ABSTRACT
The Pope, Paul III Farnese, did his best to ornament the recently ravaged city, but Rome had no central square in which to receive and impress so great a dignitary. Paul determined to move the famous equestrian statue of Marcus Aurelius to the empty piazza before the Palazzo del Senatore, and set it up early in 1538, facing the normal approach from Rome. Michelangelo had opposed this move, but having been made a citizen of Rome on the Capitol on 10 December 1537, a great honor, he soon set about designing a new base for the statue. Architecture became Michelangelo's chief old-age means of expression. Architectural design aroused none of the unconscious anxieties that so frustrated his later sculptural projects, and the abstract repertory of architectural forms became personal and sculptural in his hands. He changed Renaissance architecture in larger ways as well: what had been an organization of parts in Donato Bramante's practice became sculptural, organic wholes.
