In 1518 signed a contract for the front of this church, promising statues and marble and everything that went with it. What you see now is what came of it: rough brick.
He spent most of the years that followed up in the mountains. wanted marble from a new quarry near rather than from , so Michelangelo had a road built out there, negotiated with stonecutters, and waited on blocks that kept getting stuck. He called that whole period a waste of his life.
In 1520 his patron cancelled the commission, with not a single stone added to the facade. The design still survives as a wooden model, and the church has looked out bare over this square ever since.
Behind the church lies the entrance to the , and that is where our next stop waits.
Sources. Story: Opera Medicea Laurenziana (unrealised facade, wooden model); Treccani (Michelangelo Buonarroti, Pietrasanta quarries) Photos: Basilica di San Lorenzo, Florence, via Wikimedia Commons, photo Zairon, CC BY 4.0
