P 1 : KsF
0521551331 c 01 -p 3 a CUNY 160 /Joannides 052155 133 1 January 11 , 2007 10 : 18
CATALOGUE 53 WHOLLY OR PARTIALLY AUTOGRAPH SHEETS 251
and too long for a scroll, and it may well be the side
of a coat of arms, in which case this figure would be
one of a pair of supporters. Such arrangements are com-
mon in Roman painting and sculpture of the155 0s and
15 6 0s, and Michelangelo might have devised several: The
forms of coats-of-arms appealed to him and he devoted
much attention to those of the Medici placed below
the reliquary chamber in San Lorenzo, and to those of
the Farnese above the central window of thepiano nobile
of their palace. In his last years, he was planning the
Porta Pia, which displays the centrally placed shield bear-
ing the arms of Pope Pius IV, supported by a pair of
angels. The shield, carved by Jacomo del Duca and one
Luca, no doubt from Michelangelo’s design, was paid for
in May15 6 2; the supporting angels were executed only
three years later, after Michelangelo’s death, by Nardo
de’Rossi, but they are sufficiently Michelangelesque in
type to make it plausible that they too reflect the master’s
ideas, and it seems plausible, if no more than conjec-
tural, that the figure drawing on the verso of the present
sheet could have been made in preparation for one of
them.
The architectural drawings, confined to the verso, were
drawn over the figure study. The main one is obviously
fragmentary. It shows two columns or half-columns – the
treatment of the bases indicates toruses – flanking a round-
topped shell-headed niche. Above the niche, truncated,
there seems to be a rectangular, perhaps square, panel.
In the later155 0s and early15 6 0s, Michelangelo was
engaged in planning several buildings and, in their var-
ious transformations – whose number no doubt much
exceeded those that we now know – some of these
included columns and others columns with niches.
Among those for which drawings survive are the Porta
Pia – the interior gate facing the new via Pia, situated
at the city side of a compound extending inwards from
the walls proper and intended to be complemented by an
exterior gate, actually set into the walls – but no com-
parable columns are indicated in any of the preparatory
drawings, and there are none in the structure as finally
built. The fac ̧ade of the Palazzo dei Conservatori finally
included columns in a subsidiary role, but at one stage in
the preliminary process paired columns were planned to
be more important (see Cat. 56 verso); however, niches