| A theme itinerary: Michelangelo’s Florence A walk for two days Second day |
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Santo Spirito This great church, begun by Brunelleschi in 1444, is enriched by many treasures of art and it is located in an area very typical of old Florence, less crowded than the other bank of the Arno. The Augustinian monks founded the old monastery and here is where young Michelangelo used to live from 1492, after his protector Lorenzo the Magnificent died and he had to leave the Medici Palace. Thanks to the complicity of the prior, he could skin the dead bodies arriving for fumeral rites in order to study anatomy. As a result of this experience Michelangelo got an incomparable skill to represent any single detail of human body in his works. As a way of thanking the monks for hospitality he carved the beautiful wooden crucifix on the main altar, which is today displayed in his original setting after being exposed for more than a century inside the Casa Buonarroti Museum, the starting point of our theme itinerary. Recently one more little wooden crucifix was ascribed as Michelangelo’s after a comparison to this one. It was part of a private collection and it was temporarily exposed inside the little Horne Museum. At those times Michelangelo was the only one having such a detailed knowledge of human body to be able to portray it so realistically.
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