MICHELANGELO AS AN ARCHITECT
be added, of one never initiated into the secrets of building technique
and architectural drawing. It has already—though again chiefly con-
ceived as background for sculpture—all the characteristics of his
personal style. Architecture without any support from sculpture is
to be found in his work for the first time in another job for the
Medicis at S. Lorenzo, the library and the anteroom to the
library (pL_ Lix). The library was designed in 1524, the ante-
room (with the exception of the staircase for which the model was
supplied as late as 1557) in 1526.
The anteroom is high and narrow. This alone gives an uncomfort-
able feeling. Michelangelo wanted to emphasise the contrast to the
long, comparatively low and more restful library itself. The walls
are divided into panels by coupled columns. At the ground-floor
height of the library itself the panels have blank windows and
framed blank niches above. The colour scheme of the room is
austere, a dead white against the sombre dark grey of columns,
window niches, architraves and other structural or decorative mem-
bers. As for the chief structural members, the columns, one would
expect them to project and carry the architraves, as had always been
the function of columns. Michelangelo reversed the relations. He re-
cessed his columns and projected his panels so that they painfully en-
case the columns. Even the architraves go-forward over the panels
and backward over the columns. This seems arbitrary, just like the
relations between ground-floor loggia and flat facade above or
between second- and third-floor windows, in the Palazzo Massimi.
It is certainly illogical, because it makes the carrying strength of the
columns appear wasted. Moreover they have slender corbels at their
feet which do not look substantial enough to support them and in
fact do not support them at all. The thinness of the Massimi front
characterises the blank windows with their tapering pilasters, fluted
without any intelligible reason in one part only. The pediment over
the entrance to the library is held only by the thin line around the
door, raised into two square ears. The staircase tells of the same wilful
originality; but the sharpness of detail which Michelangelo developed
in die twenties is now replaced by a heavy, weary flow as of lava.
It has often been said that the motifs of the walls show Michel-
angelo as the father of the Baroque, because they express the super-
human struggle of active forces against overpowering matter. I do
not think that anybody who examines without prejudice his sensa-
tions in the room itself would subscribe to this statement. There
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