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Updated: June 13, 2025
After them, indeed, their successors were enabled to attain to it through seeing excavated out of the earth certain antiquities cited by Pliny as amongst the most famous, such as the Laocoon, the Hercules, the Great Torso of the Belvedere, and likewise the Venus, the Cleopatra, the Apollo, and an endless number of others, which, both with their sweetness and their severity, with their fleshy roundness copied from the greatest beauties of nature, and with certain attitudes which involve no distortion of the whole figure but only a movement of certain parts, and are revealed with a most perfect grace, brought about the disappearance of a certain dryness, hardness, and sharpness of manner, which had been left to our art by the excessive study of Piero della Francesca, Lazzaro Vasari, Alesso Baldovinetti, Andrea dal Castagno, Pesello, Ercole Ferrarese, Giovanni Bellini, Cosimo Rosselli, the Abbot of S. Clemente, Domenico del Ghirlandajo, Sandro Botticelli, Andrea Mantegna, Filippo, and Luca Signorelli.
On July 17 Michael Angelo himself paid the mason; so Granacci had gone to Florence by then to hire the other assistants. On July 27 Michael Angelo paid Rosselli thirty golden ducats, full weight, for rough plastering and other details. The amount paid, and the time taken, go to prove that the whole vault was plastered. Granacci wrote from Florence about the assistants.
He, having shown in his childhood not merely inclination, but also aptitude, for drawing, was placed, through the good services of Benedetto da Maiano, with Cosimo Rosselli, and lodged in the house of some relatives of his own, who lived at the Porta a S. Piero Gattolini; where he stayed for many years, so that he was never called or known by any other name than that of Baccio della Porta.
At the age of twenty he abandoned his calling of gold-beater, in which he had been employed up to that time; and he learnt the first rudiments of painting in the workshop of Cosimo Rosselli, where he formed such an intimacy with Baccio della Porta, that they were one soul and one body.
This is the real fairyland, the wonderland of mediæval romance and of Persian and Arabian tales, no longer solemn or awful, but brilliant, sunny, only half believed in; the fairyland of the Renaissance, superficially artistic, with its lightest, brightest fancies, and its charming realities; its cloistered and painted courts with plashing fountains, its tapestried and inlaid rooms, its towered and belvedered villas, its quaint clipped gardens full of strange Oriental plants and beasts; and all this transported into a country of wonders, where are the gardens of the Hesperides, the fountain of Merlin, the tomb of Narcissus, the castle of Morgan-le-Fay; every quaint and beautiful fancy, antique and mediæval, mixed up together, as in some Renaissance picture of Botticelli or Rosselli or Filippino, where knights in armour descend from Pegasus before Roman temples, where swarthy white-turbaned Turks, with oddly bunched-up trousers and jewelled caftans, and half-naked, oak-crowned youths, like genii descended, pensive and wondering, from some antique sarcophagus, and dapper princelets and stalwart knights, and citizens and monks, all crowd round the altar of some wonder-working Macone or Apolline or Trevigante; some comic, dreadful, apish figure, mummed up in half-antique, half-oriental garb.
In August of the same year, 1501, Michael Angelo began the colossal statue of David, that used to stand in the Piazza and is now in the Academy at Florence. The first contract for this work, signed between Michael Angelo, the Arte della Lana, and the Opera del Duomo, is dated August 16, 1501. It states "That the worthy master, Michael Angelo, son of Lodovico Bonarroti, citizen of Florence, has been chosen to fashion, complete, and perfectly finish the male statue, already rough hewn and called the giant, of nine cubits in height, now existing in the workshop of the Cathedral, badly blocked out afore-time by Master Agostino, of Florence. The work shall be completed within the term of the next ensuing two years, dating from September, at a salary of six golden florins per month; and whatever is needful for the accomplishment of this task, as workmen, wood, &c., which he may require, shall be supplied him by the said Operai; and when the said statue is finished, the Consuls and Operai, who shall be in office, shall estimate whether he deserve a larger recompense, and this shall be left to their consciences." Michael Angelo began to work in a wooden shed, erected for that purpose near the Cathedral, on Monday morning, September 13, 1501, and the "David" is said to be almost entirely finished in a note, dated January 25, 1503, when a solemn council of the most important artists, then resident in Florence, met at the Opera del Duomo to consider where the statue should be placed. What an original way of deciding æsthetic questions! They came to the admirable conclusion that the choice of the site should be left to Michael Angelo. Amongst those who spoke at the meeting were Francesco Monciatto, a wood carver, who suggested that the statue should be erected in front of the Duomo, where the block was originally meant to be set up; he was supported by the painters Cosimo Rosselli and Sandro Botticelli. Giuliano da San Gallo proposed to place it under the Loggia dei Lanzi, because "the imperfection of the marble, which is softened by exposure to the air, renders the durability of the statue doubtful." Messer Angelo de Lorenzo Manfidi (second herald) objected because it would break the order of certain ceremonies held in the Loggia. Leonardo da Vinci followed San Gallo; he did not think it would injure the ceremonies. Salvestro, a jeweller, and Filippino Lippi supported Piero di Cosimo, who proposed that the precise spot should be left to the sculptor who made it, "as he will know better how it should be." Michael Angelo elected to have his David set up on the steps of the Palazzo Vecchio, on the right side of the entrance. Its effect in that position may be well seen, appropriately enough, in a picture by the same Piero di Cosimo (No. 895), in the National Gallery, where the Piazza della Signoria forms the background to a portrait of a man in armour. Il Cronaca, Antonio da San Gallo, Baccio d’Agnolo, Bernardo della Cecca, and Michael Angelo were associated in the task of transporting the giant from the workshop near the Duomo to the Piazza della Signoria. It was encased in planks and suspended upright from great beams. "On May 14, 1504, the marble giant was dragged from the Opera. It came out at twenty-four o’clock, and they broke the wall above the door enough to let it pass. That night some stones were thrown at the Colossus with intent to injure it; a watch had to be set over it at night, and it made way very slowly, bound as it was upright, suspended so that the feet were off the ground by enormous beams with much ingenuity. It took four days to reach the Piazza, arriving on the 18th at the hour of twelve. More than forty men were employed to make it go, and there were fourteen logs to go beneath it, which were changed from hand to hand. Afterwards they worked until June 8, 1504, to place it on a pedestal where the Judith used to stand. The Judith was removed and set upon the ground within the palace. The said giant was the work of Michael Angelo Buonarroti." The great marble David stood in the Piazza three hundred and sixty-nine years; it was removed to the hall of the Accademia delle Belle Arti in 1873 for its better preservation. It has suffered very little from its exposure in the fine air of Florence, but the left arm was broken by a huge stone thrown during the tumults of 1527. Giorgio Vasari and his friend Cecchino Salviati collected the broken pieces and brought them to the house of Michael Angelo Salviati, father of Cecchino. They were carefully put together and restored to the statue in 1543. The David was the first work by Michael Angelo that displayed the awe-inspiring quality known as his Terribilit
The ends of the chapel are closed by flat walls, against the western of which is raised the altar. When Michelangelo was called to paint here, he found both sides of the building, just below the windows, decorated in fresco by Perugino, Cosimo Rosselli, Sandro Botticelli, Luca Signorelli, and Domenico Ghirlandajo.
Such must have been the works of those famous Romans and Greeks, Phidias and Praxiteles. Such were the notions of Domenico of Volterra in the earlier part of his career. For a change came gradually upon him after his first visit to Rome, whither, about 1480, he accompanied Botticelli, Rosselli, and Ghirlandaio, whom His Beatitude Pope Sixtus had sent for to decorate the new chapel of the palace.
Fra Bartolommeo was sent, when nine years old, into the workshop of Cosimo Rosselli, where he began his artist's life by colour-grinding, sweeping out the shop, and errand-running. It was in Cosimo's bottega that he made acquaintance with Mariotto Albertinelli, who became his intimate friend and fellow-worker.
The church is full of old frescoes by Cosimo Rosselli, Raffaellino del Garbo, and such, and is worth a visit, if only for the work of Mino and the S. Sebastian of Leonardo del Tasso. It is to another desecrated Benedictine convent you come when, passing through Via dei Pilastrati and turning into Via Farina, you come at last in Via della Colonna to S. Maria Maddalena de' Pazzi.
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