Michelangelo, Drawing, and the Invention of Architecture

Excellent book!!!

Although this is a well illustrated book on an important subject, it's ultimately a reflection of the author's own preferences, prejudices and area of expertise. Professor Brothers provides some great insights into Michelangelo's reliance for ideas on some of the standard architectural texts of his time. Her hypothesis; that Michelangelo basically arrived at his inventions via the medium of sketching and cross pollination of ideas from sheet to sheet, is flawed because it does not account for the consistency of his approach or adoption of certain motifs for specific ends. An example of this would be the guttae detail that Brothers perceptively showed Michelangelo had probably got from Giuliano da Sangallo's drawing of the Crypta Balbi. This detail was not only used in the Laurentian Library by Michelangelo but on almost all of his subsequent works, and in a similar way. He used it to express, I would argue, structure 'emerging' from the plane surface. Depth of anatomy of the wall/element in question is implied in order to suggest that there was more going on beneath the surface, in the same way as knuckles or ankles imply the inner workings of the bones beneath the surface of the skin. What's more, is that this is an application that Michelangelo derived from the precedents (Crypta Balbi included) he had studied, i.e. he didn't just make it up. This shows what a powerful intellect Michelangelo had and that he wasn't simply a capricious artist who borrowed ideas that he liked the look of (as Brothers sometimes blatantly suggests). Indeed the design process adopted by Michelangelo that I have just described is a proof that Michelangelo's assertion that 'architecture is anatomy' was the genuine 'sine qua non' of Michelangelo's architectural approach and that it was not simply 'contorted' rhetoric aimed at 'promoting his own credentials' as an architect (as Brothers explicitly suggests).There is a tacit and barely suppressed antipathy towards the idea that Michelangelo was truly a revolutionary figure in architecture which I think derives from Brothers' own personal prejudices regarding religion / humanism etc... For example, early in the book, she takes the (unwarranted) opportunity to 'show up' Michelangelo's lack of appreciation for perspective in comparison to Leonardo Da Vinci, by comparing cartoons by each man. Perspective was clearly to become very important to subsequent artistic development, Leonardo 'got' that, Michelangelo didn't seem to, but this should really be beside the point in a book like this. The author Howard Hibbard shows that the antipathy that existed between Michelangelo and Leonardo was almost at the existential level, Leonardo being a 'proto-humanist' (in the modern sense) and Michelangelo being a deeply religious man. It seems that Brothers has 'picked her team' and that the book is coloured by this allegiance.If you want a book on Michelangelo's architecture, Ackerman's is still the standard (and best) text (originally written in 1961). Professor Brothers' book should be purchased because of the light it sheds on Michelangelo's architectural 'textbook' (Codex Coner etc..)influences but it does not nearly explain (or even acknowledge) Michaelangelo's great achievement in the field of architecture. To Ackerman's credit, he actually came out in 2008 and corrected his earlier hypothesis on the vestibule's structure in a new article.