Art: Saved from Death

(2 of 2)

Cutthroat Foiled. But what were the drawings doing in that narrow chamber? Dal Poggetto has a theory. In 1527 the Medici, who had virtually become kings, were expelled from Florence by a wave of republican sentiment. When the Medici resumed their grip on the city in 1530, a purge of republicans followed, and a cutthroat named Alessandro Corsini was hired to murder Michelangelo—who had vocally sided with the republican cause. According to an old tradition, the great sculptor, who was then at work on the Medici tombs, hid in the bell tower of a church on the other side of the Arno. But ten years ago, a memoir was discovered in the handwriting of Giovanni Battista Figiovanni, the prior of San Lorenzo who was in charge of the Medici tombs project. "I saved him from death," the prior wrote of Michelangelo, "and I saved his belongings too." It was in this very room—well hidden by its trap door, but at street level and adequately lit, even furnished with a cistern for water—that the prior, Dal Poggetto argues, hid the sculptor during the fall of 1530.

Before those weeks of refuge, Figiovanni wrote, Michelangelo had been impossible to deal with; he was a man "with whom Job would not have kept his renowned patience for even one day." After it, "Michelangelo asked me pardon a thousand times." No doubt he was immensely relieved to be out in the air again, and carving. The drawings he left on the walls—evidently done behind shutters at night, for his lines are in places visibly interrupted by the grease from guttering candles—were a means of passing the time during that irritating concealment. They are not among the sculptor's greater works, but anything by Michelangelo's hand is, needless to say, of interest.

Only one problem now remains for Dal Poggetto. Since the general public cannot be let into the storeroom containing the drawings (the space is too confined, the risk of damage too large), he will have to find yet another exit-corridor from the Medici tombs. And for the moment, there seems to be none.