The story
On a ceiling in the gallery of Casa Buonarroti, a young woman sits on clouds holding a compass. Artemisia Gentileschi, then in her early twenties and working in Florence, painted her around 1616 as the Allegory of Inclination, the natural gift for art. She was painted nude. About 70 years later a more modest-minded descendant, Leonardo Buonarroti, had the painter Volterrano add the swirling drapery that still covers her, and a recent restoration could recover the original only as a digital reconstruction.
Her patron was Michelangelo Buonarroti the Younger, grandnephew of the great sculptor. Michelangelo himself had bought houses on this street, Via Ghibellina, in 1508. The Younger turned the property into a monument to his famous ancestor, hiring painters of the day, Artemisia among them, to fill the rooms with scenes of the master's life and virtues. In 1858 the last of the family, Cosimo Buonarroti, left the house to the city of Florence, and it opened as a museum the following year.
Most visitors come for two marble reliefs Michelangelo carved as a teenager, the shallow, calm Madonna of the Stairs and the crowded Battle of the Centaurs from around 1492. Nearby stands his wooden model for a façade of the church of San Lorenzo that was never built, and the house keeps a large collection of his drawings, shown a few at a time.
