ABSTRACT
This chapter describes Renaissance architecture to the impact of the widespread 'culture' of dissection, exploring the Medici Chapel to reveal the hold that the multivalent domain of anatomization had on the imagination of leading Renaissance artists. Architectural historians frequently contrast the logically rationalized architecture of the early Renaissance, which defined space with planar surfaces and distinct geometrical forms, with the emotive High Renaissance architecture, which formed spaces with layered, substantive masses that, through their thickness, created depth, shadow and a tangible atmosphere that encompasses the viewer psychologically. Michelangelo's architecture falls into this latter category of voluminous space, but he takes it a step further by carving and modeling his wall forms in a way that makes them appear fleshy in addition to massive. As the viewer's gaze rises, he or she encounters the architecture of the dissection theater, in which Corinthian columns uncanonically support the frieze of a Doric entablature.
