LYCOS RETRIEVER 
Michelangelo Buonarroti: San Lorenzo
built 630 days ago
In this period Michelangelo finished Madonna of the Steps (1490–1492) and Battle of the Centaurs (1491–1492). The latter was based on a theme suggested by Poliziano and was commissioned by Lorenzo de Medici. After the death of Lorenzo on April 8, 1492, for whom Michelangelo had become a kind of son, Michelangelo left the Medici court. In the following months he produced a Wooden crucifix (1493), as a thanksgiving gift to the prior of the church of Santa Maria del Santo Spirito who had permitted him some studies of anatomy on the corpses of the church's Hospital. Between 1493 and 1494 he bought the marble for a larger than life statue of Hercules, which was sent to France and disappeared sometime in the 1700s. He could again enter the court on January 20, 1494, Piero de Medici commissioned a snow statue from him.
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Michelangelo was now in his forty-fourth year. Though half his life was yet to come, yet its best days had, as it proved, been spent. All the hindrances which he had encountered hitherto were as nothing to those which began to beset him now. For the supply of materials for the facade of San Lorenzo he had set a firm of masons to work, and had himself, it seems, entered into a kind of partnership with them, at Carrara, where he knew the quarries well, and where the industry was hereditary and well understood. When all was well in progress there under his own eye, reasons of state induced the Medici and the Florentine magistracy to bid him resort instead to certain new quarries at Pietrasanta, near Serravalle in the territory of Florence. Hither, to the disgust of his old clients at Carrara and to his own, Michelangelo accordingly had to transfer the scene of his labours.
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Michelangelo studied human anatomy. He was one of the first, along with Leonardo de Vinci, to do this. He recognized that without understanding how the anatomy of the human worked it would be hard to paint and sculpt. In exchange for permission to study corpses (which was usually forbidden by the Church), the Church of Santo Spirito received a wooden Crucifix from Michelangelo. Unfortunately for Michelangelo, the chemicals with which the dead are infused were particularily bad for the living, and his contact with all the bodies made him ill. Perhaps it is because Michelangelo paid such attention to detail, even at the risk of his own health, that he became so succesful.
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Michelangelo designed, coordinated, and directed the enormous Florentine defense effort, probably the largest construction project since the erection of the medieval circuit of walls. The city was invested in October 1529, and withstood a grueling ten-month siege. Florence finally capitulated on August 12, 1530, and then sustained a protracted witch-hunt of retribution. It is something of a miracle that Michelangelo was able to survive these chaotic times. Fortunately, he had friends in high places and a pope who genuinely liked and admired him. Clement magnanimously forgave Michelangelo his defection and set him to work once again on the Medici projects at San Lorenzo.
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Around 1530 Michelangelo designed the Laurentian Library in Florence, attached to the church of San Lorenzo. He produced new styles such as pilasters tapering thinner at the bottom, and a staircase with contrasting rectangular and curving forms.
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With the death of Lorenzo the Magnificent, Michelangelo continued with his studies. Lorenzo died in Italy in 1492. But within his time of being a famous person, he created a garden into a school, supporter of Marsilio Ficino and his Neoplatonic Academy with the philosophy teachings of Plato brought back to life.
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