Exhibition Area

Since 1984 the series of rooms on the left-hand side of the entrance hall of Casa Buonarroti has been used for temporary exhibitions. Up until 1990, the exhibition space consisted of three rooms, to which a fourth was added in that year, through the restoration of part of the oldest section of the house, which had evaded all previous restorations and dated back to the time of Michelangelo. The first three rooms were undoubtedly affected by the alterations to which Michelangelo the Younger subjected the building in the first half of the seventeenth century: evidence for this is provided by the noble appearance of the spaces and above all the fine fresco by Jacopo Vignali - on the ceiling of the first room - depicting Jacob's Dream. Exhibitions are staged on an annual basis and cover subjects related to Michelangelo and the cultural, artistic and historical heritage of Casa Buonarroti. The theme is closely bound up with the aims of the institution and with the programs of scientific research that it carries out, and is an extremely wide-ranging one. It has permitted, among other things, investigation of a number of topics directly related to Michelangelo (the artist's youthful activities in the garden of San Marco, or his architectural work on San Lorenzo and St. Peter's); the myth of Michelangelo in the nineteenth century (from the centenary of 1875 to the suggestive comparison with the work of Auguste Rodin); the collecting activity of the family, through exhibitions built around the most prestigious pieces in the Casa Buonarroti (the discovery of the "painting of light" deriving from Giovanni di Francesco's predella and the human and artistic drama of Artemisia Gentileschi, based on her canvas in the "Galleria").

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