Good News for the L'Aquilani ?

The professor who teaches the Michelangelo class is a character. If this were a second or third grade parent/teacher conference, and I were the teacher, I'd say that he was dynamic. Yesterday, he was discussing Michelangelo's commission for the tomb of Pope Julius II della Rovere, from which the Moses resulted, among a few other sculptures.

Above is a design not really doing justice the original design, which was for a 36x24foot freestanding (therefore 4-sided) tomb with an oval interior featuring the sarcophagus of the megalomaniacal Julius II. The tiny picture really doesn't do it justice, but it's all I could find.

Another ridiculously small picture, but this is the tomb of San Bernardino, who died in L'Aquila. The important thing about the tomb is that it's circumambulatory, which means that it can be walked around, the relics can be seen, etc. I'm simplifying a bit, but not much.

The professor tried to make the argument that this was part of Michelangelo's inspiration for the first design of the tomb of Julius II! Why? Because it was finished by Roman craftsmen in 1507, the year Michelangelo got the commission, and one of the patrons was Sixtus IV, the uncle of Julius II, so he would have known about it.

Now, I have passed many happy days and eaten many pounds of porchetta in the market there. However, there is no way that in 1507 Michelangelo would have given a damn about a tomb in provincial L'Aquila, regardless of the great popular devotion to Bernardino. Often, I think that there's a great tendency to overanalyze art, which also can happen with literature, poetry, whatever -- and there's no need. So. This is my small bit of opinion advocating against over analyzing things, which I must remember also for myself.