Paper threshold : the drawings of Michelangelo

The following thesis is a meditation on the drawings of Michelangelo that are connected to his three projects at San Lorenzo and a series of 'gift' drawings for Tomasso de'Cavalieri. The drawings offer a glimpse of his radically inventive imagination that calls for an architecture rooted in the soul and based on the appearance of a 'live' and an emotive body. Engaged within a holistic fabrication of architecture, both the recto and the verso of the sheet are constructed as palimpsests comprised of design sketches, figurative studies, poetic fragments and pragmatic calculations. As instruments of communication, Michelangelo's paper templates are intermediaries between the 'Divine One's' mindful hand and the scarpellini's chisel. A line can be traced from the outline of his disegno , the profillo of a face and the cut line of his modani. Poetry and profiles cross-pollinate in a poiesis of architecture that culminates at a threshold---the hinge between being and becoming---the place where Love tosses in his sleep