Renaissance_ A Short History, The - Johnson, Paul [45]
This progress from use into fancy is carried still further in the vestibule staircase, from which the visitor ascends from the church cloister into the library. The elegant sets of windows let in no light and serve no function save decoration, the beautiful marble columns support nothing and the three-pronged staircase achieves no purpose by its complexities save to delight. Michelangelo defended it by saying that the servants would line the outer steps on each side while their masters proceeded up or down the central stairs. But this is an excuse, not a reason. On the other hand, the whole thing is enchanting, in color no less than in form, and the details, as always with this master, are beautifully inventive. The marble is served up crisply, as befits an accomplished chisel man, and there is an inherent simplicity about it all that allows you to take in the concept as a whole and then turn to its highly imaginative parts. No work more clearly demonstrates what distinguishes great architecture from the routine. But Michelangelo’s manner is prominent in every inch: it is mannered, and it set mankind on the long trek from the High Renaissance through Mannerism to the Baroque and so to Rococo. This staircase hall is the distant ancestor, by direct descent, of the vast Treppelhaus in the Bishop’s Palace at Würzburg, which Tiepolo turned into the largest artistic artifact in world history.
From this wonderful concept in Florence, Michelangelo returned to Rome to design and (largely) complete a great outdoor architectural scheme, the Piazza del Campidoglio on the Capitoline Hill. This began when Paul III moved the famous antique equestrian statue of Marcus Aurelius, which had inspired Donatello’s and Verrocchio’s efforts in the genre, from the Lateran Palace and asked Michelangelo to design a new base. The great sculptor, in characteristic fashion, began by creating an elegant but imposing overall base for the huge work, then opened up the project into an enormous architectural setting, with a decorative pavement, a monumental staircase ramp, a new façade for the building at the top of it, the Palazzo Senatorio, and new flanking buildings on either side. The whole splendid composition may have evolved organically as the master proceeded, or it may have been in his mind from the start, or a bit of both. It finally involved further oval steps below the pavement, and the resulting ensemble has a naturalness and simplicity and yet an impressive grandeur that bely its accidental origins. No one of any sensibility can fail to delight in walking about it, taking it in as a whole and relishing its felicitous details.
Michelangelo’s heavy and often frustrating work on St. Peter’s dominated the last part of his life, but he engaged in other projects, which included work on the Farnese Palace, Santa Maria degli Angeli and the church of San Giovanni dei Fiorentini in Rome. He also designed a monumental city gate in Rome, the Porta Pia, which ended a new street of magnificent houses and gardens pushed out from the Quirinale by Pope Pius IV. All these works and others, some of which survive only in designs and plans, complete the vernacular of Michelangelo’s architecture, a rich vocabulary of lion’s heads, eggs-and-darts, dentils and acanthus leaves, coats of arms and crenellations pulled from the Middle Ages, grinning masks and triglyphs, and all the orders of antiquity, plus composites of his own invention, broken pediments, sphinxes supporting closed ones, swags, receding and overlapping planes, echoes of Doric, Corinthian and Ionic capitals flaunted as decorative features and his characteristic inversions—façades introduced as profiles and vice versa. The fertility is awe-inspiring and at times overwhelming, also pathetic and moving, considering that some of these explosions of the imagination occurred when the old man was in his eighties, an immense age for those days. They swirled away into history to become the stock-in-trade of professional mediocrities for hundreds