The Architecture of Michelangelo: Two Volumes

by James S. Ackerman

In this widely acclaimed work, James Ackerman considers in detail the buildings designed by Michelangelo in Florence and Rome—including the Medici Chapel, the Farnese Palace, the Basilica of St. Peter, and the Capitoline Hill. He then turns to an examination of the artist's architectural drawings, theory, and practice. As Ackerman points out, Michelangelo worked on many projects started or completed by other architects. Consequently this study provides insights into the achievements of the whole profession during the sixteenth century. The text is supplemented with 140 black-and-white illustrations and is followed by a scholarly catalog of Michelangelo's buildings that discusses chronology, authorship, and condition. For this second edition, Ackerman has made extensive revisions in the catalog to encompass new material that has been published on the subject since 1970.

Genres: Architecture, Nonfiction, Italy

Hardcover

First published July 30, 1971

About the author

James S. Ackerman, Arthur Kingsley Porter Professor of Fine Arts Emeritus at Harvard University and a Fellow and former Trustee of the American Academy in Rome, was born in San Francisco in 1919 and studied at Yale and New York University. He is a former editor of the Art Bulletin, a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and a corresponding member of the British Academy, the Accademia Olimpica (Vicenza), the Ateneo Veneto and the Royal Academy of Uppsala. He gave the Slade Lectures at Cambridge in 1969-70.

Professor Ackerman has lived several years in Italy, beginning with service during the last war, and is the author of many studies on Italian architecture, including The Cortile del Belvedere (1954), a history of the Renaissance portion of the Vatican Palace, and The Architecture of Michelangelo (1961), which received the Charles Rufus Morey Award of the College Art Association of America and the Alice David Hitchcock Award of the Society of Architectural Historians. Recently, he has published The Villa: Form and Ideology of Country Houses (1990); a volume of collected essays, Distance Points, is in press. He is co-author of a volume on historical practice and theory, Art and Archaeology (1963). He has conceived an narrated the films Looking for Renaissance Rome (1975, with Kathleen Weil-Garris Brandt) and Palladio the Architet and His Influence in America (1980).

Reviews

[Victor Chiñas · Rating 3 out of 5]

The Architecture of Michelangelo is super detailed and really focused on the architecture itself, maybe a bit too much for me. I wish there had been more historical context, but even without knowing much about architecture, I learned a lot. In the end, it just confirmed how insanely talented Michelangelo was. He did everything.

[Merryn Summersgill · Rating 3 out of 5]

Ackerman gives a good visual analysis of Michelangelo’s works - he relates the structures to the human body calling them organisms which I thought was interesting. I want to go to Florence so bad now tho to see the Laurentian Library and Medici Chapel!!

[Stephen · Rating 5 out of 5]

Actually reading it through now - it was like most of my purchases a secondhand book - I had read others in the series - just the first few pages about Michelangelo's organic dynamic approach to design and modelling - well that got me hooked. It is a fascinating book and very readable (thanks to the author's wife! :-))