely depictions by workers sorting out artistic dilemmas or simply amusing themselves during breaks.

“Separating one from the other is almost impossible,” he says. Still, he adds that the mystery of who crafted the drawings does not take away from their value or the importance of the discovery.

“Being in that room is exciting. You feel privileged,” he says. “You feel closer to the working process of a master and his pupils and assistants.”
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(bron: National Geographic)