Medici Chapel

Michelangelo: tomb of Giuliano de' Medici

Medici Chapel, Italian Cappella Medicea, chapel housing monuments to members of the Medici family, in the New Sacristy of the Church of San Lorenzo in Florence. The funereal monuments were commissioned in 1520 by Pope Clement VII (formerly Cardinal Giulio de’ Medici), executed largely by Michelangelo from 1520 to 1534, and completed by Michelangelo’s pupils after his departure.

The two monumental groups of sculptures (for the tombs of Lorenzo, duke di Urbino, and Giuliano, duke de Nemours) are each composed of a seated armed figure in a niche, with an allegorical figure reclining on either side of the sarcophagus below. The seated figures, representing the two dukes, are not treated as portraits but as types. Lorenzo, whose face is shaded by a helmet, personifies the reflective man; Giuliano, who is holding the baton of an army commander, portrays the active man. At his feet recline the figures of “Night” and “Day.” “Night,” a giantess, is twisting in uneasy slumber; “Day,” a herculean figure, looks wrathfully over his shoulder. Just as imposing, but far less violent, are the two companion figures reclining between sleep and waking on the sarcophagus of Lorenzo. The male figure is known as “Dusk,” the female figure as “Dawn.”

Dawn by Michelangelo

Lorenzo the Magnificent and his brother Giuliano the Elder were buried at the entrance wall, and over them was set up a marble group consisting of a “Madonna and Child” and the Medici patron saints Cosmas and Damian. The “Madonna” is a work of imposing majesty, completely by Michelangelo’s own hand; the saints are the work of pupils after models by the master.

The many-layered articulation of the wall plane has a proto-Mannerist tension in which the rules of classical architecture seem inverted. Indeed, the Italian artist and author Giorgio Vasari wrote of this novel masterpiece that Michelangelo did not work like his contemporaries who “followed Vitruvius and the antiquities,” for “he would not conform…[but] broke the bonds and chains of usage they had always followed.”