ABSTRACT
This study was written at I Tatti under the directorship of Craig Smyth and it is a great satisfaction to me that it appears in print in a volume of essays in his honor. Many years ago when he was director of the Institute of Fine Arts, Professor Smyth offered a seminar on High Renaissance painting and drawing. The first time the class met he announced that we had all been lured into the course on false pretenses, that in fact the seminar was going to be on Michelangelo at Saint Peter’s and anybody who was distressed by that could withdraw from it. Nobody did. In that seminar I learned that we are as often blinkered by our “knowledge” as enlightened by it and as a result there is no such thing as a building that has been fully examined. In the case of the architecture of Michelangelo, precisely because we know him to be the most studied figure in all of art history, many significant aspects of his buildings have never been recognized. Some things that have been noticed and disregarded turn out to be extremely informative when considered in an organized way.
