Places >Florence
Casa Buonarroti
Florence, via Ghibellina 70
Purchased
by Michelangelo in 1508, the house was remodelled by the Buonarroti family
several times over the centuries. In the Museum, situated in the house, are
some of the young Michelangelo's masterpieces, from the Madonna of the Stairs to the Battle
of the Centaurs, of great artistic importance. On the two floors of the
museum's exhibition area are paintings, sculptures, majolicas and
archaeological findings that have come down from the Buonarroti family through
direct inheritance.
The
splendid building as we see it today was designed in the first half of the 17th
century by Michelangelo Buonarroti the Younger. The house was decorated by
famous artists to glorify the family and its illustrious ancestor. In the
"Studio", the rich iconography also shows clear references to science. Domenico
Pugliani portrayed the physicists and the simplists, Cecco Bravo the
mathematicians and astronomers. In the latter fresco can be seen, along with
scientific instruments such as an armillary sphere and a quadrant, the figure
of Galileo Galilei, who with his telescope and an open book before him is
showing the surface of the Moon, probably an allusion to the Sidereus Nuncius [Starry Messenger] (Venice, 1610). The work was completed in the
years 1633-1637, that is, while Galileo was still alive and had already been
condemned by the Court of the Inquisition. The patron thus showed remarkable
courage in celebrating a man who was at the time "strongly suspected of
heresy".