The 'House Arrest' of Michelangelo's Mural Drawings

Subsumed into the fabric of the Medici Chapel in Florence, Michelangelo’s domiciled wall drawings have the effect of converting the space into something of an archive. Materially fused into the architecture, Michelangelo’s demonstrations in red and black chalk create a visceral connection with the confabulations of the building site of the 1520s, thus turning the chapel, today, into a fecund place for active remembering and architectural thinking. One contemplates questions such as the impact of scale and drawing in full-scale, both measured and unmeasured, body posture and movement in the drawing, the role of specific drawing materials, and the relation of drawing to building in the place of construction. This essay investigates the drawings as an archive in three ways: first, in the importance of their in-situ location and spatial relation to the building site; second, as life-size, embodied marks that recall a memory of construction; and third, as a material palimpsest that re-activates past practices and gestures. It will be shown how the drawings remain, in short, domiciled demonstrations of crafty thinking and surprisingly potent documents for architects, even if they have long outlived their conventional role for guiding construction activity.