Skin: The Renaissance Library and the Archive of the Animal

Michelozzo’s Library of San Marco (1438-43) in Florence is said to have heralded the arrival of the public library in early modern Europe. Conceived as a basilical hall where readers could view and study “masterworks,” Michelozzo’s ornament is restrained in the extreme, limited to Ionic capitals and consoles. This was not the case when Michelangelo designed the Laurentian Library eighty years later. Michelangelo devised layered architectural articulation as well as figural ornament consisting of bucrania, garlands, and foliage in the pavement and ceiling. This paper considers the Laurentian Library’s ornament in light of the dramatic change in the medium of reading material from animal skin to paper driven by the printing revolution begun in ca. 1440.

The impact of this transition is often underestimated, as historian of literature Bruce Holsinger demonstrates in his book On Parchment: Animals, Archives, and the Making of Culture from Herodotus to the Digital Age (Yale 2023). Holsinger argues that writing on rendered animal skins was deeply symbolic in the Patristic era (1^st–8^th century CE) and the awareness of parchment’s “vitality” endured well beyond. With this in mind, I interrogate the form, materiality, and iconography of the Laurentian ornament and highlight similar motives in other libraries. I propose that Michelangelo designed the Laurentian Library to house hand-lettered manuscripts on parchment (but also printed materials) at a time when it was important to recall and enshrine the animal’s sacrifice in the spaces where literature was consumed.