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Updated: July 15, 2025
It is impossible for Florentine cloisters or indeed any cloisters not to have a certain beauty, and these are unusually charming and light, seen both from the loggia and the ground. Michelangelo's Biblioteca Laurenziana, which leads from them, is one of the most perfect of sombre buildings, the very home of well-ordered scholarship.
When Michael Angelo left, the works at San Lorenzo were all unfinished; the façade was not begun, the Sagrestia Nuova, the ground plan of which is similar to Bruneleschi’s Sagrestia Vecchia, was left in the rough, and the Library he designed to hold the priceless Medician manuscripts, collected by Cosimo Pater Patriæ and Lorenzo the Magnificent, now known as the "Biblioteca Laurenziana," was only begun.
In the winter sunshine I wandered about the busy, old-world streets of Florence, idling in the cafés, gazing into the many shop-windows of the dealers in faked pictures and faked antiques, while often my wandering footsteps led me into one or other of the "sights" of the city, all of which I had visited before the National Museum at the Bargello, the Laurenziana Library, with its rows of priceless chained manuscripts, the Chiostro dello Scalzo, where Andrea del Sarto's wonderful frescoes adorn the walls, or into the Palazzo Vecchio, or the galleries of the Pitti, or the Uffizi.
The Duke of Florence, through Vasari, attempted to get at the ideas of Michael Angelo with regard to the Medici Chapel and the entrance to the Laurenziana, but the old man had lost and forgotten the plans, if he had ever made them.
Just across the river rises S. Croce, where the great man is buried, and beyond, over the red roofs, the dome of the Medici chapel at S. Lorenzo shows us the position of the Biblioteca Laurenziana and the New Sacristy, both built by him. Immediately below us is the church of S. Niccolo, where he is said to have hidden in 1529, when there was a hue and cry for him.
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