Day Night Dawn Dusk
“Body and Soul“

by Laura Morelli

Pages: 20-29

“Art and death do not go well together,”
lamented Michelangelo in a famous letter, as he faced middle age
and yet another papal commission for funerary sculpture. That, however, is precisely what Pope Clement VII called on him to do—unite art and death—when in 1520 he directed the already renowned forty-five-year-old artist to execute a funerary chapel to house the remains of four members of the Medici family.