In medias res: Michelangelo’s Mural Drawings at San Lorenzo

nor does he begin the Trojan War ab ovo (with the egg)
but always he hurries to the action
and snatches the listener in medias res (into the middle of things)
     Horace, Ars Poetica 145–147

Good epic poets do not commence their tale from the beginning—ab ovo (with the egg)—as Horace states, but rather descend in medias res (into the middle of things), a reference to the Illiad opening already many years into the Trojan War. Perhaps this sentiment of plunging into the middle of action was felt by researchers in 1976 when, upon the walls of the San Lorenzo New Sacristy in Florence, they uncovered an astonishing array of mural drawings beneath centuries old plaster, recognized instantly as the possible handiwork of Michelangelo himself. Primarily related to the work at the Laurentian Library in the years 1525 and 1526, the walls of the New Sacristy apse preserve a palimpsest of hundreds of figural sketches, 1:1 scaled architectonic details, and written messages. Among them are the largest drawings known to survive by Michelangelo: two, nearly four meter elevations of the interior and exterior windows of the library, rendered in scale 1:1. Rather than examine the drawings as a history of the building site, something that has already been well explored, we ask—what story do the drawings tell? What is clear that Michelangelo conducted a building site characterized by simultaneity and anachrony, creating a discrepancy, for historians at least, between the order of construction events and the order of events told by the factures and clues left for us to trace. As drawings imagined in medias res, where one has to imagine backwards in order to look forward, a bi-directional movement of anticipation, looking back, and the future anterior, one that desires no beginning nor end, but the medias.