I am continuing to read Alexander Nagel’s recently published ‘Medieval Modern’, a book that offers an exciting and intuitive attempt to form bonds and relationships between artworks and architecture from a range of historical ‘periods’.
The book makes an interesting connection between Michelangelo’s Medici Chapel, Florence, and Dan Flavin’s Light Installations at the Green Gallery in the 1970’s. Nagel’s argument was that, although superficially the two spaces could hardly be further apart, they both adhere towards a similar aesthetic purpose.
Dan Flavin’s light sculptures are an attempt to break the modernist tradition of the autonomous work of art, casting away all notions of ‘otherness’ and the artist-genius’s hand. Flavin could see the hypocrisy and elitism in certain works of abstract expressionism. Instead, his light sculptures are both the artwork at hand, but also the environment within which the viewer experiences the work. Thus, when one enters the exhibition space, it is not merely the fluorescent tubes that one must attempt to appreciate and experience, but the environment from which the tubes are subject to being witnessed. Flavin’s insight was to develop the actual space for the ritual of art viewing as the artwork itself, thus opening-out the exhibition space and objectifying the viewer him/herself as a part of, or player within, the art experience.
In 1519, Michelangelo was commissioned by Cardinal Giulio de Medici and Pope Leo X to begin work on a new sacristy for the burial of the ruling Medici family of Florence. The sacristy was to be an extension of the ancient church of San Lorenzo, within which the family’s founder, Giovanni di Bicci Medici and the sculptor Donatello are both housed. Michelangelo, a dozen years after the completion of his David, a great symbol of the Florentine Republic before the reinstatement of the house of Medici, was the only real candidate for the commission given his overwhelming reputation and popularity across central Italy. What he designed was a space that broke away from all contemporary forms of architectural design. Michelangelo’s was a capsule that would transport both the minds and the visceral bodies of worshippers up into the circular heaven’s overhead. The altar no longer points towards a two-dimensional image of Christ or the Madonna against the wall. Instead, from behind the cross, as if operating a control panel, the priest would direct the service towards the congregation, thus involving the worshipper to an extent not attainable in the traditional, wall-facing, service.
The New Sacristy was attended only by the elite of Florence and, more importantly, the Medici Family themselves. Thus, this subtle, but highly significant, development in Michelangelo’s design plan was perhaps so appraised by the family for the way it would seem to offer a more direct line to God, and thus was an act of seemingly divine empowerment. Michelangelo’s plan was, although, ever more ambitious, and aimed to develop a space such that every object and every architectural schema would serve as a device that would help propel the very soul of the worshipper upwards through a complex, and almost maze-like, set of structural stages.
Juxtaposing larger-than-life sized sculptural ‘portraits’ of Giuliano and Lorenzo de Medici as archetypal Greco-Roman heroes was the sculptor’s attempt to further this feeling of divine empowerment amongst the Medici. The two figures not only propose, or perhaps remind, the Medici as to their divine right to rule in the manner of Roman emperors, but also help to visualise a grid-like form to embellish the square-based plan of the chapel. Line, therefore, is an important element in Michelangelo’s structural plan, and we can see how this emphasis on line helps to energise and ‘activate’ the space, perhaps in correlation with the energy of contemporary trends in many late Renaissance-early Mannerist artworks.
Across the crowded floor plan the worshipper becomes a sculptural site at the intersection between a range of literal and metaphorical lines. These lines we can see crafted on the floor, in the direction of the priest’s service, in the crossing gazes of the four allegories of the day (Dawn, Day, Dusk and Evening) and in the Corinthian columns that crowd the lower walls. The columns house a collection of seemingly empty Tabernacles, spaces that are traditionally embellished with figural sculptures. This emphasis on a sense of absence is perhaps a device that alludes to the immaterial soul of the worshipper, yet somehow re-embodied by the abstract sculpture of the Tabernacle.
The curved, upwards-pointing shape of the Tabernacle canopy projects the soul upwards, away from the earthy chaos into a second, lighter, and more minimal level. It is as if the soul is being somehow squeezed upwards, or perhaps evokes a sort of convection current that purifies the soul as it reaches ever higher and further from the dark pietra serena encrusted earth.
Light, another device used intuitively by the sculptor. One notices that towards the dome-shaped roof, Michelangelo uses light as a way of illustrating not just the purity of the heavens but the darkness of earthy existence. Somehow the shadowy chaos of the square-based ground level feels much more like a cage when compared with the enlightened dome of the roof, and the worshipper is therefore far more aware of his need to purify both mind and body when presented with such a space. Like a sculptural metaphoric paradigm, the New Sacristy operates as to visualise the body and square earth like a cage, contrasted with that of the soul, the mind and rounded heavens above.
Although much more could be said about Michelangelo’s plan, it is worth noting how both the sculptor and Flavin, over 400 years later, emphasised the need for an artwork that could activate the body of the viewer/worshipper as a device through which to render them no longer passive observer, but engaged participant within diverse rituals, and to which we can also associate ever more contemporary examples and movements such as relational art, performance, sound sculptures and politico-artistic activism.