Description
The Biblioteca Medicea Laurenziana is one of the great libraries of Europe, born from the Medici collections and largely designed by Michelangelo. You enter through the cloisters of the Basilica di San Lorenzo, in Florence, hence the name. It holds about 11,000 manuscripts.
The visit is an architectural stroll. First the vestibule, a tall, narrow space, with columns set into the wall and windows that are blind niches: a deliberate riddle, a dark prelude to the light of the reading room.
Then the staircase, which pours down like a flow of stone, barely held back by two balustrades. The central steps, elliptical, are an invention of Michelangelo: a curve that reappears in the Medici tombs and in the arches of the Ponte Santa Trinita, and that anticipates the Baroque style.
At the top, the reading room is a long, bright corridor with wooden desks designed by Michelangelo, ceiling included. On the shelves the codices were chained but free to consult, divided by subject, from patristics to poetry.
Among the treasures are the Codex Amiatinus, the Laurentian Virgil, the Squarcialupi Codex and Lorenzo the Magnificent's Platonic Dialogues on fine paper. Many codices were copied by hand by humanists such as Marsilio Ficino and Poggio Bracciolini. In the 19th century the Tribuna Elci was added, a neoclassical rotunda with a small dome for the collection of a Florentine bibliophile.
Michelangelo designed it from Rome, and reluctantly: he had left Florence intending never to come back. The library had been asked of him in 1519 by Cardinal Giulio de' Medici, the future Pope Clement VII, for the family's books.
Michelangelo directed the building site until 1534, then left. The others carried on with his instructions. The staircase, conceived in walnut wood, was made in pietra serena by Ammannati, at the wish of Cosimo I.
The library opened to the public in 1571. In the vestibule, the upper band of the walls stayed rough for centuries: it was completed only between 1901 and 1903.
The visit is an architectural stroll. First the vestibule, a tall, narrow space, with columns set into the wall and windows that are blind niches: a deliberate riddle, a dark prelude to the light of the reading room.
Then the staircase, which pours down like a flow of stone, barely held back by two balustrades. The central steps, elliptical, are an invention of Michelangelo: a curve that reappears in the Medici tombs and in the arches of the Ponte Santa Trinita, and that anticipates the Baroque style.
At the top, the reading room is a long, bright corridor with wooden desks designed by Michelangelo, ceiling included. On the shelves the codices were chained but free to consult, divided by subject, from patristics to poetry.
Among the treasures are the Codex Amiatinus, the Laurentian Virgil, the Squarcialupi Codex and Lorenzo the Magnificent's Platonic Dialogues on fine paper. Many codices were copied by hand by humanists such as Marsilio Ficino and Poggio Bracciolini. In the 19th century the Tribuna Elci was added, a neoclassical rotunda with a small dome for the collection of a Florentine bibliophile.
Michelangelo designed it from Rome, and reluctantly: he had left Florence intending never to come back. The library had been asked of him in 1519 by Cardinal Giulio de' Medici, the future Pope Clement VII, for the family's books.
Michelangelo directed the building site until 1534, then left. The others carried on with his instructions. The staircase, conceived in walnut wood, was made in pietra serena by Ammannati, at the wish of Cosimo I.
The library opened to the public in 1571. In the vestibule, the upper band of the walls stayed rough for centuries: it was completed only between 1901 and 1903.