Michelangelo’s Laurentian Library consists of two separate and distinct rooms. The reading room is just that, with a traditional layout, regular window spacing, and beautifully designed walnut furniture. The room is intensely horizontal, 152 feet long, 35 feet wide, with a ceiling at 28 feet. The windows provide light by which to read at each desk. The wooden reading desks sit along both walls, (with the reading tops part of the seats in front) a long walkway between them runs the length of the entire room. The overall feeling of the reading room is one of quiet tranquility. The Vestibule (“Ricetto”) is quite intentionally different from the reading room in all respects. Intensely vertical, (even more so than originally intended by Michelangelo, as his intended skylights were rejected by the pontificate as likely to leak rainwater, and so were replaced by windows above the rooms tabernacles, therefore raising an already high ceiling) the square room’s floor is many feet below the floor level of the reading room, and the classical architectural aesthetics of the room correspond and accentuate this verticality.

     Where as the reading room’s still but ornate decorative elements promote quiet study, the vestibule’s aesthetics have a completely contrary effect. This is a room that has been turned outside in with respect to the interior wall treatments, which since Greek classical antiquity have belonged outdoors. John Sherman (from his book “Mannerism” 1967) describes Michelangelo’s innovation of the Ricetto interior, “The principal development here is an application of license to all architectural members.” As regards the wall treatments, nothing is as it appears. The “tabernacles”, an architectural feature denoting a niche to hold sculpture, are empty, resembling more a window, though they are part of the wall, they serve neither purpose, and make no immediate sense. The (over-sized) scroll-shaped volutes beneath the tabernacles are detached from them, and so their usual supporting use is irrelevant. Further, where these volutes meet in the corners of the room, their forms merge, and so even their physical solidity is drawn into question. The double columns spaced throughout the room are recessed into the wall, in opposition to a separate, outdoor and support role normally played by such an element. The walls (containing the tabernacles between) seem to emerge and push inward into the room. The effect of the recessed columns, and “emerging” walls has been described as organically mirroring the male human form (appropriate to Michelangelo’s aesthetic ideals) creating the effect of a skin “pulled taut” over musculature beneath. The apparent thickness of the walls suggest that they are structural, where in fact they contain loose fill material and the double columns support the roof beams. Pilasters (square columns) are another feature of the walls but they are placed sideways to the other elements, and in their use in the tabernacle design, increase in width with height, both traits are odd and in opposition to traditional use. Michelangelo’s contrary use of these classical elements would be disquieting enough, yet the vestibule’s only necessary feature, a staircase, adds a necessary element that furthers, and expands the tension of the room.

     The design of the staircase of the Ricetto of the library is said to have come to Michelangelo in a dream. An earlier design called for a staircase divided into two wings that met in a landing at the reading room doorway. Michelango earnestly diverged from this plan. The staircase is really freestanding work of sculpture. (as well as the first freestanding staircase in Europe. It has been described as an “alien intruder” and seems “to pour into the room like a flow of lava” and it’s color contributes to this description as well. Composed of three staircases, the central for the master, the sides for his retainers. The convex form of central stairs, and the varying widths of the treads further lend to this expansive effect, which confronts a user of the stairs as they climb upward “against” this phenomenon.

     In the vestibule, the outward expansion of the staircase and the inward tension and compression of the walls invoke a disturbing frustration upon the observer, who in the necessity of using the staircase, also becomes the subject of this sculptural/architectural work. Michelangelo’s seeming unification of design through the use of visual (and psychological) contradiction in the Ricetto is satisfied (and furthered) upon the viewer entering the reading room. The frustration and disquieting confusion of the vestibule (appropriate to a room for conversation and debate of the libraries’ subject matter) only intensifies the experience of relief in the viewer as they enter the atmosphere of tranquility and release of the reading room.