The Church Program of Michelangelo's Medici Chapel

Abstract

Writers on Michelangelo have always encountered difficulties in interpreting the decoration of the Medici Chapel. In the first place the decoration was never brought to completion; the work dragged on for a very long time during which the original program underwent repeated modification; the documents give no clue as to the underlying idea. An added source of confusion, as I see it, is the fact that the comments on the idea of the decoration came from a period considerably later than the work on the principal figures, and were made moreover by intellectuals absorbed in literary and aesthetical questions and whose natural ambition was to find their own approach confirmed by the work of art and to explain it in literary terms. Michelangelo himself followed the same line of approach. What he formulated in his poems, what he told Condivi to write, is interpretation after the event. At the time when he conceived the figures, the commission from outside and his own inner reaction to the order had to work out in a compromise. When he later looked back at his conceptions which had become a landmark within his production and a starting point for new ideas, he dealt with them as exclusively his own. He saw and interpreted them as they now appeared to him.¹