Michelangelo In The Brooklyn Rail

I’d have posted about William Corwin’s illuminating review in the new Brooklyn Rail of Rothko in Florence at some point. But it’s not the close color reads of the Rothkos alongside the Fra Angelicos in San Marco that’s making it happen now, this second, as soon as I finished reading it. In fact, it’s not about Rothko at all. It’s this line about one of the buck wildest spaces in town, Michelangelo’s ricetto for the Biblioteca Medicea Laurenziana, which, hilariously, had two small studies for Rothko’s Seagram Murals installed facing that trippy staircase: “In the corners of the vestibule, the corbels even seem to melt into each other in a bizarre overlap that is a casualty of classicism’s desperate need for symmetry.” I have not been in that space for a long time, but I knew exactly what Wilson was referring to, an almost comically sublime architectural gesture in a confounding blizzard of ornament. But I didn’t remember them as melting into each other. detail of the corner corbels in…