The story
In the autumn of 1494 Michelangelo, then 19, left Florence weeks before the Medici were driven out, and found work in Bologna. The job was in the Basilica of San Domenico, still a Dominican church, where the tomb of Saint Dominic, founder of the order, who died in this city in 1221, had been growing for more than two centuries. Nicola Pisano's workshop had carved the sarcophagus in the 1260s. The sculptor Niccolò dell'Arca then spent some 25 years on its crowning lid, so long that he took his name from it, and he died in March 1494 with the work unfinished.
Michelangelo carved the missing figures. On the right of the altar kneels his angel holding a candlestick, a sturdy counterpart to Niccolò's slender one on the left. Above stand his two small saints, Petronius, the city's patron, cradling a model of Bologna, and Proculus, a soldier martyr.
Look up in the same chapel and Guido Reni's fresco of Dominic rising into heaven fills the half-dome. Elsewhere in the church hangs Filippino Lippi's Mystic Marriage of Saint Catherine, painted around 1501 for the Casali family chapel. Reni, one of the most celebrated painters of 17th-century Bologna, is buried here, in the Rosary chapel, beside the painter Elisabetta Sirani.
