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Renaissance in Italy: The age of the despots
Renaissance in Italy The age of the despots Author:John Addington Symonds Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: MICHAEL ANGELO. 87 who required fit setting for his statues, or of an architect who designed statues to enhance the structure he had planned. Both arts are us... more »ed with equal ease, nor has the genius of Michael Angelo dealt more masterfully with the human frame than with the forms of Roman architecture in this chapel. 11 c seems to have paid no heed to classic precedent, and to have taken no pains to adapt the parts to the structural purpose of the building. It was enough for him to create a wholly novel framework for the modern miracle of sculpture it enshrines, attending to such rules of composition as determine light and shade, and seeking by the slightness of moldings and pilasters to enhance the terrible and massive forms that brood above the Medicean tombs. The result is a product of picturesque and plastic art, as true to the Michaelangelesque spirit as the Temple of the Wingless Victory to that of Pheidias. But where Michael Angelo achieved a triumph of boldness, lesser natures were betrayed into bizarrerie ; and this chapel of the Medici, in spite of its grandiose simplicity, proved a stumbling-block to subsequent architects by encouraging them to despise propriety and violate the laws of structure. The same may be said with even greater truth of the Laurentian Library and its staircase. The false windows, repeated pillars, and barefaced aiming ateffect, that mark the insincerity of the barocco style, are found here almost for the first time. What S. Peter's would have been, if Michael Angclo had lived to finish it, can be imagined from his plans and elevations still preserved. It must always remain a matter of profound regret that his project was so far altered as to sacrifice the effect of the dome from the piazza. This dome is Michael Angelo's supreme achievement as...« less