Basilica di Santo Spirito

This guide to the Basilica di Santo Spirito in Florence follows a seventeen-year-old Michelangelo around 1492, newly without a patron after Lorenzo de' Medici's death, taken in by the monks here. It traces the secret bargain he struck with the prior: nights spent dissecting corpses in the convent hospital to study anatomy, forbidden by the church, in exchange for carving the friars a wooden crucifix for their altar, finished when he was about eighteen. Step into the sacristy to see the crucifix suspended above you.