Conservative in politics, Clement was more open to innovation in matters of design, but he remained a practical man. When Michelangelo explained that he wanted to light the library vestibule through circular skylights, Clement expressed delight at the idea but observed that at least two persons would have to be employed "just to keep the glass clean."172 However, Michelangelo (whose stubbornness was one of his most notorious traits) did not wait for the pope 's agreement on everything, and started raising the walls in December 1525, three months before the final design was approved by His Holiness.
When Michelangelo received the commission for the library in November 1523, he was forty-eight years old. Celebrated throughout Europe, he was in the eyes of patrons and fellow artists a painter, sculptor, architect and poet whose talents were beyond question. In all these areas, he coupled the physical world to the world of thought, so that the laws of one intermingled with the laws of the other. For Michelangelo, the properties of wood and marble were mirrored in the properties of imagination and reason; in his eyes, aesthetics and physics, ethics and mathematics shared the same matter and substance. In an unfinished sonnet composed around the time of his work at San Lorenzo, he wrote:
Since no piece of wood can preserve
Its proper moisture out of its proper place,
It cannot help, touched even slightly by some great heat,
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The monumental staircase ofthe Laurentian Library, designed by Michelangelo.
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Being dried up or bursting into flame or burning.
Just like the heart, taken by one who will never return it,
Living in tears and fed by flames—
Now that it's far from its home and proper place,
What blow will not be fatal to it?173
Michelangelo's confidence in the ability of material things to reproduce or translate thought and feeling according to objective rules is evident in the Laurentian Library. Three separate building commissions were entrusted to him. The first, the fagade of San Lorenzo, was never completed. The second, the Medici Chapel interior, was a project he undertook belatedly, after other artists had worked on it for years, and though he achieved some of his best work here, his contribution remained only partial. However, the third, the library, is entirely Michelangelo's own creation.
Since the library was to be used primarily as a workplace, the interior was given greater aesthetic importance than the exterior. Erected (due to the fear of floods) on the third floor, it consists of an entrance vestibule, a magnificent and startlingly original staircase, and a lofty reading room that seemingly stretches towards a point of perspective on the hidden horizon. The entire space of the library is built out of rectangles: the columned openings on the walls holding the windows, open or blind; the rows of desks on either side of the room; the majestic central aisle; the divided and carved ceiling. It is easy to imagine the effect created by the great illuminated codexes or the smaller octavo volumes open on the inclined desktops, duplicated by equal rectangular shapes on walls, floor and ceiling, so that every element of the architecture and decoration recalls for the reader the intimate relationship between the world and the book, the unlimited physical space which, in the library, is divided into pagelike areas. The central motif of the carved wooden ceiling of the vestibule is, however, not a rectangle, but four interlinked circles representing the Medici diamond ring, a pattern repeated in the yellow and red tiled floor of the library itself, reminding readers of the four related corners of God's universe, reflected in God's word penned by the four Evangelists.
Michelangelo's contemporary Giorgio Vasari speaks of the "licence" that the artist allowed himself when he departed from classical notions of proportion and order, a licence to which, says Vasari, "all artists are under a great and permanent obligation." According to Vasari, nowhere did Michelangelo better demonstrate these new ideas than in the Laurentian Library,
namely, in the beautiful distribution of the windows, the pattern of the ceiling, and the marvelous entrance of the vestibule. Nor was there ever seen such resolute grace, both in detail and overall effect, as in the consoles, tabernacles, and cornices, nor any stairway more commodious. And in this stairway, he made such strange breaks in the design of the steps, and he departed in so many details and so widely from normal practice, that everyone was astonished.174
The stairway that Vasari so admired is indeed a marvel. Michelangelo had conceived it in walnut, not in the grey stone in which it was finally executed by the Florentine sculptor Bartolomeo Ammanati in 1559, twenty-five years after Michelangelo's departure from Florence
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Ground plan of the Pergamon Library.
in 1534. But even in grey stone rather than dark wood, which would have introduced the visitor to the material of the desks and the ceiling of the reading room beyond, the stairway suggests a spatial complexity that seems almost impossible in so restricted a space, a laboriously intricate passage proposing at least three different routes, an obligation of choice entirely appropriate for someone entering the realm of books. The area of the vestibule is small; Michelangelo's design treats it as if it were vast, so that the stairs cascade from between the balustrades outside the door onto three descents with no railings, the middle one made of curving steps each finished with a volute, the side ones rectangular but, as they reach the floor, gently metamorphosing into lozenges. Writing to Vasari from Rome before construction had begun, Michelangelo said that he indeed remembered his original design for the stairway but only "as if in a dream." That is the quality that best defines the finished work.
However, what Vasari saw as startling novelty was rather the perfecting of primitive conceptions of the shape a library should occupy. The examples are many. One of the earliest dates from 2300 B.C. Archaeological digging performed in 1980 at the site of the royal palace of Ebla, in Syria, unearthed a rectangular room containing the remains of a library: more than fifteen thousand clay tablets which had apparently been kept on wooden shelves along the walls; when the shelves burnt after invaders set fire to the palace, the tablets fell in heaps to the floor.175 The library of Pergamum was discovered to have followed the same pattern twenty-five centuries later. Its ruins show that it consisted of a rectangle formed by a succession of chambers: the first and largest one used for meetings, the following three housing the stacks. Readers consulted the scrolls in the space before the chambers, sheltered by a colonnade. In Rome, in the library of the Forum of Trajan, built in a.d. 112, the design changed somewhat: the rectangular shape was maintained, but the division into small rooms was elimi- nated.176 Designing the Laurentian Library, Michelangelo was aware that he was evolving a practical, ancient design familiar to Plato and to Virgil.