Michelangelo In The Brooklyn Rail

a photo down a wide curled set of stairs that almost entirely fills the terra cotta floor of a tall square space with grey walls, covered in two layers of architectural ornament: windows, columns, pilasters, corbels, all the kind of thing you'd expect to see on the exterior of a renaissance building in florence, michelangelo put it here on the inside. go figure. at the center of the lower section of the far wall are two rothko works on paper, one red and one black.
Installation view of two Rothko Seagram Mural studies at the Laurencian Library, part of Rothko in Florence, organized at the Palazzo Strozzi, 2026, đź“·: Ela Bialkowska, OKNO Studio via brooklynrail

I’d have posted about William Corwin’s illuminating review in the new Brooklyn Rail of Rothko in Florence at some point. But it’s not the close color reads of the Rothkos alongside the Fra Angelicos in San Marco that’s making it happen now, this second, as soon as I finished reading it. In fact, it’s not about Rothko at all.

It’s this line about one of the buck wildest spaces in town, Michelangelo’s ricetto for the Biblioteca Medicea Laurenziana, which had two small studies for Rothko’s Seagram Murals installed facing that trippy staircase [Rothko said the non-windows were an inspiration, and the vibe]: “In the corners of the vestibule, the corbels even seem to melt into each other in a bizarre overlap that is a casualty of classicism’s desperate need for symmetry.”

I have not been in that space for a long time, but I knew exactly what Wilson was referring to, an almost comically sublime architectural gesture in a confounding blizzard of ornament. But I didn’t remember them as melting into each other.

in the corner of a library vestibule in florence, two attenuated stone volutes, s-shaped curves, or corbels, the kind of ornamented architectural brackets that would normally signify holding something up, but here, are just on the wall, in the corner, smashed into each other in such a way that they merge, either by interleaving their striations, or just getting cropped. that michelangelo, what was he thinking?
detail of the corner corbels in Michelangelo’s Laurentian Library vestibule, which I’ve also seen called volutes, which, I guess if a corbel doesn’t hold anything up, is it even a corbel? No, they’re volutes. đź“·: arttrav

It made me want to look up a picture of the corbels—which are actually volutes. Alexandra Korey has a nice one, with kind of wonky lighting that makes the whole situation feel even more artificial. And I guess I’d say that no, I wasn’t misremembering, but the way the forms come together is varied.

The top striations are interleaved, like shuffled cards or combs’ teeth, which is what, I think, had left its impression on me so long ago. But looking now at the bottom volute, they’re just abutting each other; the lighting makes it look like a clunky photoshop. Such a weird thing, easily lost among the rest, and one which, tbqh, I hadn’t thought about in ages. Read the Brooklyn Rail for Hot Michelangelo Takes, I guess!

Necessary Miracles: Rothko in Florence [brooklynrail.org]