Can you imagine having to design a building for the Capitoline Hill in Rome? Whatever your architectural ideas might be, they would have to reflect an immense burden of history: for this was the very centre of the first Western empire and before that one of its first and most successful republics. It overlooks the Forum to the east and sits on the cradle between the hill’s two peaks upon which stood the ancient temples to Jupiter and Juno.
Michelangelo’s Palazzo dei Conservatori is a solemn, elegant construction of brick and stone. Grand vertical accents created by a giant order of Corinthian pilasters span both storeys. On the ground floor a loggia opens the building to the piazza, a beautiful cambered oval with a bronze equestrian statue of (what was believed to be) the Emperor Constantine on a central plinth. These apertures are flanked with smaller Ionic columns and they create a secondary rhythm as an understated counterpoint to the Corinthian. Other decorative touches, such as the sculpted figures on the balustrade at roof level, are similarly discreet. The whole is as sober and dignified as a clean shaven, toga-ed senator from the days of the Roman Republic.
It’s all serious stuff but between the scrolls of these smaller Ionic capitals, just above the egg and dart motif, Michelangelo designed tiny grotesque heads; each one is different. These details are irreverent and humorous, a reminder that there is another side to life than that of high-minded politics and statecraft. It doesn’t and shouldn’t dominate, but it’s there. The devil, as they say, or in this case more accurately the Dionysian, is in the detail.
