Michelangelo was one of the most influential artists of the Italian High Renaissance period. As a sculptor, architect, painter, and poet, he exerted tremendous influence on his contemporaries and subsequent Western art. Some of his most notable works discussed in the document include the Palazzo Farnese in Rome, which he helped design and added prominent cornice details to. He also designed the Laurentian Library and its dynamic sculptural staircase in Florence. As an architect, he designed the Medici Chapels, including the New Sacristy containing his sculptures of Night and Day and Dusk and Dawn.

1. BY- RAJAT NAINWAL

2. •Michelangelo was one of the
most inspired creators in the
history of art and, with Da Vinci,
the most potent force in the
Italian High Renaissance.
•As a sculptor, architect, painter,
and poet, he exerted a
tremendous influence on his
contemporaries and on
subsequent Western art in
general.

3. Michelangelo produced at
least two relief sculptures
by the time he was 16 years
old, the Battle of the
Centaurs and the Madonna
of the Stairs (both 1489-92,
Casa Buonarroti, Florence),
which show that he had
achieved a personal style at
a very early age.

4. THE PALAZZO FARNESE (1528)
 Palazzo Farnese is one of the most
important mannerism palaces in Rome.
Owned by the Italian state, it was given
to the French Government in 1936 for a
period of 99 years, and currently serves
as the French embassy in Italy.
 First designed in 1517 for the Farnese
family, the building expanded in size and
conception when Alessandro Farnese
became Pope Paul III in 1534, to designs
by Antonio da Sangallo the Younger.
 The Palazzo Farnese facade has a cornice
and central window with coat of arms at
the piano nobile level. Unlike the
Florentine interpretation of the type,
this palazzo has rustication only in the
form of quoins and at the entry has
classically inspired window surrounds.

5. •Each register is clearly demarcated. The bottom
register use "kneeling" windows, a type invented by
Michelangelo.
•The piano nobile has "tabernacle" windows or strongly
projecting aedicula windows with columns on each side
with Corinthian capitals. Arched and triangular
pediments alternate in the second register.
•The third story has arched windows, all with triangular
pediments. The large, strongly projecting cornice was
added by Michelangelo.

6. The back

7. The Medici Chapels are two structures at the Basilica of San Lorenzo, Florence, Italy,
dating from the 16th and 17th centuries, and built as extensions to Brunelleschi's 15th
century church, with the purpose of celebrating the Medici family, patrons of the
church and Grand Dukes of Tuscany. The Sagrestia Nuova, ("New Sacristy"), was
designed by Michelangelo.

8. Tomb of Giuliano di Lorenzo
de' Medici with Night and Day
Tomb of Lorenzo di Piero
de'Medici with Dusk and Dawn

9. One of the
vault and
ceiling
fresco by
Annibale
Carracci is
Galleria
Farnese, an
art gallery.

10. THE LAURENTIAN LIBRARY, FLORENCE,
(1524)
• The Laurentian Library is a historical library in
Florence, Italy, containing a repository of more
than 11,000 manuscripts and 4,500 early
printed books.
• The Library was built to emphasize that the
Medici family were no longer mere merchants
but members of intelligent and ecclesiastical
society.
• It contains the manuscripts and books
belonging to the private library of the Medici
family.
• The library is renowned for the architecture
planned and built by Michelangelo and is an
example of Mannerism.
• The staircase is a piece of dynamic sculpture
that appears to pour forth from the upper level
like lava and compress the limited floor space
of the vestibule.

11. STAIRCASE
•The staircase is a piece of dynamic sculpture
that appears to pour forth from the upper level
like lava and compress the limited floor space of
the vestibule.
• The plan of the stairs changed dramatically in
the design stage.
•Originally in the first design in 1524, two flights
of stairs were placed against the side walls and
formed a bridge in front of the reading room
door.
•A year later the stairway was moved to the
middle of the vestibule. Tribolo attempted to
carry out this plan in 1550 but nothing was built.
• The staircase leads up to the reading room and
takes up half of the floor of the vestibule.
•The treads of the center flights are convex and
vary in width, while the outer flights are straight.
•The three lowest steps of the central flight are
wider and higher than the others, almost like
concentric oval slabs. As the stairway descends, it
divides into three flights.

12. •The stairway connecting the high, narrow
space of the vestibule to the long, low room of
the library proper is among the most
remarkable inventions of mannerist
architecture. It was built under the direction
of Bartolomeo Ammannati in 1559--more than
thirty years after work on the vestibule had
begun--in accordance with a clay model sent
from Rome by Michelangelo.
•As has often been remarked, it resembles a
lava flow that the walls seem intent on
containing. Here the volutes assume a
character totally at odds with the static quality
of the consoles from which they derive, having
been invested with great power, bulging
forward in the center only to recede in the
lateral swirls and assume conventional form to
either side of the balustrade.

13. READING ROOM
•The reading room is 46.20 m. long, 10.50 m. wide, and
8.4 m. high (152 by 35 by 28 feet).
•There are two blocks of seats separated by a center
aisle with the backs of each serving as desks for the
benches behind them. The desks are lit by the evenly
spaced windows along the wall.
•The windows are framed by pilasters, forming a
system of bays which articulate the layout of the ceiling
and floor.
•Because the reading room was built upon an existing
story, Michelangelo had to reduce the weight of the
reading-room walls. The system of frames and layers in
the walls’ articulation reduced the volume and weight
of the bays between the pilasters.
•Beneath the current wooden floor of the library in the
Reading Room is a series of 15 rectangular red and
white terra cotta floor panels. These panels, measuring
8 foot-6-inches (2.6 m) on a side.
•It is believed that these tiles were arranged so as to be
visible under the original furniture; but this furniture
was later changed to increase the number of reading
desks in the room.

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