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0521551331 c 01 -p 3 a CUNY 160 /Joannides 052155 133 1 January 11 , 2007 10 : 18
252 WHOLLY OR PARTIALLY AUTOGRAPH SHEETS CATALOGUE 53do not appear. Columns with or without niches between
them appear in drawings of projects such as San Gio-
vanni dei Fiorentini, the Baths of Diocletian, which
Michelangelo was planning to transform into the church
of Santa Maria degli Angeli, and the Sforza Chapel.
Of the three, the forms seem most congruent with the
paired columns in the plan on CB 123 A/B15 7/Corpus
608 (pen and ink with brush and wash over black chalk,
173 × 279 mm), which is, with virtual certainty, the sin-
gle elaborated plan to survive by Michelangelo’s hand for
the Sforza Chapel, obviously developing the sketch on
CB 104 A/B 162 /Corpus 624 .Inaddition, Michelangelo
wasinvolved in planning a monumental gate for the Castel
Sant’Angelo about which nothing is known in detail, and
agreat columnar porch for St. Peter’s which, of course,
wasnever built.
Despite this proliferation of architectural projects,
however, the forms indicated in the present drawing can-
not firmly be linked to any stage of any of them, either
as executed, or as known from drawings and models. An
apparent difficulty is that the floor of the niche is set
puzzlingly low in relation to the bases of the columns.
This would be inexplicable in any project of “normal”
scale in which the columns were set either directly on
the floor or on ordinary bases. This contradiction might
be accommodated in two ways. One explanation is that
the columns are set on high pedestals, now excised from
the present drawing; the second is that they are situated
on an upper storey, in which niches are habitually placed
lower in relation to the columns or pilasters flanking them
than on lower storeys. In favour of one or the other of
these possibilities is that a faint and wavering but dis-
cernable horizontal line joins the two column bases. This
strongly indicates, at least, that the column bases were not
envisaged as standing directly on the floor.
Both alternatives – the pedestal and the upper-storey
solution – had been anticipated in earlier drawings by
Michelangelo. In a study for a monumental gate, datable
around the mid-15 2 0s(Vicenza, Centro internazionale di
Studi di Architettura Andrea Palladio, raccolta grafica,
no. 1 recto/Corpus 630 ;red chalk, 287 × 277 mm),
Michelangelo planned an arrangement similar to that
shown here, in which a niche surmounted by a rectan-
gular panel, between two columns, flanked a triumphal
arch on its front face. Such a scheme, of course, could
also have been repeated on the rear face of such an
arch, or on all four sides of anarcus quadrifrons.Asimilar
arrangement is also found in Michelangelo’s largemodello
for an early project for the fac ̧ade of San Lorenzo (CB
45 A/B 245 /Corpus 497 ;pen and ink, brush and wash
overblack chalk, 724 × 870 mm).The San Lorenzo project also provides an example
of an upper-storey site. In the final scheme for the
fac ̧ade, as recorded in the wooden model, the upper
storey contained statuary niches between paired mem-
bers, and although these are pilasters rather than columns,
there would be no inherent difficulty in supposing
that Michelangelo planned a fac ̧ade with two orders of
columns rather than a columnar order surmounted by a
pilaster order. If one of these hypotheses is correct, the
most likely function for this drawing would be for one
of the gates, either the Porta Pia or that of the Castel
Sant’Angelo, more probably the latter.
Nevertheless, notwithstanding the issues addressed, it is
worthtesting a different hypothesis: that the architectural
drawing as we see it does represent Michelangelo’s inten-
tions. Thus, if we accept that it is not outside the bounds
of possibility that the columns really do stand directly on
the ground with what structure might they have been
connected? The only case the compiler can envisage in
which the base of a niche might not be proportionately
farabove a column base situated on the ground would be
abuilding on a colossal scale, in which the column bases
would themselves rise to the head level of the spectator.
However, such a building would have to be truly enor-
mous, and the only plausible candidates seem to be the
porch of St. Peter’s, or the Baths of Diocletian. The diffi-
culty with the former is that although Duperac’s engrav-
ing does suggest that Michelangelo planned the porch
with columns without pedestals, it provides no indica-
tion of the articulation of the front wall of the church at
the rear of that porch, and niches there would surely have
been of the same form as the niches already established on
the exterior articulation of the building, from which these
differ. The other alternative, the conversion of the Baths
of Diocletian, is improbable: This project was intended
to be economical, and Michelangelo would hardly have
planned to excavate niches in the main hall.
The smaller architectural study, truncated at the bot-
tom and the left side, is difficult to interpret. It might
be possible to see it as the ground plan of a structure of
which the columns and niche were to be a part, but the
scale of the protruberant arcs and the space between them
seems too unlike that of the elevation drawing to relate
to it. If one discounts the various discrepancies of level
and line as slippages of an old man’s hand and assumes the
structure to be symmetrical about an axis running from
the lower edge to the apparent niche that is set adjacent
to the figure’s right shoulder, then it might be assumed to
be the ground plan of the interior of a simple rectangu-
lar building, with an altar? at the end and two side altars
on each flanking wall. The alternative view, that it is a