Architecture became Michelangelo's primary occupation
in the last thirty years of his life, and once he had finally settled
in Rome, he began to work on projects in earnest. Prior to the
move, Michelangelo's architectural experience had been limited
to the fa¸ade of San Lorenzo, the Florentine fortifications, and
a few smaller commissions. In 1535, however, Pope Paul III designated
Michelangelo as his primary painter, sculptor, and architect. Although
this appointment was not immediately accompanied by any architectural
assignments, it did discourage the heirs of Julius II from pestering
Michelangelo over the uncompleted tomb and distracting him from other
interests. From 1537 to 1539, while painting the Last Judgment, Michelangelo
worked on the design for his most important civic architectural
commission, the renovation and redesign of Rome's Campidoglio.
He began by designing a base for a statue of Marcus
Aurelius, which was situated in the middle of a symmetrical trapezoidal
courtyard space, surrounded on three sides by newly designed fa¸ades.
The massive size of these fa¸ades made the Campidoglio the most
famous and influential civic center in the world. Michelangelo
completed the design around 1545 or 1546, but the buildings were
not completed until almost 100 years after his death.
In 1546, Michelangelo took over the construction of the Palazzo Farnese
after the death of the previous architect, Giuliano da Sangallo.
He also took over the design and construction of St. Peter's, which
had gone through several different designs by Bramante, Raphael,
and Sangallo. Michelangelo accepted no money for this project.
He was able to compress the previous designs into an elegant, compact
whole, with open spaces and a revolutionary upwardly thrusting
dome, the model for which he finished in 1561. Michelangelo's design
for the church came to serve as the standard for the architectural
dome for hundreds of years after it was built by another architect
in 1590, with some slight modifications.
In the final ten years of his life, Michelangelo work
simultaneously on designs and models for St. Peter's, San Lorenzo,
the conversion of the Roman Baths of
Diocletian into the church of Santa Maria degli Angeli,
a fa¸ade for the new city gate, and the Sforza Chapel in Santa
Maria Maggiore. Michelangelo's architectural work was as revolutionary
as his art, as evidenced by the indignant protests of his contemporaries,
who were outraged by his break from Classical form and stability.
In all his buildings, Michelangelo treated structural elements
as being separate from decorative embellishments, and he was as
concerned with creating open, flowing spaces as he was with sculptural
details. His approach to architecture was always that of a sculptor
to a block of marble–he sought to release the possibilities locked
within a given space or location according to his personal conceptions
of architecture rather than the rules of any school. Michelangelo
stretched the limits of the Classical form to express his own aesthetic,
thereby predicting the Baroque architecture of artists like Bernini
and his contemporaries.
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