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Tomb of Giuliano de’ Medici Michelangelo Buonarroti August Gerber (cast maker)

Artist

Michelangelo Buonarroti Caprese, 1475 – Rome, 1564

August Gerber (cast maker) Köln

Date 1519–1533 (original), 1906 (cast)
Object type plaster cast
Medium, technique plaster cast
Dimensions

420 × 438 × 180 cm

Inventory number Rg.232
Collection Sculptures
On view This artwork is not on display

The Medici funerary chapel and its decorations was commissioned from Michelangelo in 1519 by Cardinal Giulio de’ Medici (1478–1534), afterwards Pope Clement VII. The figure of giuliano de’ Medici (1492–1519), Duke of Nemours is seated in a niche above a sarcophagus, on which the allegorical figures of Day and Night recline. On the opposite wall there is the companion tomb of Lorenzo’s uncle, Lorenzo de’ Medici (1479–1516), Duke of Urbino in similar structure. The Museum of Fine Arts was the only cast collection which purchased the entire plaster casts of the two Medici tombs, ordered in 1906 from August Gerber at Cologne. In the Museum of Fine Arts, built between 1900 and 1906, the Michelangelo Room was specially designed to provide proper placement for these tombs, in a similar way as the funerary monuments are arranged in the Florentine Medici Chapel. In the Michelangelo Room the casts of the two tombs were installed in 1908; the final arrangement of the room was finished in 1909, when other plaster casts after Michelangelo were also installed here. Although the gallery was opened to the public only in 1913. The figures of Giuliano, the Night, the Day and the sarcophagus underneath are exhibited since 1976 in Kecskemét at the House of Science and Technology, together with other fourteen plaster casts after Michelangelo’s statues. The architectural elements of the tomb remained unrestored in the museum, now being kept in storage.

This record is subject to revision due to ongoing research.

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