The Medici Chapel Museum gets an author's exit and opens Michelangelo's Secret Room


After years of work, the Medici Chapel Museum gets a new author's exit and a new bookshop and opens Michelangelo's Secret Room for the first time.

The Medici Chapels Museum now has asignature exit, which will not only ease the flow of visitors at the end of the tour, but also allow visitors to visit, after decades of closure, the Lorraine Crypt and discover a section of the ancient medieval Florentine walls that emerged during excavations. The museum also has a large new bookshop and modern facilities. From Wednesday, September 27, visitors to the Medici Chapels Museum will therefore conclude their visit by passing through the new exit designed by the Zermani e Associati Architecture Studio: a new passageway, integrated into the historical and artistic context, created over years of intense work. Starting in November, on the other hand, Michelangelo’s Secret Room, which contains charcoal drawings made on the walls by the master, will be open to the public for the first time.

“The new exit conceived by Professor Paolo Zermani represents the culmination of a series of different security, restoration and enhancement interventions that have affected the Medici Chapel Museum over the past eight years,” said Paola D’Agostino, director of the Bargello Museums, of which the Medici Chapel Museum complex is part. “Since the first months of 2016 there has been a fruitful collaboration first with Superintendent Alessandra Marino, then with Superintendent Andrea Pessina, with whom we shared four years of very intense work and in close collaboration on this site that is so delicate because of the presence of different stratifications, and finally with Superintendent Antonella Ranaldi in full harmony. There was equal collaboration between the colleagues of the Bargello Museums and those of the Soprintendenza Archeologia, Belle Arti e Paesaggio for the metropolitan city of Florence and the provinces of Pistoia and Prato in the most complex phases that followed. After the close of the international competition in 2018, the start of work was marked by the coexistence of different construction sites that insisted on the same spaces. The realization of the New Exit was also possible thanks to the experience and dedication of the officials of the Bargello Museums and the reception and security staff serving the Medici Chapels. Finally, I owe special thanks to Professor Zermani, who has realized a project that fits so masterfully into the architectural fabric of the Chapels and the city of Florence, in the highest sense of providing a service to the public.”

“The Medici factory of San Lorenzo has always guarded and transmitted a living memory to Florence. Inside the New Sacristy Michelangelo fixed, in the tombs, the cycle of life, sculpting Day, Night, Dawn, Twilight. In continuity with this principle, the design of the New Exit is a path from darkness to light, from death to life, from the tomb to the city of today,” explained intervention designer Paolo Zermani.



“The urgent need to adapt the Medici Chapels Museum to current safety regulations and to provide the museum with adequate services to the public made the Superintendence start the first excavation works in 2010,” said Massimo Osanna, Director General of Museums. “The discovery shortly thereafter of a rare portion of medieval walls - a distinctive element of the centuries-old urban stratification of Italy’s historic centers - necessitated patient cataloging and verification work that ended only in 2016. The irregular space, intended for the new exit and services, presented significant design challenges that architect Zermani, winner of the 2018 international competition, brilliantly solved while respecting the archaeological and architectural heritage of one of Florence’s most important monumental complexes. The concomitant extraordinary safety campaign and the restoration of the external facades of the New Sacristy and the Chapel of the Princes, the Medici and Lorraine crypts, carried out in recent years by the Bargello Museums allow all the rooms of the Medici Chapels to be restored to an architectural purity and the right articulation of spaces, demonstrating how fundamental it is to continue from now on with an adequate planned maintenance that is among the priorities of the General Directorate of Museums.”

Studio di Architettura Zermani e Associati of Parma, winner in 2018 of the competition announced by the Bargello Museums, developed the project in abasement area, connected to the crypts, where the new museum services, also suitable for the disabled, the bookshop have been placed, and a new small square above, set between the walls of Michelangelo’s New Sacristy and the Chapel of the Princes, has been created, where visitors will emerge by climbing up through a stone staircase. To respect the context, Studio Zermani chose to employ linear forms and materials such as Rapolano Travertine, in harmony with the adjacent factories. The project is also intended to be a decisive contemporary insertion alongside the work of the great masters of the past, and the intervention, through a precise and minimal language, wants to clearly establish its formal autonomy. Placed in the area delimited by the Baroque buildings of the Chapel of the Princes, Michelangelo’s New Sacristy and the right end of the transept of the Basilica of San Lorenzo, the new exit goes to define a very singular place in the city of Florence. The need to ensure the best conditions of safety and enjoyment during the public’s visit gave a strong impetus to conclude the complex works begun already in 2010 to provide the Museum with a new exit, adequate and modern service spaces and, in the course of the work, to secure some of the external facings of the Medici Chapels complex including the walls of the New Sacristy and the Chapel of the Princes that insist on the area of the new exit. The total amount for the construction of the new exit and for securing, restorations and new signage is approximately 2,600,000 euros, divided between its own funds and extraordinary funding from the Ministry of Culture.

Excavation for the work on the new exit was started in May 2010 by the Superintendence for Architectural and Landscape, Historical, Artistic and Ethnoanthropological Heritage for the provinces of Florence (excluding the city on BSAE property), Pistoia and Prato. During this period, important archaeological remains, more specifically part of the 12th-century Florentine city walls (1172-1175), were found during excavation operations. The transition between Soprintendenza Archeologia, Belle Arti e Paesaggio for the metropolitan city of Florence and the provinces of Pistoia and Prato and the former Soprintendenza Speciale per il Patrimonio Storico, Artistico ed Etnoantropologico e per il Polo Museale della città di Firenze dates back to 2015. At the end of that same year, the Medici Chapels Museum became part of the newly formed state group of Bargello Museums. The excavation was completed in 2017, and given the historical and urbanistic importance of the exit that redraws the urban boundaries and was intended to make the medieval archaeological remains visible to the public on the way to the exit, the director of the Bargello Museums, Paola D’Agostino, with the Soprintendenza Archeologia, Belle Arti e Paesaggio (SABAP) for the metropolitan city of Florence and the provinces of Pistoia and Prato, then headed by Andrea Pessina, established a collaboration with the Florence Order of Architects and the Florence Architects Foundation to announce, in late 2017, the international design competition of which Studio Zermani was proclaimed the winner in July 2018.

The firm executed the complex works between April 2021 and May 2023. Paolo Zermani was also director of works and designed the versatile new bookshop, made by the firm Fallani of Venice, which in preparation for the opening was handed over to Opera Laboratori, which currently has the management of ticketing and bookshops for the Bargello Museums, and which set it up in the last week. Over the course of these two years of work, Paolo Zermani’s firm has actively collaborated with the two RUPs that have overseen the work for the Bargello Museums, architect Maria Cristina Valenti first and architect Costantino Ceccanti in the last phase, both supported by architect Emanuela Mollica, an external professional with the task of supporting the RUP.

Beginning in spring 2023, once the construction site was closed and in anticipation of the opening of the new exit, all the rooms of the museum underwent extraordinary maintenance and, where necessary, restoration, under the careful supervision of Francesca De Luca, an art historian functionary and head of the Medici Chapel Museum.

In the Chapel of the Princes, the integrity of the polychrome marble floor made between the late 19th century and 1962 by the Opificio delle Pietre Dure, which had small gaps in several places, was restored. In the New Sacristy, after a general dusting, the altar with its marble candlesticks and the two trophies of arms, also made of marble, by Silvio Cosini, heavily clouded by dust and traces of waxy materials, were restored. The walls of the apse, on which Michelangelo and his collaborators had sketched designs, were very dusty despite being protected by plexiglass plates, and in the uncovered lower band, damage caused by the footsteps of numerous visitors was visible. Once the protections were removed, very light cleaning was done, gaps in the plaster and old additions were tidied up, and shoe marks were removed from the lower band. The Crucifix and copper alloy metal candlesticks of the altar, which were very oxidized and dirty, were also cleaned, as were those of the altar in the Medici Crypt on the ground floor and the Lorraine Crypt in the basement. The display of a selection of reliquaries from the Treasury of San Lorenzo, which had been mounted in 2013 for the exhibition Nello splendore mediceo. Pope Leo X and Florence. In addition, the 19th-century metal frames of the thirty-two terracotta tombs of the grand dukes and their relatives were overhauled, as well as the large frame of the monumental dedicatory plaque on the back wall of the apse. For the pavement tomb of Giangastone de’ Medici, which is now in the path leading to the exit, a spacer was created like those protecting the other similar tombs in the Crypt.

Finally, the Lorenese Crypt, built by architect Emilio De Fabris for the heirs of the Habsburg-Lorraine grand dukes in 1873 and closed to the public for several decades, has been cleared and restored in its entirety: from the cleaning and polishing of the floors (with the reinstatement of the gaps in both the white marble and the bardiglio and in the inscriptions of the epigraphs), the altar, the pietra serena splays of the two windows, the marble tombstones on the walls and around the central pillar with their pietra serena frames, damaged by dirt and splashes of various substances, including some oily ones brought by the 1966 flood. The same damage was also noticeable on the lower part of the memorial plaque in the apse of the Medici Crypt, again these traces could not be completely removed but were visibly mitigated by the restoration. Also in the Lorenese Crypt, a new lighting system and two new stained-glass windows have been installed that allow visitors to admire the tomb of Cosimo the Elder by Andrea del Verrocchio.

New visitor orientation signage has been designed and is nearing completion, as well as new educational apparatuses throughout the museum in Italian and English, produced by Haunagdesgin Srl, with texts by Francesca de Luca.

The imminent opening of Michelangelo’s Secret Room to the public was also announced. Beginning in early November 2023, explained Museums General Director Massimo Osanna, the small room accessed from the New Sacristy and containing charcoal drawings attributed to Buonarroti, will be accessible periodically to small, limited groups. The room, never previously open to the public, was discovered in 1975 by Paolo Dal Poggetto, then director of the museum, during an inspection prior to restoration work. Under the plaster was discovered a series of sketches inspired by the works of the master, who, according to Dal Poggetto’s reconstruction, spent a couple of months in the small room in 1530 to escape Medici persecution. “The completion of the work on the New Exit and the adaptation of the Medici Chapel Museum to safety standards will make it possible from the beginning of November to periodically open Michelangelo’s secret room as well,” explained Massimo Osanna, “a place of extraordinary charm, but very delicate because of the location of the narrow room in the museum itinerary and the protection of the charcoal drawings on the walls. Together with the Direction of the Bargello Museums, in the next few weeks the modalities of the visit will be agreed upon, which will take place in small, limited groups.”

The New Exit of the Museum of the Medici Chapels. Designed by architect Paolo Zermani. Photo by Stephane Giraudeau
The New Exit of the Medici Chapels Museum. Design by architect Paolo Zermani. Photo by Stephane Giraudeau
Michelangelo's Secret Room. Photo by Francesco Fanfani
Michelangelo’s Secret Room. Photo by Francesco Fanfani
The new bookshop and the medieval Florentine walls - Museo delle Cappelle Medicee. Photo by Francesco Fanfani
The new bookshop and the medieval Florentine walls - Museo delle Cappelle Medicee. Photo by Francesco Fan
fani
The Lorraine Crypt of the Medici Chapel Museum. Photo by Francesco Fanfani
The Lorraine Crypt of the Medici Chapels Museum. Photo by Francesco Fan
fani

The Medici Chapel Museum gets an author's exit and opens Michelangelo's Secret Room
The Medici Chapel Museum gets an author's exit and opens Michelangelo's Secret Room


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