Michelangelo and the secret room.

Michelangelo and the secret room in the New Sacristy 
 

Michelangelo lived for three months in a small and narrow room of seven metres for two under the New Sacristy in the Medici Chapels. It was 1530 and the Florentine Republic entrusted him to build the defensive walls to protect the city during the siege of Florence by the Emperor Charles V.  Charles helped the Medici Pope Clemente VII to bring back at the power of Florence his family. Michelangelo denied the Medici family in particular he didn't accept the new goverment of the first duke of Tuscany Alessandro, Pope's illegitimate son, who governed as a tyrant. 
While the Florentine Republic was falling down Michelangelo stayed inside the narrow corridor alone and he made some sketches representing the David, already completed in 1504, the Laocoon he observed in 1506 in Rome when it was discovered, some figures decorated on the vault for the Sistine Chapel (1512) and so on. The artist drew even his self-portrait depicting the attitude of an imprisoned man. Nobody thought he was hidden in the holy place of the Medici family, the new Sacisty he was sculpting since 1520 for the pope he hated, Clemente. For this reason he saved himeself. Clemente forgave him provided that he completed the New Sacrsity but In  1534 left definitively Florence for Rome where he died in 1564.