It was an architectural gem that Michelangelo never completed. Now the magnificent façade that he designed for the Basilica of San Lorenzo, Florence, is to be erected five centuries late, thanks to the detective work of Renaissance scholars.

Gabriele Morolli, an architectural historian and a member of the reconstruction team, said that he had traced three of the façade’s columns to a depository at Pisa.

One has already been brought to Florence and is being guarded “day and night”. The team plans to dig up another of the columns, known to have been buried near the church in the 17th century.

Professor Morolli said that he was on the trail of other marble components of the façade, including reliefs and statues. A digital reconstruction of the façade is to be projected on to the front of San Lorenzo next weekend.

Thought to be Florence’s oldest church — it was founded in the 4th century — San Lorenzo is a monument to Medici rule. It was given its Renaissance interior by Filippo Brunelleschi at the end of the 15th century, with Michelangelo designing the library, the grandiose Biblioteca Laurenziana.

Most famously Michelangelo sculpted the exquisite Medici tombs in the crypt, still one of Florence’s main tourist attractions. What he did not have time to do was complete the front of the building, which, to the puzzlement of many visitors, remains unfinished rough brickwork.

Massimo Ruffili, Professor of Architecture at Florence University and one of the experts behind the scheme, said that Michelangelo designed the façade and even got as far as carving columns and statues, supervising the quarrying of white Carrara marble for the project himself.

Michelangelo worked on the façade in 1516-20, making “numerous sketches and drawings” as well as a model in terracotta — with wax figures representing statues in niches — for the approval of Pope Leo X, the former Cardinal Giovanni de Medici and son of Lorenzo the Magnificent.

The terracotta model has not survived, but a model in wood by a contemporary is preserved in the Casa Buonarroti, the Michelangelo museum in Florence. According to Giorgio Vasari, the Renaissance artist and biographer, the first 23ft (7m) column arrived at the site in April 1521.

The Medicis were toppled in a republican uprising, and although they returned to power in 1532, Michelangelo was ordered to complete the Medici chapel tombs rather than finish the façade. In 1534 he left Florence for Rome to work on The Last Judgement in the Sistine Chapel, never to return.

Professor Ruffilli said: “Since the Medici popes and princes did not manage to complete the facade, it falls to us, the citizens of 21st-century Florence, to give back to the city and the world a lost Michelangelo masterpiece.”

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