Medici Chapels: Michelangelo's New Sacristy

Why is it significant?

You are behind San Lorenzo now, in Piazza di Madonna degli Aldobrandini, looking up at a dome that seems far too big for the church it sits on. It crowns the Chapel of the Princes, the mausoleum the grand dukes built for themselves, and the door below is the entrance to the Medici Chapels.

Key Facts

Open the walk

You are behind San Lorenzo now, in Piazza di Madonna degli Aldobrandini, looking up at a dome that seems far too big for the church it sits on. It crowns the Chapel of the Princes, the mausoleum the grand dukes built for themselves, and the door below is the entrance to the Medici Chapels.

The Chapel of the Princes was begun in 1604, an octagon whose walls are covered not with paint but with hard stones and precious marbles cut and fitted like a jigsaw, with the coats of arms of the Tuscan cities inlaid around the base. The workshop created to supply this kind of stonework, the Opificio delle Pietre Dure, still exists. The decoration took centuries.

Then step into silence. Michelangelo's New Sacristy was begun around 1520 for the Medici pope Leo X and his cousin, Cardinal Giulio. On two tombs recline the figures of Night and Day, Dawn and Dusk, below idealised statues of two young dukes of the family. Lorenzo the Magnificent himself and his brother Giuliano, murdered in the Pazzi conspiracy, lie in a far plainer tomb under Michelangelo's Madonna. Michelangelo left Florence in 1534 and never came back; the work stayed unfinished.

In 1975 a small room was found below the sacristy, its walls covered with charcoal drawings that many scholars attribute to Michelangelo. One theory: in 1530, when the Medici returned after the siege, Michelangelo, who had designed the Republic's defences, hid down there for weeks, drawing on the walls. It has only recently been opened to small groups of visitors.

The dynasty ended here too. Anna Maria Luisa de' Medici, the last of the line, died in 1743 and was buried in these chapels. In 1737 she signed the Family Pact with the new rulers of Tuscany, and its clause that the Medici collections must never leave Florence is the reason the Uffizi is still full. Now walk west along Via del Melarancio to the wide square of Santa Maria Novella.