Michelangelo's Art of Devotion in the Age of Reform 1009314378, 9781009314374
In this volume, Emily A. Fenichel offers an in-depth investigation of the religious motivations behind Michelangelo'
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MICHELANGELO’S ART OF DEVOTION IN THE AGE OF REFORM
In this volume, Emily A. Fenichel offers an in-depth investigation of the religious motivations behind Michelangelo’s sculpture and graphic works in his late period. Taking the criticism of the Last Judgment as its point of departure, she argues that much of Michelangelo’s late oeuvre was engaged in solving the religious and artistic problems presented by the CounterReformation. Buffeted by critiques of the Last Judgment, which claimed that he valued art over religion, Michelangelo searched for new religious iconographies and techniques both publicly and privately. Fenichel here suggests a new and different understanding of the artist in his late career. In contrast to the received view of Michelangelo as solitary, intractable, and temperamental, she brings a more nuanced characterization of the artist. The late Michelangelo, Fenichel demonstrates, was a man interested in collaboration, penance, meditation, and experimentation, which enabled his transformation into a new type of religious artist for a new era. Emily A. Fenichel is Associate Professor of Art History at Florida Atlantic University.
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MICHELANGELO’S ART OF DEVOTION IN THE AGE OF REFORM EMILY A. FENICHEL Florida Atlantic University
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Shaftesbury Road, Cambridge , United Kingdom One Liberty Plaza, th Floor, New York, , USA Williamstown Road, Port Melbourne, , Australia –, rd Floor, Plot , Splendor Forum, Jasola District Centre, New Delhi – , India Penang Road, #–/, Visioncrest Commercial, Singapore Cambridge University Press is part of Cambridge University Press & Assessment, a department of the University of Cambridge. We share the University’s mission to contribute to society through the pursuit of education, learning and research at the highest international levels of excellence. www.cambridge.org Information on this title: www.cambridge.org/ : ./ © Emily A. Fenichel This publication is in copyright. Subject to statutory exception and to the provisions of relevant collective licensing agreements, no reproduction of any part may take place without the written permission of Cambridge University Press & Assessment. First published Printed in the United Kingdom by CPI Group Ltd, Croydon CR YY A catalogue record for this publication is available from the British Library. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data : Fenichel, Emily A., author. : Michelangelo’s art of devotion in the age of reform / Emily A. Fenichel, Florida Atlantic University. : Cambridge ; New York, NY : Cambridge University Press, . | Outgrowth of the author’s thesis (doctoral)–University of Virginia, , under the title: Michelangelo and Marian theology. | Includes bibliographical references and index. : (print) | (ebook) | (hardback) | (paperback) | (epub) : : Michelangelo Buonarroti, -,–Criticism and interpretation. | Michelangelo Buonarroti, -,–Religious life. | Counter-Reformation and art–Italy. : . (print) | .B (ebook) | .–dc/eng/ LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/ LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/ ---- Hardback Cambridge University Press & Assessment has no responsibility for the persistence or accuracy of URLs for external or third-party internet websites referred to in this publication and does not guarantee that any content on such websites is, or will remain, accurate or appropriate.
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CONTENTS
List of Figures Acknowledgments INTRODUCTION
page vii ix
PUBLIC: CRITICISM, PENANCE, AND THE PORTRAIT MEDAL
PUBLIC: COLLABORATION AND RELIGIOUS ART IN ROME
P R I V A T E : MI C H E L A N GE L O , V I T T O R I A C O L O N N A , A N D ME D I T A T I O N
P R I V A T E : T H E J E S U I T S , T H E BO D Y , A N D ME D I T A T I O N
CONCLUSION
Bibliography
Index
v
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FIGURES
Nanni di Baccio Bigio / Pietà (copy after Michelangelo’s Pietà in St. Peter’s Basilica) / page Michelangelo Buonarroti / Last Judgment / – Leone Leoni / Portrait medal of Michelangelo (obverse) / – Leone Leoni / Portrait medal of Michelangelo (reverse) / – Michelangelo Buonarroti / Studies for the David / c. Pellegrino Tibaldi / Adoration of the Shepherds / Marcello Venusti / Last Judgment (copy after Michelangelo’s Last Judgment in the Sistine Chapel) / Marcello Venusti / Pietà (after Michelangelo) / c. Marcello Venusti / Crucifixion (after Michelangelo) / c. Marcello Venusti / Annunciation (after Michelangelo) / c. Marcello Venusti / Annunciation (after Michelangelo) / c. Marcello Venusti / Annunciation (after the Cesi altarpiece) / c. Michelangelo Buonarroti / Annunciation / c. Michelangelo Buonarroti / Study for an Annunciation (n. f ) / c. Francesco Salviati / Annunciation / c. Marcello Venusti / The Annunciation / Sixteenth century Marcello Venusti / Madonna del Silenzio (after Michelangelo) / c. Daniele da Volterra / Deposition / c. Michelangelo Buonarroti / Studies for the Deposition / c. della Rovere Chapel, general view (decoration) / – Daniele da Volterra / Assumption of the Virgin from the della Rovere Chapel / c. Daniele da Volterra / Presentation of the Virgin from the della Rovere Chapel/ c. Daniele da Volterra and Michele da Alberti / Massacre of the Innocents from the della Rovere Chapel / c. Raphael / School of Athens (Philosophy) from the Stanza della Segnatura / – Michelangelo Buonarroti / Rachel or the Contemplative Life / c. Il Sodoma (Giovanni Antonio Bazzi) / The Marriage of Alexander and Roxanne / c. Michelangelo Buonarroti / The Epiphania cartoon / c. Ascanio Condivi / Epiphania (after Michelangelo) / c. Michelangelo Buonarroti / Pietà for Vittoria Colonna / – vii
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LIST OF FIGURES
Saulus Populi Romani / CE Michelangelo Buonarroti / Crucifixion for Vittoria Colonna / – Michelangelo Buonarroti / Pietà / – Michelangelo Buonarroti / Florentine Pietà / – Michelangelo Buonarroti / Christ Appearing to His Mother / c. Michelangelo Buonarroti / Crucifixion (D..PG.) / c. Michelangelo Buonarroti / Crucifixion (Ashmolean .) / c. Michelangelo Buonarroti / Crucifixion (Windsor ) / c. Michelangelo Buonarroti / Crucifixion (Windsor )/ c. Michelangelo Buonarroti / Crucifixion (British Museum ,.) / c. Michelangelo Buonarroti/ Crucifixion (British Museum ,.) / c. Michelangelo Buonarroti / Crucifixion (Louvre ) / c. Michelangelo Buonarroti / Studies for a Pietà (Ashmolean WA.) / c. Michelangelo Buonarroti / Study for the Laurentian Library (Casa Buonarroti a) / ca. Michelangelo Buonarroti / Elevation toward the hallway (Laurentian Library) / c. Michelangelo Buonarroti / Plan for San Giovanni dei Fiorentini (Casa Buonarroti a) / c. Michelangelo Buonarroti / Design for a window at the Palazzo Farnese (Ashmolean .) / – Michelangelo Buonarroti / Study for the Porta Pia (Casa Buonarroti a) / c. Michelangelo Buonarroti / Rondanini Pietà / – Michelangelo Buonarroti / The back of the Rondanini Pietà in the Ospedale Spagnolo of Castello Sforzesco / – Michelangelo Buonarroti and Luigi Vanvitelli / Interior, transept, Basilica of Santa Maria degli Angeli / –
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ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
I was an undergraduate at the University of Mary Washington when I first became enamored of Michelangelo, largely through the mentorship of Marjorie Och. Prof. Och supported my research and helped me find the funding to travel to Rome for the first time. Some of the themes and chapters of this book came from my dissertation, completed at the University of Virginia. The network of professors, mentors, and friends from dear old UVa has shaped me into the scholar I am today. David Summers, Paul Barolsky, and Francesca Fiorani taught me how to think about Michelangelo, the Renaissance, and my career in different and complementary ways. I am more indebted to them than I can express. Conversations with Tracy Cosgriff, Yoko Hara, Eric Hupe, Sarah Nair James, Elizabeth Merrill, Elizabeth Nabi, and Jessica Stewart in the “studiolo” and beyond have enriched this book beyond measure. A particular thank you goes to Yoko, who found the door to the della Rovere chapel unlocked one afternoon. The broader community of Renaissance scholars beyond UVa has been similarly supportive. Parts of this manuscript benefitted from presentations at the Renaissance Society of America annual conferences, the Sixteenth Century Society Conference, the Southern Council of Art Colleges annual conference, and at the Frick Collection in New York. The Italian Art Society funded one of these trips to present my work in Berlin. Conversations with Steve Cody, Kelley Helmstutler-Di Dio, Tiffany Lynn Hunt, Deborah Parker, Sarah Rolfe Prodan, Tamara Smithers, and William Wallace have broadened and improved my thinking. Although brief, my time at Duquesne University was illuminating. Alima Bucciantini and Julia Sienkewicz helped me transition into a professional and provided valuable insight on book writing. Florida Atlantic University has been another vital community for me. My colleagues in the Department of Visual Arts and Art History have been supportive in so many different ways, from commiseration to stimulating conversations about practice. The College of Arts and Letters provided me with a Scholarly and Creative Achievement Fellowship in , which enabled me to complete a large portion of the manuscript. The college also provided money to purchase images. Additional funding from my department ix
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ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
over the summer facilitated research trips. The Faculty Writing Group organized by Marianne Porter aided through friendship and accountability. The exchanges I had in that small, windowless room with Camila Afanador-Llach, Kate Detweiler, and Rindy Anderson helped me see my work from different perspectives. Particular thanks go to the long-suffering librarians at FAU – especially those in the Interlibrary Loan office. Being able to see works in person has been vital to my research. The hardworking staff and scholars at Windsor Castle, the Courtauld, the Uffizi Gallery, the Casa Buonarroti, the Louvre, and the Lowe Art Museum in Miami were wonderfully helpful. Beatrice Rehl and the staff at Cambridge University Press have been believers in this project from the beginning. Their help in completing the project and navigating book publishing have been invaluable. The anonymous readers made this manuscript much better, and I thank them for their time and candor. Alana Dunn at Regent Square Editing was a joy to work with – thank you for your precision. Finally, I am fortunate to have an extended and supportive family. My inlaws Doug and Karen Fenichel have proudly shown me off at every opportunity and provided key moments of childcare when I was out of town. Eli and Tonka Fenichel have asked probing questions from outside of my field. My grandmother Clara Mae McKenzie was the only one of my grandparents to graduate from high school. She fostered a love of reading in each of her six children. My parents, Jeff and Vicki Lovins, were each the first in their families to graduate from college. My education and this book are the direct result of their nurturing my love of learning and love of art. They never questioned my decision to get a degree in art history and have joyously celebrated my achievements. My sister Daria Lovins has shown me what true courage is. She is also a better writer than I am. I know that it is commonplace to call your book your “baby,” but comparing these poor pages to my vibrant, wonderous children has never made sense to me. Thank you to Ruth and Simon for teaching me so much more than can be learned in a book or a museum. You are both marvelous in every sense of the word. The greatest thanks go to Ethan, who has seen me through undergrad and graduate school, the academic job market, the pre-tenure years, and now this book. You are my stable foundation, my soft place to land, my consummate travel companion, and my best decision ever. No matter how many times I thank you, it is never enough.
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INTRODUCTION
I
n , a copy of Michelangelo’s Pietà from St. Peter’s was installed in Santo Spirito in Florence (Figure ). Commissioned by the artist’s great friend and poetic collaborator, Luigi del Riccio, the work was undoubtedly meant as a celebration of Michelangelo’s achievements and the relationship between the two men. Public reaction to the installation of the copy, however, reveals the complexities of Michelangelo’s artistic and religious reputation in the last decades of his life. The most famous reaction to the sculpture was included in Giorgio Vasari’s Life of Michelangelo but written by Giovan Battista Strozzi il Vecchio – a leading figure of contemporary Florentine literary circles. He writes, Beauty and goodness, and grief and pity, alive in dead marble, Do not, as you do, Weep so loudly, Lest too early He should reawaken himself from death In spite of Himself, Our Lord and Thy Spouse, Son and Father, Only bride, His Daughter and Mother.
In his poem, Strozzi praises Michelangelo’s ability to bring marble to life, to make it seem as though the holy figures of Mary and Christ are present in front of the viewer. He remarks that the volume of the Virgin’s weeping might
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MICHELANGELO’S ART OF DEVOTION
. Nanni di Baccio Bigio / Pietà (copy after Michelangelo’s Pietà in St. Peter’s Basilica) / / Florence: Santo Spirito / © DeA Picture Library / Art Resource, NY
wake Christ, who appears to be asleep in his mother’s arms. In this sense, Strozzi praises a work that not only explores the emotional impact of Christ’s death but also anticipates the coming resurrection and triumph of the savior. He ends his meditation on the sculpture by alluding to Dante Alighieri’s Divine Comedy and paraphrasing St. Bernard’s prayer to the Virgin in Paradiso, calling her “only bride, His daughter and Mother.” In this passage, Strozzi extolls the work as a miracle of art, an emotional tour de force, a theological treatise, and a heavenly vision. Despite its being a copy, Strozzi assures us that the artistic and religious import of the original shines through and has been brought to Florence.
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INTRODUCTION
Other contemporaries were not so impressed. One anonymous commentator wrote in his diary, In this month a Pietà was unveiled in Santo Spirito . . . and they say that the original came from Michelangelo Buonarroti, that inventor of filth who puts his faith in art rather than devotion. All the modern painters and sculptors imitate similar Lutheran caprices so that now throughout the holy churches are painted and carved nothing but figures that put devotion in the grave. But one day God I hope will send his saints to throw idolatries like these to the ground.
This commentator does not treat the sculpture at all. He neither praises nor censures the copy in Santo Spirito. Instead, his attacks are focused entirely on Michelangelo himself. The critiques the anonymous diarist levels at Michelangelo come from two separate issues. First, he criticizes the artist personally, claiming that Buonarroti valued art over religion and, in so doing, created improper images or “filth.” Second, he argues that Michelangelo’s example is leading other religious artists astray, causing them to fill churches with “Lutheran caprices” and to ignore the true path of devotion. Although we do not know the identity of the diarist, he must have been someone who read a great deal and was interested in questions of art and faith. In fact, he may even have been on intimate terms with some of the most famous literary figures on the Italian peninsula in the era. This anonymous diarist parrots arguments that noted author, satirist, and Michelangelo critic Pietro Aretino wrote in a letter but whose contents would not be published until . Moreover, the allusion to Lutheran caprices may indicate that the writer had heard the recent news out of Rome that members of Michelangelo’s circle of friends were being questioned by the Inquisition for heretical beliefs related to the reform group known as the spirituali. In either case, he seems remarkably well informed. The contrast between the reactions of these two men to a single event in Florence also highlights Michelangelo’s increasingly complex reputation in the mid-sixteenth century. Many thought him to be “Il Divino” – the artist sent by God to show others how to create. A sizeable minority, however, was beginning to doubt whether Michelangelo’s motives were quite so divinely inspired. They questioned his personal faith, the example he was setting for a younger generation of artists, and the ability of his religious works to inspire minds to contemplate God. Split opinions about the artist became particularly public after the unveiling of the Last Judgment (Figure ) in . Though heralded by some as the most awesome display of artistic invention and artifice ever to be created, others condemned it for being too nude, confusing, and prone to leading innocent viewers into sin. Indeed, for most scholars, the Last Judgment has become the
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MICHELANGELO’S ART OF DEVOTION
major turning point in the history of early modern art during the CounterReformation, and they have traced how artists and the public reacted to both the criticism and the fresco. It is a watershed moment that initiates a new period in religious art – one that had to respond to the diverse concerns of the Counter-Reformation. What is missing in these discussions is, more often than not, the man at the center of the controversy. Looking at the artist’s life after , and particularly his artistic output after this period, one would be hard pressed not to see a deliberate shift after the unveiling of the Last Judgment. As the established narrative goes, outside of the Pauline Chapel frescoes, Michelangelo never completed another major work. Publicly, Michelangelo spent his time overseeing architectural projects. Privately, he wrote deeply religious poems and created drawings and sculptures that were never seen, except by those in his inner circle. He befriended the poet and noblewoman Vittoria Colonna, sought Catholic reform, spent six weeks at a Franciscan retreat in Spoleto, worried constantly about his immortal soul, and bemoaned his increasing age and the approach of death. This is not to say that there have not been considerations of the artist’s last years. These examinations, however, are rarely holistic; scholars have preferred to focus on individual works or moments in his later life. Where these studies have been broader, they tend to agree that Michelangelo retreated from public engagement with art and religion, as can be seen in the works of Charles de Tolnay and Alexander Nagel. Tolnay argues that Michelangelo’s “political convictions gradually dissolved” and that the artist focused increasingly on making private works for the “glory of God.” In understanding the artist’s late works in this way, Tolnay also claims that the artist achieved some kind of “spiritual liberation.” Overall, the impression that dominates Tolnay’s understanding of Michelangelo in his seventies and eighties is of an aging, “decaying” artist striving for and then attaining a kind of private transcendence before dying. Similar arguments come from Leo Steinberg, who claims that “Michelangelo trembled lest the protraction of his life add to his guilt and make it harder for Grace to affect his salvation.” In other words, obsessed with death, the artist’s late period is marked by a preoccupation with his immortal soul. Nagel also argues that Michelangelo largely withdrew from public life, but he focuses primarily on Michelangelo’s relationship with Vittoria Colonna and his interest in the reform group, the spirituali. The spirituali were a group of intellectuals and clergy interested in reconciling the theological differences between Protestants and Catholics. In aligning himself with this group, Michelangelo also left behind the typical economies of public, religious art, preferring to make private works that were freely exchanged between friends. In this sense, Michelangelo’s late drawings clearly mirrored the spiritualist
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INTRODUCTION
theology of sola fide, or “by faith alone.” Eliminating the Catholic need for “good works,” the spirituali argued that grace was freely given to those who believed – a belief later considered heretical by the Catholic Church. Consequently, Nagel’s focus on the spirituali has had a marked impact on recent scholarship on the artist’s late period. The notable exception to these trends is William E. Wallace, whose book considers a multifaceted man at the end of a long life and illustrious career. Wallace concentrates on Michelangelo’s late architectural works and the projects that consumed him in the last twenty years of his life. In contrast, the present book argues that much of Michelangelo’s late career can be alternatively understood through its engagement with the new era of religious art inaugurated by the criticism that followed the unveiling of the Last Judgment in . Michelangelo’s reactions to the demands of this new age were public and private. Publicly, Michelangelo worried about his reputation, his ability to create works of art that could inspire devotion in faithful Christians, and the example he was setting for his fellow artists. Privately, Michelangelo sought to reconcile what had become competing interests in his life: art and faith. The primary method he found for bringing these two ideas together was meditation. Michelangelo’s late period was deeply engaged in solving the religious and artistic problems of the Counter-Reformation. This period of his life was also intensely experimental. Searching for new religious iconographies and new techniques, he undertook the challenge of becoming a new religious artist in a new era. In advancing this argument, I am not ignoring the artist’s preoccupation with death in his final years. Certainly, his autograph writings support the notion that he was constantly aware of his own mortality. The need to engage critically with the issues raised by the Last Judgment would have been made all the more urgent by the artist’s advanced age. He had a limited and dwindling amount of time in which to figure out how to create works that placed faith above art and set an example of how to bring souls to God. In some ways, the time limit was beneficial. Michelangelo, in his final years, was penitential, collaborative, meditative, and experimental. Outside of his copious duties at St. Peter’s and with other architectural projects, he used his time wisely, pouring his energies into finding a way to reconcile art and religion. Michelangelo was also doing this in a time of great religious change. Against the backdrop of the religious reform that swept Europe, the final twenty-three years of the artist’s life fit neatly into the period of uncertainty before the close of the Council of Trent – the church meeting tasked with dealing with the Protestant defection from the Catholic Church. The criticisms that plagued him during this period were largely a result of scholars’, artists’, and theologians’ attempts to understand what it might mean to be Catholic and to produce Christian art in this era. The pronouncements from Trent would
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MICHELANGELO’S ART OF DEVOTION
provide some clarity, but they were years away. In response to this uncertainty, Michelangelo actively sought out and engaged with reform groups such as the spirituali and the Jesuits. From them, he learned how to refocus his mind on God through devotion and creation. Moreover, he strove to set an example for other Christian artists, presenting himself as a sinner and a penitent, and by collaborating with other artists to forge a new direction for religious art. Although I am interested in the last twenty-three years of the artist’s life, this book will not be a comprehensive catalog of all of Michelangelo’s works during that time. It will not consider works such as the frescoes in the Pauline chapel because they occupy a liminal space between public and private and were heavily influenced by their papal commissioner and the demands of the worship that took place there. Neither will it explore the numerous mythological and secular works – particularly drawings – that the artist completed in these years. Instead, it will focus on the works of art that most readily demonstrate the artist’s religious and artistic experimentations in both the public and private spheres. This study proposes thinking about how the artist and his works can be understood as addressing the most pressing religious and artistic concerns of his age. It offers new interpretations of both littleconsidered and well-known works as engaging in and even influencing contemporary theological debates. It is also important to note that this new religious age was accompanied by some of the first mass-produced artistic media in history. Increasingly, the ability to comment on Michelangelo’s iconography, his talent, his reputation, and even his religious faith, was being facilitated by high-quality replicas of his work in sculpture, paint, and print. The last of these is particularly significant. Widespread use of prints as a means of artistic dissemination had only become popular in Italy in the mid-sixteenth century. Although Mantegna and Raphael may have been early adopters of this medium, Michelangelo never fully embraced the technology, preferring instead to collaborate with those who could disseminate his work in other ways. A persistent thread that runs through this book is how Michelangelo managed his public reputation as a religious artist and a Christian in the age of print. He did this through circulating portrait medals, collaborating with other artists, and encouraging them to paint copies of his works. Another important theme found throughout this book is how Michelangelo’s relationship to the body in his art changed between and . The Last Judgment has often been described as the apotheosis of the artist’s investment in the body as a means of aesthetic communication. The twisting, sensuous bodies in the fresco were meant not only to express lofty theological ideas but to demonstrate the artist’s mastery of his craft through difficultà and artifice. As will be explored, these ideas, particularly within religious art, became untenable in the age of reform. In nearly all the works
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INTRODUCTION
examined in this book, Michelangelo sought a different artistic and religious relationship to the body. This culminated in the artist’s embracing the body not as an exterior site but as a haptic, phenomenological experience in his final drawings and sculptures. The first chapter examines how the criticism of the Last Judgment fresco by Pietro Aretino, Giovanni Andrea Gilio, and Ludovico Dolce affected Michelangelo’s reputation as a religious artist. They argued that only good Christians could create effective religious art. Importantly, Michelangelo’s own biographer, Giorgio Vasari – though never openly critical of the Last Judgment – agreed with the critics. Michelangelo responded to this criticism publicly by designing and distributing a portrait medal (Figures and ) in which the artist is depicted as a blind pilgrim and encircled by a motto taken from the penitential Psalms of David. This little-studied object is an anomaly in the artist’s oeuvre and in the genre of artistic portrait medals, but it attests to Michelangelo’s public contrition, his penance, and his hope of redemption that he may once again make effective Christian art. It is an attempt to rehabilitate the artist’s reputation in the minds of the public through deliberate and conscious self-fashioning. The second chapter challenges the idea that Michelangelo was a solitary genius, arguing that he became an increasingly corporate artist after . Works such as the two Annunciation altarpieces (Figures and ) produced in collaboration with Marcello Venusti are examples of Michelangelo’s overlooked public engagement with religious art in the s and s. The large, prominent, and public altarpieces Buonarroti and Venusti created in Santa Maria della Pace and St. John the Lateran drew on the skills of both artists – disegno and colore. Together, the men created images that actively promoted devotion in viewers and provided a new direction for altarpieces and private devotional works in Rome following the Last Judgment. Buonarroti also drew close to Daniele da Volterra, who became not only a collaborator but a trusted friend. Daniele’s work in the della Rovere Chapel in Trinità dei Monti (Figure ) attests to a sophisticated and intimate knowledge of Michelangelo’s artistic and religious philosophies in his last years. Making savvy use of allusions, portraits of Michelangelo, and the creation of the fictive space in the frescoes themselves, Daniele serves as an amplifier of Michelangelo’s ideas. The vision of religious art that emerges from the chapel is one where Buonarroti’s art is sometimes criticized, and Daniele and Michelangelo together implore younger artists to refocus on God. The works by both Venusti and Daniele demonstrate Michelangelo’s considerable innovation in his public religious works in light of the CounterReformation. Michelangelo’s reactions to the new religious age indicated by the criticism surrounding the Last Judgment were not limited to the public sphere. That so
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MICHELANGELO’S ART OF DEVOTION
much of the criticism focused on the artist’s personal faith and the efficacy of his works was particularly concerning. In response, Michelangelo sought personal redemption through the religious practice of meditation. The third chapter will take up Michelangelo’s exposure to meditation as a powerful devotional tool, advocated by his dear friend, noted intellectual, and member of the spirituali, Vittoria Colonna. Michelangelo’s understanding of devotional practice can be seen in the drawings he produced for Colonna. His Pietà and Christ on the Cross (c. ) (Figures and ) were created to aid his friend’s meditation and are closely connected to her writings. They demonstrate Michelangelo’s deep understanding of the links between art and meditation rather than simply his interest in the heretical theology of the spirituali. This chapter will contend with the legacy of meditation that persisted in Michelangelo’s life long after the group had been condemned as heretical and Colonna herself had been a subject of the Inquisition. To that end, it will examine Michelangelo’s Florentine Pietà (c. ) (Figure ), a sculpture originally intended as the artist’s tomb monument. Containing the only selfportrait of the artist to be confirmed in his lifetime, the sculpture depicts Michelangelo as Nicodemus, a powerful exemplar for meditating men. In choosing to embody this figure, Michelangelo announces his own meditative practice and makes a first, tentative, and ultimately unsuccessful attempt to combine his artistic process and his private devotion. After Colonna’s death in and his abandonment of the Florentine Pietà, Michelangelo continued his experiments in combining art and meditation. What followed was a reconception of his artistic relationship to the body. Although certainly carrying on the lessons of Colonna, Michelangelo was also influenced by the new Jesuit order () and the intensely sensory form of meditation described in the group’s guide for prayer and retreat: the Spiritual Exercises (). The fourth and final chapter will consider how the artist’s seven Crucifixion Drawings (c. ) (Figures –) and his drawings for the Porta Pia (Figure ) utilize radically different drawing techniques to communicate embodied and haptic experiences. Michelangelo’s late graphic works encourage a haptic engagement with the Crucifixion and architecture. Instead of using the nude as an aesthetic site, Michelangelo’s last works, including the Rondanini Pietà (c. ) (Figures and ), demonstrate his interest in conveying embodied experiences. Until the end, the artist was experimenting, innovating, and combining his religious and devotional practices as a way of adapting to the new religious era in which he found himself after the unveiling of the Last Judgment. A new understanding of the artist emerges from these pages. Instead of the solitary, intractable, and temperamental artist, a more nuanced characterization will be brought to light. The later Michelangelo is a man interested in collaboration, penance, meditation, and experimentation. Here is a man
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INTRODUCTION
trying to understand and reconcile the two parts of his reputation: the divine, devout creator and the vile purveyor of Lutheran caprices who placed art over faith. Publicly, he strove to demonstrate that he was neither as great nor as sinful as he was accused of being. Privately, he sought a way to save his soul and adapt his art to the demands of the Counter-Reformation. NOTES Louis Alexander Waldman, “Nanni di Baccio Bigio at Santo Spirito,” Mitteilungen des Kunsthistorischen Institutes in Florenz , vol. (): . Rudolph Wittkower, “Nanni di Baccio Bigio and Michelangelo,” in Festschrift Ulrich Middeldorf, ed. Antje Kosegarten and Peter Tigler (Berlin: W. de Gruyter, ), . “Bellezza et onestate, / E doglia e pietà in vivo marmo morte, / Deh, come voi pur fate, / Non piangete sì forte / Che anzi tempo risveglisi da morte, / E pur mal grado suo, / Nostro Signore et tuo, / Sposo, figliuolo e padre, / Unica sposa sua, figliuola e madre.” Giorgio Vasari, “Vita di Michelagnolo Buonarroti Fiorentino,” in Le vite de piu eccellenti pittori scultori e architettori, ed. Rosanna Bettarini and Paola Barocchi (Florence: Sansoni Editore, ), :–. Translation from Giorgio Vasari, The Lives of the Artists, trans. Julia Conway Bondanella and Peter Bondanella (Oxford: Oxford University Press, ), . Canto , verse . Dante Alighieri, “Paradiso” in The Portable Dante, trans. and ed. by Mark Musa (New York: Penguin Books, ), . Translation from John T. Spike, The Young Michelangelo: The Path to the Sistine: A Biography (New York: Vendome Press, ), . For the full Italian transcription, see Waldman, “Nanni,” . Erica Tietze-Conrat, “Neglected Contemporary Sources Relating to Michelangelo and Titian,” Art Bulletin , no. (June ): –. For a good overview of the Inquisition’s interest in Colonna, Pole, and others, see Ramie Targoff, Renaissance Woman: The Life of Vittoria Colonna (New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, ), –, or William E. Wallace, Michelangelo, God’s Architect: The Story of His Final Years and Greatest Masterpiece (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, ), –. Lynette Bosch, Mannerism, Spirituality, and Cognition: The Art of Enargeia (New York: Routledge, ), especially chap. . For example: Marcia B. Hall, The Sacred Image in the Age of Art (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, ); Stuart Lingo, Federico Barocci: Allure and Devotion in Late Renaissance Painting (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, ); Marcia B. Hall and Tracy Cooper, eds., The Sensuous in the Counter-Reformation Church (New York: Cambridge University Press, ); Morten Steen Hansen, In Michelangelo’s Mirror: Perino del Vaga, Daniele da Volterra, and Pellegrino Tibaldi (University Park: Penn State University Press, ); Bernadine Barnes, Michelangelo’s Last Judgment: The Renaissance Response (Berkeley: University of California Press, ); Christian Kleinbub, Michelangelo’s Inner Anatomies (University Park: Penn State University Press, ). We might consider, for example: Jack Wasserman, Michelangelo’s Florence Pietà (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, ); Jane Kristoff, “Michelangelo as Nicodemus: The Florence Pietà,” Sixteenth Century Journal , no. (Summer ): –; Valerie Shrimplin-Evangelidis, “Michelangelo and Nicodemism: The Florentine Pietà,” Art Bulletin , no. (March ): –; Leo Steinberg, Michelangelo’s Last Paintings: The Conversion of St. Paul and the Crucifixion of St. Peter in the Cappella Paolina, Vatican Palace (London: Phaidon, ); John Paoletti, “The Rondanini Pietà: Ambiguity Maintained through the Palimpsest,” Artibus et Historiae , no. (): –. There is also a whole subset of scholarship on Michelangelo’s late presentation drawings for Vittoria Colonna. Those citations can be found in Chapter .
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MICHELANGELO’S ART OF DEVOTION
Charles de Tolnay, Michelangelo, vol. , The Final Period (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, ), and Alexander Nagel, Michelangelo and the Reform of Art (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, ). Tolnay, Michelangelo, :. Ibid., :. Ibid., :. Steinberg, Michelangelo’s Last Paintings, . Nagel, Michelangelo and the Reform of Art, especially chaps. and . For example: Emidio Campi, Michelangelo e Vittoria Colonna (Turin: Claudiana Editrice, ); Maria Forcellino, Michelangelo, Vittoria Colonna e gli “spirituali” (Rome: Viella, ); Bernadine Barnes, “The Understanding of a Woman: Vittoria Colonna and Michelangelo’s Christ and the Samaritan Woman,” Renaissance Studies , no. (): –; Sarah Rolfe Prodan, Michelangelo’s Christian Mysticism: Spirituality, Poetry, and Art in Sixteenth Century Italy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, ); Jessica Maratsos, “Michelangelo, Vittoria Colonna, and the Afterlife of Intimacy,” Art Bulletin , no. (): –. Wallace, Michelangelo, God’s Architect. As O’Malley has argued, even the Council did not offer much concrete guidance. John W. O’Malley, “Trent, Sacred Images, and Catholics’ Senses of the Sensuous,” in The Sensuous in the Counter Reformation Church, ed. Marcia B. Hall and Tracy Cooper (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, ), –. Bernadine Barnes, Michelangelo in Print: Reproductions as Responses in the Sixteenth Century (Burlington, VT: Ashgate, ), –. My characterization owes much to the way Wallace has changed our notion of the artist through his latest two biographies.
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CHAPTER ONE
PUBLIC Criticism, Penance, and the Portrait Medal
T
he story behind the man suffering a particularly gruesome torment in Michelangelo’s Last Judgment fresco comes to us from the artist’s biographer Giorgio Vasari, but every tourist who enters the Sistine Chapel today has heard it. While Michelangelo was painting the massive fresco, one of the members of the papal court took exception to the way Michelangelo conceptualized the subject. The artist took his revenge by painting his critic with an ass’s ears, in hell, being enveloped by a massive serpent. That the serpent is also taking a rather intimate bite out of the man only adds to the comedic enjoyment of the anecdote. Vasari’s tale reveals something more important about the fresco, however – criticism of Michelangelo’s Last Judgment began even before the work was finished. Of the criticism, Vasari says, Michelangelo had already completed more than three-quarters of the work when Pope Paul came to see it, and when Messer Biagio da Cesena, master of ceremonies and scrupulous man who was in the chapel with the pope, was asked what he thought of the painting, he declared that it was the most unseemly thing in such a venerable place to have painted so many nudes that so indecently display their shame and that it was not a work for a pope’s chapel but rather one for baths or taverns.
Although Vasari undoubtedly meant to highlight the ignorance of Biagio da Cesena – and there is no way to conclusively prove the identity of the man having his genitals gnawed by the snake in the fresco – Vasari’s intimation that
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there was immediate criticism of the Last Judgment rings true. Vasari’s tale is, in fact, echoed in one of the earliest written reactions to the unveiled fresco from , when Nino Sernini wrote to his boss, Cardinal Ercole Gonzaga. The fresco had been finished for less than a month, yet Sernini recorded that there was unrest in the papal court about the work: “The very reverend Theatines are the first to say the nudes do not belong in such place . . . although . . . hardly ten figures of so great a number are seen as immodest.” Theatine, in this context, was a kind of shorthand for the most pious and conservative members of the curia who, one can imagine, would not have been comforted by Sernini’s relative ratio of immodest to modest figures. For the most part, however, Sernini does not seem overly worried about this criticism. He goes on to praise the fresco highly, even quoting Reverend Cornaro’s statement that “if Michelangelo wanted to give him a painting of only one of those figures he would gladly pay him whatever he liked.” The criticism of the fresco was not limited to the months in and around the unveiling of the Last Judgment (Figure ). Among artists, intellectuals, and theologians in the middle of the sixteenth century, and no less in art historians’ consideration of the period today, the Last Judgment is a pivotal moment. As Stuart Lingo observes, “Michelangelo’s Last Judgement became a flashpoint for criticism of religious painting that was too invested in art and its ideal, the perfect body.” The Neoplatonic notions of the perfection of the body as evidence of the elevation of the soul that had characterized Michelangelo’s first interventions in the chapel were no longer acceptable in his return to the space. Nevertheless, the artist had painted the altar wall of the chapel with seemingly similar expectations – that the nude was acceptable in the Pope’s chapel and that the select audience of the papal court would understand and accept it. The whole episode feels like a rare miscalculation by the artist – he had not considered that both the religious atmosphere of Rome and his audience had changed in the decades between his painting of the ceiling and his painting of the altar wall. Rather than unveiling his fresco to universal acclaim, Michelangelo and his work were subject to strong and ongoing criticism that attempted to understand the fresco in the context of the massive religious changes happening in Reformation Europe. The main public criticism of the chapel came from Pietro Aretino (, ), Ludovico Dolce (), and Andrea Gilio (). Equally, Vasari and others wrote strident defenses of the work, arguing that its artifice was the very height of artistic achievement and that it made viewers tremble as though standing in front of God on the Day of Judgment. Something that Aretino, Dolce, Gilio, and Vasari all agreed upon, however, was that the devotional value of the work of art and the Christian character of the artist were closely allied. Art that was most affecting to faithful viewers was created by artists who were also good Christians, at least according to those in the mid-
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. Michelangelo Buonarroti / Last Judgment / – / Vatican City: Sistine Chapel / The Picture Art Collection / Alamy Stock Photo
sixteenth century. Crucially, it was on these grounds that Michelangelo’s critics made their most vicious and effective attacks on the artist’s Last Judgment fresco. By criticizing the work as lacking devotional efficacy, they also personally attacked the artist’s faith. In producing “improper” work, Michelangelo further inspired impious behavior in viewers – a direct result of his own bad character. Although it has long been recognized that the debates around the Last Judgment were instrumental in shaping the development of art in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, there has been little consideration of what Michelangelo’s reaction to all of this might have been. Further, the critiques around the fresco were fueled, in a new way, by reproduction. That we have Sernini’s recording of the early reactions to the Last Judgment is due to the fact that his correspondence with the cardinal was
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MICHELANGELO’S ART OF DEVOTION
about procuring a copy of the fresco for Gonzaga’s personal collection. But the fresco was also widely disseminated through prints. This meant that the work was able to reach new audiences – including those not primed to understand its erudite message and make sense of its nudes. Contending with the increasingly popular nature of his works also formed part of the artist’s reaction. It is imperative to consider, therefore, Michelangelo’s opinion regarding not simply the nature of the religious artist but also how he himself might be seen to fit into such a paradigm. As a man concerned with both the efficacy of his art and the state of his immortal soul, the reactions of viewers and critics to his works would have had profound importance for his art and life in his late period. Michelangelo, for the most part, agreed not only with Vasari but also with Gilio, Aretino, and the other critics. The artist’s portrait medal is Michelangelo’s clearest graphic statement on the subject and reveals that he believed in the linking of the character of the artist with the religious value of his works. The medal also indicates that the artist was far from being redeemed and, therefore, far from producing effective religious art. Through his selfidentification with both David and the penitent pilgrim, Michelangelo revealed himself to be striving for redemption, seeking to one day make works fit for the Lord’s service. Consequently, the medal functions as a public act of penance and contrition for his errors in creating the Last Judgment. It is also one of the most obvious instances of the artist’s attempt to sway public opinion and repair his reputation. Michelangelo’s portrait medal is a deliberate moment of self-fashioning that provides a counternarrative of the artist and the state of his soul. . DEFINING THE RELIGIOUS ARTIST
In the very first paragraph of Vasari’s biography of the fifteenth-century Dominican monk and painter Fra Angelico, the author tells us that his subject, unlike many of the other artists featured in the tome, should be honored equally as “an accomplished painter” and “a worthy priest.” The statement sets the tone for the vita that follows, which reads much more like a hagiography than a mere biography. The art in Vasari’s accounting, however, is not an afterthought but is instead deeply entwined with the life of Angelico himself. As Diane Cole Ahl notes, Vasari singles out Angelico as “the ideal Christian painter” in his collection of artists. It is with Angelico’s life that Vasari defines the model religious artist. The character traits that Vasari most eagerly highlights in Angelico are humility, diligence, and faith. As evidence of his humility, Vasari lists numerous occasions when Fra Angelico repeatedly resisted the call of the earthly life, preferring instead to live modestly with his brothers. Vasari attests to the artist’s diligence through the great list of works ascribed to his hand. There are
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so many that Vasari is “amazed by how a single man . . . could have executed so much work that is perfect.” The dominant trait of Fra Angelico’s life, however, was his devout and persistent faith, which affected both how and what he painted. Vasari reports that Angelico refused to paint secular subjects, instead dedicating his talent only to God. Further, his faith in the divine as an aid to his painting was profound. Angelico, it was said, never retouched his paintings because their appearance “was God’s will.” Fra Angelico’s works are not merely a reflection on the pious man’s life; they are also a means of proselytizing. As such, Vasari carefully notes the effect the friar’s work has on a viewer. In the course of enumerating the works that Angelico completed for San Marco, Vasari singles out the altarpiece for particular praise, claiming that the Virgin Mary’s “simplicity inspires devotion in anyone who gazes at Her, as do the saints who . . . surround her.” The blessed painter himself was not immune to being moved by his own paintings, either. Fra Angelico was, in a sense, the first viewer for his own paintings and never painted a crucifixion without “tears streaming down his face.” When not inspiring the viewer to personal piety, Fra Angelico’s works evoke the divine. In one of many passages where the artist’s works are compared to the perfection of the heavens, Vasari claims that a panel from San Domenico contains “blessed spirits” who “could not be any different if they possessed bodies, for all the saints in this painting are so lifelike.” With their mere appearance, Angelico’s works elevate the mind of the viewer to the heavens. The linking of art and personal devotion in a viewer or patron is not particularly extraordinary, and there are many scholars who have explored this theme in the fifteenth century, especially in domestic spaces. What is remarkable about Vasari’s account is that the biographer affirms that Angelico’s sweetly affecting religious works are a direct reflection of the man’s pious life. It is not merely Angelico’s talent or the beauty of his figures that inspires the viewer to pray or to contemplate the celestial; instead, his works also somehow communicate something of the holy nature of the artist to the viewer. Not only does “every painter paint himself,” in Vasari’s estimation, but every viewer should be able to see the character of the artist in his works. The insistence not only on the saintly character of the artist but also on an audience’s ability to ascertain such saintliness from his works is exactly where Michelangelo’s Last Judgment most offended contemporary critics. The discussions that swirled around Michelangelo’s midcentury addition to the Sistine Chapel have been considered from many different angles, and what I present below is not meant to be definitive or exhaustive. I do, however, want to focus on the two ideas that seem to have most concerned critics of Michelangelo’s fresco and Vasari in his discussion of religious artists such as Fra Angelico. First, there was a constant questioning of Michelangelo’s personal motivations and, specifically, the artist’s Christianity. Those most
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critical of Buonarroti claimed he had created a work of art that privileged art and artifice over religiosity and, consequently, that Michelangelo cared more about his art than he did about his God. Michelangelo may have been a formidable artist, but he was a bad Christian. Such charges are astonishingly personal and should not be taken lightly. Second, there was great concern about who the potential audience was for this work and what they might make of the fresco. It was no longer sufficient for the artist to claim that he was making images for the papal court, whose members were religious, highly educated, and largely male. Instead, the reactions of the uneducated, the naïve, and the impressionable – mostly women and children – entered the debate largely due to printed copies of the fresco. Thus, the relationships Vasari charted between artist, work, and viewer in the life of Fra Angelico were part and parcel of the larger debate already well underway by the time he published his Lives of the Artists in . Although one of the earliest reactions to the Last Judgment, Sernini’s letter to Ercole Gonzaga manages to characterize most of the subsequent debate and scholarship on the fresco. Sernini’s Theatines represent the side of the debate concerned with the work’s perceived lack of propriety, decorum, or convenevolezza in such a sacred space. On the most basic level, they objected to Michelangelo’s privileging of art in a space that should have prioritized religion, resulting in an imbalance between the expected relationship of the fresco to the decorum demanded by the chapel. In other words, the figures were too nude and the message too obscure to be devotionally appropriate. The other side of the debate, represented by Reverend Cornaro, praised the work’s varietà, difficultà, and ornamentation, claiming that it was the pinnacle of contemporary art and artifice and, therefore, worthy to grace the Pope’s chapel. Put another way, Michelangelo’s nudes were the pinnacle of artistic achievement and elevated the mind to God through their beauty. The problem with framing the debate in this way, however, is that critics were not exclusively concerned about the decorum required by the space or the ingenuity of the artist. Using the Last Judgment as a pretext, they also seriously considered what a religious artist should be in the CounterReformation. Indeed, one of the most central, but consistently overlooked, facets of the criticism written about the Last Judgment fresco is the argument that no true Christian could have made such a work. Further, critics reasoned that Michelangelo’s fresco, evidence of his lack of faith, would have had the power to lead viewers astray simply by being seen. One of Pietro Aretino’s letters, from his Fourth Book of Letters, written in and published in , echoes Vasari’s Life of Angelico in that it linked the character of the artist to the religious nature of his works. The satirist and theorist’s strident criticism questions, “How can that Michelangelo of such stupendous fame, that Michelangelo of outstanding prudence, that
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Michelangelo of admirable habits, have wanted to show to the people no less religious impiety than artistic perfection?” In another section, he elaborates, “And yet he who is a Christian, by valuing art more than faith, makes such a genuine spectacle . . . that even in a brothel the eyes would shut so as not to see it.” Aretino’s critique is succinct and stunning as he accuses the artist of no less than impiety and, subsequently, judges his work to be so base and immoral that it is not even fit for a brothel. Aretino, in claiming that the artist made a conscious choice to value art more than faith, questions Michelangelo’s status as a Christian – a description that here could be read as sarcastic. The implicit argument is that a better Christian would have had his priorities in better order: faith over art rather than art over faith. It is important to note that Aretino’s criticism was not purely motivated by questions of decorum. He was also in a bit of a spat with the artist over Michelangelo’s refusal to send him a work of art. Nevertheless, Aretino couches his criticisms, personal as they are, in an understanding of the religious artist that would have been familiar to his contemporaries and that was echoed by those who agreed with his assessment of the fresco and equally by those who disagreed. For example, similar criticisms can be found in Ludovico Dolce’s Aretino from . The Aretino was written as a dialogue on art – one that argued for the supremacy of Titian over all other artists. As the title suggests, one of the main commentators in the dialogue is a fictionalized Pietro Aretino, whom Dolce knew. At one point, Aretino, in Dolce’s dialogue, asks his companion of Michelangelo, “But what will you say on the subject of decency [onestà] ? Does it seem proper to you that an artist, to show off the complexities of his art, should constantly and disrespectfully expose those parts of his nude figures which shame and decency [onestà] keep concealed . . . ?” Aretino continues that the chief place where such a disregard for decency occurs is, in fact, the “Chapel of the Pope,” or the Sistine Chapel. Bette Talvacchia argues that Dolce significantly changed the terms of the argument by switching from ideas of decorum or convenevolezza – a term he uses frequently in other parts of the dialogue – to decency or onestà in this particular section. For Talvacchia, this deliberate change in vocabulary to onestà denotes a moral dimension closely related to issues of personal licentiousness that is simply not found in related words for decorum. Through the use of the term onestà, Dolce specifically questions Michelangelo’s moral fiber because of the inclusion of nudes in the Last Judgment. Far from being a philosophical debate about the decorum demanded by the space, Dolce uses pointed language to question the artist’s personal morality, character, and Christian faith as revealed through his use of the body in the monumental fresco. Giovanni Andrea Gilio, a priest and author, echoed Dolce some seven years later in his Dialogue on the Error of Painters, reiterating the idea that Michelangelo valued art and artifice over religion, writing, “And this is the
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marvel: that no figure which one sees in this painting does the same thing as another, or resembles another. And for this feat he put aside devotion, reverence, historical truth and the honor that one owes to this most important and great mystery.” In another, pithier passage, Gilio says, “Not everyone wants to learn to paint, but everyone should learn to be a good Christian.” In other words, talent is certainly commendable, but how one uses that talent and cares for one’s immortal soul are vastly more important. Such statements, like those by Dolce and Aretino before him, sharply question Michelangelo’s personal devotion because Gilio cannot see the faith of the artist at work in the fresco. Artistic innovation is evident, but true Christian devotion is not. Tellingly, Gilio also uses the personal, moralizing term onestà in his critiques of Michelangelo. Concerns about Michelangelo’s sinful nature and how it was revealed in the Last Judgment were compounded by fears for impressionable viewers of the fresco. As Bernadine Barnes contends, access to printed reproductions of the Last Judgment had opened up the fresco to the unsophisticated public, even though it was meant for an exclusive, erudite audience. Dolce, for example, wrings his hands over “the eyes of infants, mothers, and girls . . . afforded an open view of the immodesty on display.” In the Aretino, Dolce even compares the nudes in the fresco to “indecent books” precisely because, in this dialogue, he finds it impossible that Michelangelo’s work should “elevate” the minds of the public to “contemplating the divine.” Instead, the fresco, circulated like a pornographic book, would surely only arouse baser tendencies in a broader audience. Gilio likewise worries about the audience of Michelangelo’s work and their ability to accurately read what is before them, in addition to whether or not it reflects the correct narrative of the Last Judgment. In introducing his discussion on the Last Judgment, Gilio has his protagonist share a printed copy of the fresco with his companions so that they can gaze upon Michelangelo’s iconography themselves. In alluding to a print, Gilio indicates that the technology had radically democratized a space and a fresco originally intended for a select audience. As a response, each critic articulates a legitimate worry that viewers such as women and children would not understand the sophisticated imagery because Michelangelo, as a bad Christian, had valued art over faith. Unlike the Roman Curia, ordinary viewers would not be able to properly parse his cavorting nudes. Rather than following the example of Fra Angelico, whose personal holiness was evident to everyone who viewed his art, Michelangelo had instead revealed his baser nature to the unsophisticated through his fresco and its copies. In an oblique response to Michelangelo’s critics, Vasari significantly edited his biography of Fra Angelico between and , adding a lengthy paragraph discussing the nature of religious art, religious artists, and the role
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of viewers who gaze upon works of religious art. This addition is worth quoting in full and reads: But I would not wish anyone to be mistaken and to construe that clumsy and inept works are pious, while beautiful and well-done ones are corrupt, as some people do when they see figures either of women or young boys that are a bit more pleasing, beautiful, and ornate than usual and who immediately seize upon them and judge them as lustful, without realizing that they are very much wrong to condemn the good judgment of the painter, who holds that the beauty of the saints, both male and female, who are celestial beings, surpasses that of mortal beings just as heavenly beauty our earthly beauty and our moral works. But worse than this, they reveal their own infected and corrupted souls when they dig out evil and impure desires from these works, for if they were truly lovers of virtue, as they wish to prove by their foolish zeal, they would discern the painter’s yearning for Heaven and his attempt to make himself acceptable to the Creator of all things, from Whose most perfect and beautiful nature all perfection and beauty are born. What should such men do – or what can we believe they might do – if they found themselves in the presence of beautiful living things with lascivious ways, sweet words, movements full of grace, and eyes which enrapture their not-so-resolute hearts, since they are moved so passionately by the mere image and only the shadow of beauty? But I would not want people to believe that I approve of such figures, which are little less than completely naked, and painted in the churches, for such figures show that the painter has not shown the proper consideration for the location. Whenever a painter wishes to display all that he knows, he should do so according to the circumstances and show the proper respect for the people, the time, and the place.
The passage is a complicated – even contradictory – statement on the agency of artists, viewers, and art itself in Vasari’s time. In this paragraph, he defends beautiful works, fighting back against the notion that religious art cannot also appeal to the senses. This is in direct opposition to an earlier paragraph, where he claims that when works “are executed by people who have little faith . . . they often fill the mind with impure appetites and lascivious desires,” and thus blame for corrupt works has become shared. Now, viewers’ reactions to religious art are at least partially dependent upon the relative corruption of their own minds. If viewers are predisposed to see licentiousness in a work of art, then they will not be able to distinguish the holy from the unholy. Worse still, they might see “impure desires” in works ordained by God himself, the source of “perfect and beautiful nature.” Vasari also defends artists who merely seek the celestial perfection of God in making beautiful figures. Such a quest cannot lead to improper painting because those seeking godliness will find it, whether or not this is recognized by viewers. Finally, Vasari ends the paragraph rather oddly. In a seeming non sequitur, he states that he does not support
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nude or mostly nude figures in churches because they are a breach of decorum. He does not clarify whether or not those artists seeking celestial perfection – but also making nude figures in churches – lack decorum or what the effect of those nude figures on viewers might be. We get the sense that Vasari is walking a careful rhetorical tightrope in this addition; he cannot condemn artists for seeking beauty, but he also must conform to the religious ideals of his age. The ideas offered by Aretino and seconded by Dolce and Gilio had become more codified norms by . Consequently, he makes the audience for this art simultaneously into both passive receivers of images and discerning viewers capable of divining artistic intent and the hand of God at work. Likewise, artists fall into two strict camps: They either only seek God in their religious works or exhibit “little esteem” for the divine. His peculiar concluding statement about nudity in churches helps elucidate the reason for all of this philosophical flip-flopping. His final sentence may not name the specific work of art that included so many nude figures in a church, but to contemporary readers, the reference would have been clear. He tangentially addresses the uproar precipitated by the unveiling of Michelangelo’s Last Judgment. Vasari’s editing of his life of Angelico between and constitutes a tacit admission of shifting attitudes surrounding religious art after the close of the Council of Trent in , as well as a counterargument to those who took exception to Michelangelo’s last public fresco. Vasari acknowledges, perhaps for the only time, the potential problems with Michelangelo’s fresco. Vasari even seems to imply that he agreed with the decision to alter the work shortly after Michelangelo’s death, as these interventions made the work markedly less nude and clarified certain problematic passages. Although he indicates that some viewers are to blame for seeing impiety where there is only the pursuit of beauty, Vasari also strongly affirms and augments his personal position that “every painter paints himself,” particularly in religious works. Those who lack religious feeling and a desire for God cannot produce art that is elevating for viewers. In this sense, he articulates the precise definition of a good and true religious artist in the context of both Protestant challenges to religious art and in the Catholic response of the Counter-Reformation. Moreover, he agrees with Michelangelo’s staunchest critics. Vasari’s defense of the Last Judgment fresco in his biography of Michelangelo is straightforward, a marked contrast to his careful and contradictory rhetoric in the life of Fra Angelico. He praises the varietà of Michelangelo’s hundreds of figures, lavishly describing the fresco and all of its attendant parts. From devils to angels, in Vasari’s account, each figure is difficult, beautiful, worthy of praise, and could not have been achieved by anyone but Michelangelo. The initial defense, then, is that Michelangelo, in seeking beauty and perfection, does not ignore God but honors him. Importantly, Vasari claims that
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Michelangelo has shown his God-given abilities to “any person who has good judgment and an understanding of painting” and pitched his fresco to the educated members of the court rather than to innocent women and children. In other words, he places the onus back on the audience for understanding the fresco. Michelangelo, cast as God’s divine, beauty-seeking instrument in the Lives, is beyond reproach. Although Vasari’s life of Angelico changed significantly between and , his appraisal of the Last Judgment remained unchanged between the two versions of the Lives. Further, Vasari claims, in an echo of his opening sentence of Michelangelo’s vita that Buonarroti’s skill in completing the fresco “is that example and that great picture sent by God to men on earth so that they could see how Fate operates when supreme intellects descend to earth and are infused with the grace and the divinity of knowledge.” In evoking the grace and magnanimity of God, Vasari seems to indicate that Michelangelo does not privilege art over Christian decorum. Instead, his exploration of artifice and beauty is God’s work. Vasari exonerates Michelangelo from the charge of being impious or losing sight of his priorities in the Pope’s chapel – no matter how sensual his figures – by turning him into an instrument of the Almighty. As such, Vasari also attempts to refute those who would accuse Michelangelo of being unchristian and, therefore, creating potentially damaging religious works. Indeed, much of Vasari’s life of Michelangelo reads in a similarly hagiographic manner to that of Fra Angelico’s. In Vasari’s estimation, Michelangelo is not merely an instrument of God, wielding great artistic talent as a corrective throughout the world, but also a man of “true moral philosophy” and “holiness” who should be called “divine rather than mortal.” Vasari’s language is, moreover, drawn from descriptions of the coming of Christ, sent directly by God to save the world from sin (artistic or otherwise). According to Vasari, Michelangelo is a similar kind of artistic saint to Fra Angelico and produces similarly effective and holy religious works. . MICHELANGELO’S REACTI ON
Michelangelo’s own response to Vasari’s sanctification was swift and stark. Dictating to friend and fellow artist Ascanio Condivi, Michelangelo rejected the celestial origins that Vasari created for him. Instead, Condivi’s biography, from the first sentence, highlights the very human roots of the artist, connecting his family to the noble lineage of Canossa. If Michelangelo rejected his own beatification at Vasari’s hands, he did not likewise reject the prevailing attitudes about religious artists found in the writings of both his critics and admirers. That Michelangelo himself shared many of the ideas expressed in Vasari, Aretino, Gilio, and Dolce is supported by the artist’s words as recorded in Francisco de Hollanda’s Dialogues. Hollanda was a Portuguese court artist
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sent to Rome in the mid-sixteenth century. He wrote a volume entitled On Antique Painting, the second part of which purported to record conversations between Michelangelo, Vittoria Colonna, and other friends at the church of San Silvestro al Quirinale. Many of these friends were members of the spirituali, a reform group interested in reconciling Protestant and Catholic theologies that met at San Silvestro to hear sermons and debate various issues of faith and art. At one point in the volume, Hollanda’s Michelangelo unequivocally declares, “In order to represent the venerable image of our Lord in any part . . . I maintain that it is necessary for him to lead a very good life or even, if possible, to be a saint, for the Holy Spirit to be able to inspire his intellect.” In this passage, the concept of the religious artist relies upon a close connection between the saintly soul of the artist and the potency of his images. Although he goes on to insist upon the technical skill of religious artists (even suggesting that rulers decree that only the most “illustrious” painters be allowed to create religious art), his first and seemingly most important precept is that religious artists are themselves devout. It is only in leading a “blameless life” that artists may obtain inspiration and understanding, gifts from the Holy Spirit. Michelangelo continues that following such criteria avoids the problem of “badly painted images,” which “distract people and cause them to lose their religious fervor.” In these statements, Michelangelo links the sanctity of the artist with the devotional character of his images and the reaction of his audience. The artist even asserts that one is dependent upon the other – that only saintly men can produce images that turn the mind of the faithful toward God. The dialogues written by Hollanda cannot be taken as literal translations of conversations held by Michelangelo and his companions at San Silvestro. As many have noted, the Dialogues are as much a work of literature as Vasari’s Lives, and, although Michelangelo may have held these opinions in the s and s, it is not clear that he would have expressed them in precisely this way. It is not necessary to assert definitively that Michelangelo either did or did not make the statements found in Hollanda’s Dialogues, however, as the artist’s autograph writing supports a similar conception of the religious artist. Michelangelo’s late poetry, in particular, bears witness to his attempts to cope with the charge that he put his art above his faith in creating the Last Judgment. His poems also attest to a kind of self-conscious refashioning in the public eye. Beginning “Giunto è già,” sonnet professes the profound regret of a faithful man who has succumbed to the sensual delights of art and beauty. Michelangelo echoes the charges of his critics in both form and content when he rails against “the affectionate fantasy / that made art an idol and sovereign to me.” Combined with the understanding that Michelangelo, Vasari, and others had about audiences perceiving the godliness of the artist through their
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works, the poem acknowledges Buonarroti’s personal and professional failure. He has discovered at the end of his life that the passion that has consumed him will not grant the absolution he seeks. Realizing that “neither painting nor sculpture will be able any longer / to calm my soul,” the artist is now “turned toward that divine love / that opened his arms on the cross to take us in.” In the finished version of this sonnet, it seems that Michelangelo has definitively abandoned art, instead spending his remaining energy contemplating the love and sacrifice of Christ. The poem further repudiates the poetic tradition of the pensieri amorosi and the possibility of transcendence through love and beauty. Vasari may have attempted to retain the pursuit of beauty as a main goal of religious art, capable of helping the mind ascend to celestial things. Michelangelo has seemingly rejected such a notion completely. In so doing, the artist also summarily rejects the visual arts. An incomplete sonnet from the same set of folios again finds Michelangelo imploring God to “have mercy on me” as “all my efforts / can’t make a man blessed without your blood.” In other words, as an unredeemed sinner, Michelangelo cannot make his works capable of lifting the mind to God. Michelangelo shared many of his opinions about religious artists with Dolce, Aretino, and Gilio, which must have made their initial, and then continued, criticism of the Last Judgment particularly painful and damaging to the artist’s reputation. That Michelangelo had failed in his mission to create a religiously effective work of art was irrefutable, even by his own standards. His critics claimed that the Last Judgment did not elevate their minds to God but instead recalled the brothel or the bathhouse. If these educated men were not moved by his eloquent and intellectual vision of the Last Judgment, then what would less qualified viewers think? Ergo, Michelangelo, even by his own measure, created works that are not pious, and such creations reflected poorly on the state of his own soul. Although the failure of the fresco to inspire the faithful would have been disappointing, the commentary such a failure made about the artist’s personal faith was devastating. It is important to think about these poems as being destined for an audience – they are not purely confessional but were deliberately crafted to promote a public identity. Michelangelo, ever cognizant of his ability to shape his reputation in the mind of the public, crafted a poem that acknowledges and even agrees with his critics. He then goes on to reinvent himself – rejecting art in favor of religion. The result is a poem that purports to be a kind of public and personal confession – even though the artist’s contemporaries and modern scholars know that it was highly mediated through repeated drafts and the artist’s literary influences. Michelangelo’s ideas about religious artists, however, never made it out of his notebook as written. Although Michelangelo was preparing to have his verses published, the death of his friend and literary
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. Leone Leoni / Portrait medal of Michelangelo (obverse) / – / Washington: National Gallery of Art / Courtesy National Gallery of Art, Washington
. Leone Leoni / Portrait medal of Michelangelo (reverse) / – / Washington: National Gallery of Art / Courtesy National Gallery of Art, Washington
collaborator Luigi del Riccio in halted that effort. Any attempt at a public rehabilitation of his reputation, both as a Christian and as an artist, was lost. To replace the penitential message of the poems, the artist designed his portrait medal (Figures and ) and, together with fellow sculptor Leone Leoni, created a work that is more a public act of contrition than a celebration of the artist’s talents. It is one of the clearest statements the artist ever made about the state of his soul and his potential to make works of religious art that elevated the minds and souls of viewers. In the impresa on his portrait medal, Michelangelo publicly grapples with the effect the Last Judgment and its criticisms have had on his reputation, as well as the relationship between his unredeemed soul and the potential efficacy of his religious art. This emphatically public and mobile object with its message of contrition acknowledges not only the CounterReformation understanding of a religious artist but also how far Michelangelo is from the requirements outlined by Aretino, Dolce, and even Vasari. It further offers public penance and hope that a redeemed artist may one day bring souls to God with his art. Like the poems, it is a moment of selffashioning where the artist has intervened in the public discourse to manipulate his own reputation as a religious artist. It both acknowledges his missteps and promises to make amends.
. THE PORTRAIT MEDAL
Vasari identified the man on the reverse of Michelangelo’s medal as a blind pilgrim, an assessment reinforced by the walking stick the man uses, as well as the rosary and canteen in the man’s possession (Figure ). The elderly gentleman is led by Fido, or faith, and he strides behind his intrepid hound. Given the artist’s own features, the pilgrim’s body recalls Michelangelo’s
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powerful nudes through its twisting pose. Though his face is in profile, the pilgrim’s muscular back is rotated so that it is almost fully exposed to the viewer. As he advances, the flowing robes on the lower half of his body cling to his legs, revealing their form. The motto encircling the scene is taken from Psalm : (in the Vulgate) and reads: “I will teach the unjust thy ways: and the wicked shall be converted to thee” (DOCEBO INIQVOS VIAS TVAS ET IMPEE AD TE CONVERTENTVR) (Figure ). The obverse of Michelangelo’s medal (Figure ) displays a flattering portrait of the artist’s craggy profile, with an inscription identifying the likeness as Michelangelo Buonarroti, a Florentine, taken in his eighty-eighth year. At the base of the bust, Leoni tucked his signature (LEO) under one of the folds of Michelangelo’s cassock. The medal does not allude to Michelangelo’s profession and skill, nor to his pretensions to nobility, nor to his powerful patrons. With the invocation of the pilgrim in the image, we might well anticipate a passage from Dante Alighieri for the motto, and the omission is striking. Despite its unexpected impresa, Michelangelo was clearly pleased with the results and sent Leoni a small wax model of Hercules and Antaeus and some drawings in gratitude. For his part, Leoni sent copies of the medal not only to Michelangelo but also to his established patrons at the Hapsburg courts in Spain and Flanders. But what did Michelangelo want these exalted audiences to see and understand when they saw this object? To decipher the unexpected ensemble on the reverse of Michelangelo’s portrait medal, one must read motto and image as two halves of the same whole. We might even think of them as Paolo Giovio did, comparing the motto and image to the body and the soul, respectively. The impresa clearly promotes Michelangelo’s desire for forgiveness in the figure of the pilgrim on his arduous journey, as well as his wish to render service to God through the selection of the motto from Psalm , “I will teach the unjust thy ways: and the wicked shall be converted to thee.” The medal is thus a public statement of Michelangelo’s self-conception as the penitent artistevangelist in the tradition of the Old Testament King David, “the humble psalmist.” In effect, David’s words become Michelangelo’s. The impresa also makes a bold statement of Michelangelo’s potential as a religious artist, bearing witness to his belief that he will only be able to render service to God after he has been redeemed in the eyes of heaven. Michelangelo’s portrait medal seeks the forgiveness of the divine that his works might one day again help raise hearts and minds to the Almighty. He seeks a different path forward in the new religious age heralded by the reception of the Last Judgment. . PSALM AND MICHELANGELO ’S I MPR ESA
Written as evidence of King David’s contrition after taking Bathsheba for his lover and murdering her husband, Psalm is among the most famous of the
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psalmist’s penitential works. Michelangelo appropriates David’s words as his own personal motto, offering the psalmist’s extended prayer in his own voice. In selecting the fifteenth verse for his motto, Michelangelo gives particular significance to that line but also invokes the psalm’s broader meaning. Unto the end, a psalm of David, When Nathan the prophet came to him after he had sinned with Bathsheba. Have mercy on me, O God, according to thy great mercy. And according to the multitude of thy tender mercies blot out my iniquity. Wash me yet more from my iniquity, and cleanse me from my sin. For I know my iniquity, and my sin is always before me. To thee only have I sinned, and have done evil before thee: that thou mayst be justified in thy words and mayst overcome when thou art judged. For behold I was conceived in iniquities; and in sins did my mother conceive me. For behold thou hast loved truth: the uncertain and hidden things of thy wisdom thou hast made manifest to me. Thou shalt sprinkle me with hyssop, and I shall be cleansed: thou shalt wash me, and I shall be made whiter than snow. To my hearing thou shalt give joy and gladness: and the bones that have been humbled shall rejoice. Turn away thy face from my sins, and blot out all my iniquities. Create a clean heart in me, O God: and renew a right spirit within my bowels. Cast me not away from thy face; and take not thy holy spirit from me. Restore unto me the joy of thy salvation, and strengthen me with a perfect spirit. I will teach the unjust thy ways: and the wicked shall be converted to thee. Deliver me from blood, O God, thou God of my salvation: and my tongue shall extol thy justice. O Lord, thou wilt open my lips: and my mouth shall declare thy praise. For if thou hadst desired sacrifice, I would indeed have given it: with burnt offerings thou wilt not be delighted. A sacrifice to God is an afflicted spirit: a contrite and humbled heart, O God, thou wilt not despise. Deal favorably, O Lord, in thy good will with Zion; that the walls of Jerusalem may be built up. Then shalt thou accept the sacrifice of justice, oblations and whole burnt offerings: then shall they lay calves upon thy altar.
Michelangelo’s choice of the psalm also revisits the artist’s longstanding selfidentification with the Old Testament king and psalmist. In Louvre , dated to c. , Michelangelo sketched compositions for his marble or bronze David, adding inscriptions to the sheet as he worked (Figure ). Next to the drawing of the psalmist standing in contrapposto, Michelangelo mused,
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. Michelangelo Buonarroti / Studies for the David / c. / Paris: Musée du Louvre / © RMN-Grand Palais / Art Resource, NY
“David with his sling / and I with my bow / Michelangelo.” Equating David’s sling with the artist’s bow drill is a rich metaphor. Through this comparison, the artist enables us to view both David’s sling and Michelangelo’s bow as powerful instruments, capable of meaningful “service to God,” but also important aids to the new Florentine republic.
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In the portrait medal, Michelangelo draws an entirely different comparison between himself and the psalmist. Michelangelo no longer boldly compares his artistic powers to the strength of David’s martial ones. Instead, the artist, much like the king himself, is spiritually humbled late in his life – reduced to the barefoot destitution of a pilgrim. David, and Michelangelo through his allusion to the psalm, begins his penance by crying out, “Have mercy on me, O God.” He appeals to God’s “multitude of . . . tender mercies” to “blot out my iniquity.” Michelangelo’s fear for his soul after the unveiling of the Last Judgment is not unlike David’s confrontation of similar perdition after his affair with Bathsheba – both have valued flesh over faith. Both artist and psalmist seek a way back to God, the forgiveness of the Almighty, and atonement through penance. Verse , however, marks a turning point in the psalm. David no longer pleads for forgiveness but instead finds comfort in “the uncertain and hidden things of thy wisdom thou hast made manifest to me.” David believes that he has favored status with God and that he will be made to understand Divine will and celestial wisdom, even after his grave sins. After this point, David’s faith – and Michelangelo’s faith – in the mercy of the Lord allows him to hope that God will “create a clean heart in me, O God: and renew a right spirit within my bowels.” In many ways, this is the intention of the portrait medal as an object – to begin the public process of penance and cleansing David seeks in the psalm. St. Augustine’s interpretation of the psalm highlights its penitential aspect: “God’s mercy must be implored, that He may give understanding for condemning these things, inclination to flee them, and mercy to forgive.” Sinners like David and Michelangelo must ask for God’s mercy and hope to obtain absolution. After attaining forgiveness, sinners must hope for the understanding to live a more blameless life and to become more saintly. Such behavior on the part of the worshipper and the divine defines the very nature of penance. Penance is the fundamental idea that God can and will forgive those who recognize and regret their sin as well as sincerely ask for God’s mercy. In the Catholic tradition, this recognition and regret is commonly first made known to a priest during confession. Depending on the perceived severity of the offense, penitent petitioners will be given some form of service to God such as prayer or even the mortification of the physical body in order to save their soul. Whatever the service, its purpose is to humble the sinner before God and his community, thereby confirming his sincere and contrite heart. After the completion of these tasks, the sinner will again be pure in spirit, renewed, and forgiven by God. Pilgrimage was a popular penitential option, being a particularly public and physically punishing confession of sin.
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The arduousness of the pilgrimage as a form of penance is pictured in Michelangelo’s impresa. Michelangelo, in the guise of the humbled pilgrim, walks barefoot. He is dressed in clothing that will offer little protection against the elements and carries few possessions for such a long journey. It seems that this pilgrim, like many before him, will have to depend upon the charity of others for food and shelter along the way. Compounding Michelangelo’s already difficult path is the fact that he, as the pilgrim, is seemingly blind, reliant upon a guide dog to show him the way. Undaunted by these hardships, the pilgrim strides out on his public voyage toward God’s forgiveness. In the impresa, Michelangelo and Leoni have captured the very spirit of a successful pilgrimage, particularly its humbling destitution and public nature. After all, the medal was widely disseminated through Leoni’s efforts and contacts. In the image of his metaphoric pilgrimage, together with the invocation of Psalm , Michelangelo confesses his sinful nature and provides proof of his contrition through pilgrimage. He continues on, paralleling the words of David’s psalm, in the hope of becoming sinless once again in the view of heaven. The artist would have been especially sensitive to the metaphorical importance of pilgrimage, having undertaken at least one in his lifetime. In September (a few short years before the medal was struck), Michelangelo took an unprecedented break from his work at St. Peter’s in order to make a pilgrimage to Loreto. Moreover, Michelangelo made frequent use in his own poetry of the journey or pilgrimage as a metaphor for the struggle of earthly life. In sonnet , for example, Michelangelo pines for his friend and spiritual mentor Vittoria Colonna. He attempts to reach her “lofty, shining diadem” but must travel over “the long steep road,” which has made the artist “short of breath halfway along the route.” Although certainly inspired by Dante’s ascent to Beatrice, Michelangelo’s employment of the metaphor of the spiritual journey is also clearly influenced by contemporary pilgrimage practices. From these lines and others like them, Michelangelo self-consciously presents himself to the public as a sinner, a pilgrim, and a penitent. . VERSE
The particular choice of the fifteenth verse of Psalm , however, means that Michelangelo’s motives were more than purely penitential. Verse is a turning point in the psalm. David – and Michelangelo through the choice of motto – begins to commend himself to God’s service, offering to proselytize after his soul is washed clean: “I will teach the unjust thy ways: and the wicked shall be converted to thee” (DOCEBO INIQVOS VIAS TVAS ET IMPEE AD TE CONVERTENTVR). In this understanding of the verse, Michelangelo would have been closely following an interpretation of the
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psalm by one of the earliest and perhaps most prophetic reformers of the church, Girolamo Savonarola. Savonarola’s “extended prayer,” written while awaiting execution in Florence, would have been among the most prominent in the mid-sixteenth century. Smuggled out of the monk’s prison cell, the prayer had eight Latin editions and five Italian editions in print before the end of . Written under extreme emotional duress as he awaited certain death, Savonarola considered each verse of Psalm , finding comfort and validation in its words. Savonarola explains in his analysis of verse that “if you strengthen me with a willing Spirit, if you set me free, then will I teach transgressors your ways. This is not something difficult for you . . . Neither can my sins stand in your way if you want to do this.” Savonarola likens forgiveness by God to being fundamentally changed, to freedom, and to blessing by the Almighty to effectively evangelize, in the process comparing himself to St. Paul – the ultimate convert. Savonarola in his commentary and Michelangelo in his motto both confess to believing in the transformative love of God. In explaining the verse in these terms, we must also understand the powerfully conditional nature of verse . Savonarola’s reading of the verse is thus: If one is forgiven and touched by God, then one will be “set free,” be fundamentally changed, and have the power to successfully convert sinners to God’s path. Redemption, however, must happen before successful proselytizing. The efficacy and outcome of service to God is dependent upon the receipt of grace by the penitent. In this sense, Savonarola’s words anticipate the debates surrounding the religious artist in the sixteenth century, particularly those concerning the Last Judgment. The personal faith of those attempting to render service to God, through paint or sermon, directly impacts the ability of their offerings to bring souls to the faith. The hopeful note that Savonarola strikes about his own salvation is mirrored in the verses Michelangelo composed while writing the hopelessly pessimistic sonnet . Although the finished version of the poem has seemingly rejected the visual arts altogether, the record of sonnet ’s creation in the folios now held in the Vatican (Vat. Lat. ) presents a relationship of Michelangelo to both art and absolution that is considerably more nuanced. While working on sonnet , Michelangelo simultaneously composed an unfinished sestet that reads, When I conceive some image in your name, it’s never without its equal attendant, death, at which my art and genius melt away. But, if, as some believe, I can still console myself that one returns to life, with such a fate I’ll serve you again, if my art comes back with me.
Recognizing that his art, regardless of the fame it garners him, will not grant him the spiritual comfort he desires, the artist seeks to be born again into grace
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or to “return to life.” So redeemed, Michelangelo promises that he will serve God again through his art, if provided with the same gifts on the other side of his absolution. Consistent with the conception of the religious artist described in Hollanda’s Dialogues, Vasari, and the works of his critics, Michelangelo’s poetry attests that he understood his art’s profound potential to be of service to God. Furthermore, he accepts the idea that an artist’s works and their ability to inspire the faithful to good thoughts and actions are reflections on the artist’s state of grace. A similarly dependent relationship between penance and proselytizing is explored in Michelangelo’s impresa, although it must be said that Michelangelo’s personal understanding of the psalm is far less confident than Savonarola’s. The pilgrim is still striving in the image on the medal. He wanders barefoot over rough and rocky terrain with no clear destination. The lack of church or town in the background indicates the long duration of the pilgrim’s journey. His blindness and reliance upon the dog, metaphorically upon faith, further attests to the indeterminate nature of the length and outcome of his pilgrimage. Temporally, Michelangelo’s impresa shows the artist occupying a time between his sinful existence and his transformation “into another man,” one capable of converting lost souls to God. Neither the image nor the motto indicates when or if Michelangelo will ever reach the state of grace he so ardently seeks – the impresa demonstrates only the artist’s spiritual journey and hope of redemption. He has not yet been forgiven, nor is the end in sight, but he promises his service and art to God, pledging to “convert transgressors to your ways,” should the heavens see fit to bestow mercy upon him. Michelangelo acknowledges not simply that he needs to change but also that he is taking steps to rectify what has become an untenable situation. He refashions himself in the public’s eye. Although still the foremost artist of his age, his religious works were no longer understood as befitting the decorum of the new and fraught religious era and, subsequently, reflected poorly on the artist’s own state of redemption and his reputation. As both his sonnets and his portrait medal affirm, the artist, contemplating death and his legacy, has lost his way. In the years following the unveiling of the Last Judgment and in the wake of continuing criticism, the artist would seek not only absolution but also a way to reconcile art, his “idol and sovereign,” and the need to save his soul. More immediately, however, the furor surrounding the Last Judgment left Michelangelo with a conundrum. Because his religious works were ineffective, his soul without grace, and his art prone to criticism, he was left with few public avenues for change. As many scholars of the artist’s late period have noted, he simply seems to have stopped producing public works. After the frescoes in the Pauline Chapel, which can hardly be understood as widely accessible, Michelangelo never completed another painting or sculpture for the
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public sphere. This narrative does not quite tell the whole story, however. Instead, his collaborations with other painters – much like his collaboration with Leone Leoni – allowed the artist to continue to experiment with religious iconography and release it to the public. His collaborative works with Marcello Venusti and Daniele da Volterra bear witness to Michelangelo’s continued interventions in public, religious art. They also attest to the reinvention of his iconography in the Counter-Reformation and after the Last Judgment. NOTES Michelangelo had been called back into the Sistine Chapel to create the massive fresco on the altar wall by Pope Clement VII, though it was largely completed under Paul III. The fresco took him five years to complete, and he was ill for some of the time. A nonexhaustive bibliography on the fresco might include: Marcia B. Hall, ed., Michelangelo’s Last Judgment (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, ); Bernadine Barnes, “Skin, Bones, and Dust: Self-Portraits in Michelangelo’s Last Judgment,” Sixteenth Century Society Journal , no. (): –; Barnes, Michelangelo’s Last Judgment; Leo Steinberg, “Michelangelo’s Last Judgment as Merciful Heresy,” Art in America , no. (): –; Marcia B. Hall, “Michelangelo’s Last Judgment: Resurrection of the Body and Predestination,” Art Bulletin , no. (March ): –. Vasari, “Michelagnolo Buonarroti,” –. Translation from Vasari, Lives, . Barnes, Michelangelo’s Last Judgment, . Ibid., . There were and are perfectly legitimate theological reasons for the preponderance of nudes in the Last Judgment fresco, as well as for their complicated postures. These figures, which so angered Gilio, Aretino, and others, could have been easily interpreted by the audience for whom Michelangelo was creating the work – the highly educated and deeply religious members of the papal court. Marcia Hall’s analysis of the fresco in light of the theology of the resurrected body is ample proof of this. Moreover, her scholarship provides concrete reasons for the multitude of nudes in the fresco, no matter how extreme their figure style or how contorted their body positioning. The same cannot be said for Michelangelo’s on the ceiling of the same room – their function in the program is still not agreed upon – but they seem not to have bothered contemporary viewers in Julius II’s court. Hall, “Resurrection,” –. Barnes, Michelangelo’s Last Judgment, . Indeed, it continued through the fresco’s cleaning in the twentieth century. See Melinda Schlitt, “Painting, Criticism, and Michelangelo’s Last Judgment in the Age of the CounterReformation,” in Hall, Michelangelo’s Last Judgment, . Lingo, Federico Barocci, . For example, see Doni’s letter as quoted in Schlitt, “Painting,” . As Barnes notes: “The association between the artist’s character and the work he produced was very close.” Barnes, Michelangelo’s Last Judgment, . Vasari, Lives, . Giorgio Vasari, “Vita di Fra Giovanni da Fiesole,” in Bettarini and Barocchi, Le vite, :. Diane Cole Ahl, Fra Angelico (New York: Phaidon Press, ), . Of Vasari’s opinion of Angelico, Ahl also states, “Vasari found in the friar the epitome of the Christian artist: a painter of peerless gifts and matchless piety . . . a man who devoted his life to the service of the Lord.” Diane Cole Ahl, “Sia di mano di santo o d’un angelo: Vasari’s Life of Fra Angelico,” in Reading Vasari, ed. Anne B. Barriault, Andrew Ladis, Norman E. Land, and Jeryldene M. Wood (Athens: Georgia Museum of Art, ), .
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In a particularly striking passage, when offered the opportunity to become the archbishop of Florence by the Pope, Angelico humbly demurs, saying he did not “feel capable of governing other people.” Vasari, Lives, . Vasari, “Fra Giovanni da Fiesole,” . Vasari, Lives, . Vasari, “Fra Giovanni da Fiesole,” . Vasari, Lives, . Vasari, “Fra Giovanni da Fiesole,” . Vasari, Lives, . Vasari, “Fra Giovanni da Fiesole,” . Lest this sounds like hagiographic hyperbole, we would do well to remember that modern scientific analysis of the paintings has at least provided some support for the biographer’s first claim. Fra Angelico rarely edited his paintings through pentimenti. Ahl, “Vasari’s Life of Fra Angelico,” –. Vasari, Lives, . Vasari, “Fra Giovanni da Fiesole,” . Vasari, Lives, . Vasari, “Fra Giovanni da Fiesole,” . This aphorism can be found in many places in Renaissance culture. Martin Kemp observes that it is an idea present in many of Leonardo’s writings but is also closely associated with Cosimo de’ Medici, Agnolo Poliziano, Savonarola, and even Michelangelo himself. Martin Kemp, “‘Ogni dipintore dipinge se’: A Neoplatonic Echo in Leonardo’s Art Theory?,” in Cultural Aspects of the Italian Renaissance: Essays in Honor of Paul Oskar Kristeller, ed. Cecil H. Clough (Manchester: Manchester University Press, ), . For more complete treatments of the controversy, see Barnes, Michelangelo’s Last Judgment, –; Schlitt, “Painting,” –; Barnes, Michelangelo in Print, –. Barnes, Michelangelo’s Last Judgment, . Barnes also notes that these prints were largely faithful to the fresco as it was painted, and printmakers did not tend to edit the work, even after loincloths had been added to many of the figures in . Barnes, Michelangelo in Print, –. For more on these terms, see Robert Gaston, “How Words Control Images: The Rhetoric of Decorum in Counter-Reformation Italy,” in Hall and Cooper, Sensuous, –. Peter Lukehart’s essay in the same volume, “Painting Virtuously: The Counter Reformation and the Reform of Artists’ Education in Rome between Guild and Academy,” treats many of the same themes. Robert Williams, Raphael and the Redefinition of Art in Renaissance Italy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, ), –. Charles Dempsey, “Mythic Inventions in Counter Reformation Painting,” in Rome in the Renaissance: The City and the Myth, ed. P. A. Ramsey (Binghamton, NY: Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies, ), . Barnes, Michelangelo’s Last Judgment, . Ibid., . Schlitt, “Painting,” . Mark Roskill, Dolce’s Aretino and Venetian Art Theory of the Cinquecento (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, ), . Onestà was also a legal term closely associated with courtesans during the sixteenth century, thus enhancing its connection to questions of the erotic. See Bette Talvacchia, Taking Positions: On the Erotic in Renaissance Culture (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, ), –. Ibid., . “When, however, Dolce addresses matters tied to obscenity, he moves into moral territory more specific than can be covered by the general precepts of decorum, and notes the change linguistically by substituting convenevolezza with onestà.” Michelangelo died in and so might not have been personally aware of Gilio’s criticisms. They are included here because they echo the earlier critiques and address the fresco directly. Gilio’s writings also come after the close of the Council of Trent, which had recently issued statements about religious images. For a fuller analysis of how those statements came to pass, see O’Malley, “Trent, Sacred Images,” –. O’Malley further notes that any statements from the Council about religious images came at the behest of the French, not the Italians. Moreover, “in the Early Modern period after Trent, the Church in its official capacity continued to maintain its tradition of condemning iconoclasm and
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defending the legitimacy and usefulness of images even in sacred places. To a degree unknown before, however, controversies swirled in elite circles over what in images was religiously and morally acceptable. In play in the controversies were diverse theological and philosophical assumptions about the senses and, in particular, about the relationship of the body and soul, flesh and spirit. On these controversies, the Church made no pronouncement.” In other words, Gilio’s treatise came at a pivotal moment. It is worth noting as well that, contrary to much scholarship, O’Malley writes that the Council of Trent did not treat Michelangelo’s fresco directly. Instead, “the pope created a deputation of cardinals to review the decrees to see what could . . . be put immediately into action in Rome.” It was from this deputation that the decision was made to cover “the pictures in the Apostolic Chapel.” As quoted in Lingo, Federico Barocci, . Barnes, Michelangelo’s Last Judgment, . See Lukehart’s translation: “Painting sacred images, honest and devout, with these signs that have been given to them by the ancients in accordance with their holiness, which has seemed to the moderns vile, clumsy, common, humble, outdated, and without ingeniousness or art; on that basis, they prefer art to virtuousness.” Lukehart, “Painting Virtuously,” . Barnes, Michelangelo’s Last Judgment, . Barnes, Michelangelo in Print, –. Roskill, Dolce’s Aretino, . Ibid., . Barnes, Michelangelo’s Last Judgment, . As noted in Ibid., . Hall, “Resurrection,” –. Nagel noted the significance of the addition of this passage. Nagel, Michelangelo and the Reform of Art, . Vasari, Lives, –. Vasari, “Fra Giovanni da Fiesole,” –. Dempsey interprets Vasari’s statement here as being against the “stile devoto,” a Lombard style that set itself against Michelangelo’s Last Judgment by using the style of Raphael and with the “goal of touching the earthly passions of the spectator, thereby invoking a natural yet typical devotional effect that identifies human passion with the Divine.” Charles Dempsey, “The Carracci and the Devout Style in Emilia,” in Emilian Painting of the th and th Centuries: A Symposium, ed. Henry A. Millon (Bologna: Nuova Alfa, ), . Stuart Lingo tracks similar language in Borghini’s Il Riposo, where the concept of “allure” in images took on fraught new meaning. As Lingo notes, “On the one hand, successful images had to possess the alluring power of the Cnidian Venus . . . . On the other hand, Christian paintings had to fuse this stunning affective power with piety and devotion, in forms that carried none of the . . . sensuous appeal of pagan cult objects . . . . The gravity of this double bind for modern art had been obvious from the unveiling of Michelangelo’s Last Judgment, which made abundantly clear the extent to which the nude had come to dominate much ambitious contemporary art, even religious art. Period responses reveal that both admirers and critics remarked first on the presence of the body in the work rather than its narrative or religious meaning.” Vasari’s response in the life of Fra Angelico acknowledges, at an earlier moment than Borghini’s, the stakes of this debate. Stuart Lingo, “Raffaello Borghini and the Corpus of Florentine Art in an Age of Reform,” in Hall and Cooper, Sensuous, . Nagel, Michelangelo and the Reform of Art, –. See also Ahl, “Vasari’s Life of Fra Angelico,” . As Nagel observes, Vasari “surrounded his earlier plea for the unity of beauty and religion with carefully worded caveats” in the wake of the close of the Council of Trent in . Robert Gaston notes, “In the relatively neutral ground of Fra Angelico’s biography, Vasari was cautiously positioning himself in this contentious debate.” Robert Gaston, “Vasari and the Rhetoric of Decorum,” in The Ashgate Research Companion to Vasari, ed. David C. Cast (Farnham: Ashgate, ), . In Michelangelo’s Vita, for example, the passage about the Last Judgment remains relatively unchanged between the two editions.
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Pius IV hired Daniele da Volterra to add clothing to certain figures and to recompose at least one group of saints. John O’Malley, “The Council of Trent (–) and Michelangelo’s Last Judgment (),” Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society vol. , no. (December ): –. Vasari, Lives, –. Vasari, “Michelagnolo Buonarroti,” –. Vasari, Lives, . Vasari, “Michelagnolo Buonarroti,” . Vasari, Lives, . Vasari, “Michelagnolo Buonarroti,” . Vasari, Lives, . Vasari, “Michelagnolo Buonarroti,” . Vasari was not alone in comparing Michelangelo to God. For more on this phenomenon, see Tamara Smithers, The Cults of Raphael and Michelangelo: Artistic Sainthood and Memorials as Second Life (New York: Routledge, ), –. Ascanio Condivi, The Life of Michelangelo, ed. Hellmut Wohl, trans. Alice Sedgwick Wohl (University Park: Penn State University Press, ), . The spirituali will be covered more fully in Chapter . Francisco de Hollanda, On Antique Painting, trans. Alice Sedgwick Wohl (University Park: Penn State University Press, ), . Ibid., . Ibid., . Translation by James Saslow, The Poetry of Michelangelo (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, ), . “. . . l’affetüosa fantasia / che l’arte mi fece idol e monarca.” Ibid., . “Né pinger né scolpir fie più che quieti . . . Volta a quell’amor divino / c’aperse, a prender noi, ‘n croce le braccia.” This poem went through a “fragmentary, nonlinear” creation process. For more, see William E. Wallace, “‘Certain of Death’: Michelangelo’s Late Life and Art,” Renaissance Quarterly , no. (): –. I am grateful to Paul Barolsky for this observation. Saslow, Poetry of Michelangelo, . “Miserere di me”; “c’ogni mie pruova / fuor del tuo sangue non fa l’uom beato.” Here, Michelangelo directly refers to the language of Psalm . Wallace, “‘Certain of Death,’” –. Prodan, Michelangelo’s Christian Mysticism, . “Et in quel tempo il cavaliere Lione ritrasse in una medaglia Michelagnolo molto vivacemente, et accompiacenza di lui gli fece nel rovescio un cieco guidato da un cane . . .” Vasari, “Michelagnolo Buonarroti,” . Likewise, Plon confirms Michelangelo’s hand in the design of the medal: “C’est le grand Florentin lui-même qui avait suggéré cette composition assez énigmatique.” Eugène Plon, Les maîtres italiens au service de la maison d’Autriche: Leone Leoni, sculpteur de Charles-Quint, et Pompeo Leoni, sculpteur de Philippe II (Paris: Nourrit, ), . Michelangelo had almost certainly known Leoni since the s or s when they were both in Rome. Their friendly relations were renewed or strengthened in the s, as is attested by the warm letters that passed between them. Additionally, there has always been some question as to Michelangelo’s involvement with Leoni’s commission and design for the tomb of the Marquis de Marignan in the cathedral of Milan. For more, see Plon, Les maîtres italiens, –, and Vasari, La vita di Michelangelo, :. Despite the relatively large bibliography on this object, there has not been much consensus over what the medal means or how to interpret the image and motto together. See Ernst Steinmann, Die Portraitdarstellungen des Michelangelo (Leipzig: Klinkhardt and Biermann, ), –; Phillip Fehl, “Michelangelo’s Crucifixion of St. Peter: Notes on the Identification and Locale of the Action,” Art Bulletin , no. (September ): ; Paul Barolsky, Michelangelo’s Nose: A Myth and Its Maker (University Park: Penn State University Press, ), –; Eliana Carrera, “Michelangelo, Leone Leoni, ed una stampa de Maarten van Heemskerck,” in Studi in onore del Kunsthistoriches Institut in Florenz per il suo centenario (–), ed. Paolo Enrico Arias and Paola Barocchi (Pisa: Quaderni, ), –; John Howett, “Observations on the Iconography of Leoni’s Michelangelo
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Medal,” SECAC Review (): –; Patricia Emison, Low and High Style in Italian Renaissance Art (New York: Garland, ), –; Emily A. Fenichel, “Penance and Proselytizing in Michelangelo’s Portrait Medal,” Artibus et Historiae , no. (): –. The portrait medal is also a common inclusion in catalogs of both medals and Michelangelo’s work. For example, see John Graham Pollard, Renaissance Medals (New York: Oxford University Press, ), :; John Graham Pollard, Medaglie italiane del Rinascimento nel Museo del Bargello (Florence: S.P.E.S., ), :–; Stephen K. Scher, ed., The Currency of Fame: Portrait Medals of the Renaissance (New York: Harry N. Abrams, ), –; George Hill, Medals of the Renaissance (London: Oxford University Press, ), ; Giuseppe Toderi and Fiorenza Vannel, Le medaglie italiane del XVI secolo (Florence: Edizioni Polistampa, ), :; G. F. Hill and Graham Pollard, Renaissance Medals from the Samuel H. Kress Collection at the National Gallery of Art (London: Phaidon, ), ; Pina Ragioneri, Michelangelo: Drawings and Other Treasures from the Casa Buonarroti, Florence (Atlanta: High Museum of Art, ), –; and Hugo Chapman, Michelangelo Drawings: Closer to the Master (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, ), and . Vasari, “Michelagnolo Buonarroti,” . Pilgrims’ attributes included the staff, the sclavin, and the scrip. The staff was the pilgrims’ walking stick, the sclavin was the “long, coarse tunic” worn by pilgrims, and the scrip was the soft pouch that carried the pilgrims’ effects. As Sumption explains, “Probably in the middle of the thirteenth century, pilgrims began to wear a great broad-brimmed hat.” For more on this subject, see Jonathan Sumption, Pilgrimage: An Image of Mediaeval Religion (Totowa, NJ: Roman and Littlefield, ), –. Michelangelo’s physiognomic kinship to the pilgrim is often overlooked in scholarship but can be taken as confirmation of his identification with the figure. As Pope-Hennessy notes, “The beggar is Michelangelo – the figure corresponds with a drawing which Zuccari made of Michelangelo in the Piazza Mattei in .” John Pope-Hennessy, The Portrait in the Renaissance (New York: Pantheon Books, ), . Various issues related to translation and transcription make the numbering of both psalms and verses different in the Vulgate than in other versions of the Bible. In other translations, this would be Psalm :. I have chosen to use the Vulgate because it best approximates the Latin Bible with which Michelangelo would have been familiar. It was actually his eighty-sixth year. For more on this “mistake,” see Andreas Schumacher, “Leone Leonis Michelangelo-Medaille: Porträt und Glaubensbekenntnis des alten Buonarroti,” in Die Renaissance-Medaille in Italien und Deutschland, ed. Georg Satzinger (Münster: Rhema-Verlag, ), –. These are themes that other artists routinely chose for their portrait medals: Bramante, Filarete, Titian, Baccio Bandinelli, and Taddeo Zuccaro all exhibited their fortunate patronage or artistic talents or both in their portrait medals. Joanna Woods-Marsden, Renaissance Self-Portraiture: Visual Construction of Identity and the Social Status of the Artist (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, ), –, , and ; Jack Freiberg, “Bramante’s Portrait Medal: Classical Hero/Christian Architect,” Artibus et Historiae (): –. These objects took pride of place in the display of Leoni’s impressive personal collection. Di Dio relates, “Michelangelo’s model of Hercules and Antaeus, some of his drawings, and his poetry were displayed in the interior” of Leoni’s home. Kelley Helmstutler Di Dio, Leone Leoni and the Status of the Artist at the End of the Renaissance (Burlington, VT: Ashgate, ), . For more on Leoni’s collection, refer to pages – in the same volume. Considering recent scholarly attention on Michelangelo’s careful gift-giving, one cannot see such an exchange as coincidental. Michelangelo gave Leoni, the consummate collector, objects that would become the centerpieces of his collection. Michelangelo must have been very pleased in order to make such a gift. For more on Michelangelo’s gifting practices, see Maria Ruvoldt, “Michelangelo’s Slaves and the Gift of Liberty,” Renaissance Quarterly , no.
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(Winter ): –; Alexander Nagel, “Gifts for Michelangelo and Vittoria Colonna,” Art Bulletin , no. (December ): –; William E. Wallace, “Manoeuvring for Patronage: Michelangelo’s Dagger,” Renaissance Studies (): –. In his letter to Michelangelo, Leoni claims that his own “ambition” forced him to send copies of the medal to the Hapsburg court in Spain and Flanders but that he sends the copies to Rome out of affection for Michelangelo. Paola Barocchi and Renzo Ristori, eds., Il Carteggio di Michelangelo (Florence: SPES Editore, ), :–. Plon, Les maîtres italiens, is the most sustained study of Leoni’s relationship with the Hapsburgs. “Prima, giuta proportione d’anima e di corpo; seconda, ch’ella non sia oscura, di forte, c’habbia mistero della Sibilla per interprete a volerla intendere; ne tanto chiara, ch’ogni plebeo l’intenda; Terza, che sopratutto habbia bella vista, laqual si fa riuscire molto allegro, entrandovi stelle, soli, lune, fuoco, acqua, arbori verdeggianti, instrumenti mecanici, animali bizzari, e uccelli fantastichi. Quarta non ricerca alcuna forma humana. Quinta richiede il motoo, che è l’anima del corpo, e vuole essere communemente d’una lingua diversa dall’Idioma di colui chef a impresa,” Paolo Giovio, “Dialogo dell’Imprese,” in The Philosophy of Images, ed. Stephen Orgel (New York: Garland, ), :. Furthermore, this analogy of body and soul in the meaning of portrait medals applies not only to the impresa on the reverse but to the entirety of the object. The obverse of the medal inevitably shows the accurate form of the subject in question, or the body, whereas the reverse alludes to prevailing aspects of their character that they would like to promote, or the soul. For more on the penitential psalms, see Clare Costley King’oo, Miserere Mei: The Penitential Psalms in Late Medieval and Early Modern England (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, ). The psalm was used in a number of liturgical settings. The “Miserere Mei,” a song drawn from the words of the psalm, has long been a common musical inclusion in the liturgy of the services during the Paschal Services of Holy Week. In addition, the priest’s sprinkling of purifying holy water before Mass was, and indeed still is, accompanied by his chanting of “Asperges me.” Moreover, Michelangelo singled out this psalm not only in the motto of his portrait medal but also in his own late and unfinished sonnet , where he cries out to God, “miserere di mei.” Saslow, Poetry of Michelangelo, . “Davicte cholla Fromba / e io collarcho / Michelagniolo.” As Leonard Barkan explains, “The ‘I’ who speaks this phrase claims to possess all the qualities inherent in the Biblical Hero.” Leonard Barkan, Michelangelo: A Life on Paper (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, ), . Charles Seymour explains the inscription thus: “The double parallel between Biblical victor and sculptor, between Philistine enemy and recalcitrant sculptural problem, appears to be inescapable.” Charles Seymour Jr., Michelangelo’s David: A Search for Identity (Pittsburgh, PA: University of Pittsburgh Press, ), . In addition to Seymour and Barkan, see Irving Lavin, “David’s Sling and Michelangelo’s Bow: A Sign of Freedom,” in Past-Present: Essays on Historicism in Art from Donatello to Picasso (Berkeley: University of California Press, ), –. Paul Joannides, Michel-Ange: Élèves et copistes (Paris: Réunion des Musées Nationaux, ), –, and Rona Goffen, Renaissance Rivals (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, ), –. Robert J. Clements, Michelangelo’s Theory of Art (New York: New York University Press, ), –. The latter interpretation is supported by Michelangelo’s quotation at the bottom of the page of a Petrarchan sonnet that alludes “elegiacally” to the downfall of “princely rulers,” which Barkan explains as nostalgia “for the days of the good Medici while living in fear of the exiled bad ones.” Barkan, Life on Paper, . Augustine was “pervasive in Renaissance literary and spiritual culture.” Meredith Gill, Augustine in the Italian Renaissance: Art and Philosophy from Petrarch to Michelangelo (New York: Cambridge University Press, ), . Kevin Knight, ed., “Augustine of Hippo,” New Advent, accessed January , , www .newadvent.org/fathers/.htm.
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Theologians divided penance into three stages: contritio cordis (contrition in one’s heart), confessio oris (confession aloud to a priest), and satisfactio operas (penitential works). King’oo, Miserere Mei, . This also made it a good punishment for high-profile sinners, such as repentant monarchs. It might also be useful to think of the portability and potential publicity of medals in the context of other forms of portraiture, as is argued by Baxandall when thinking about Guarino. Guarino expressed his frustration with paintings and sculptures to Alphonse V of Naples because they were unlabeled and not sufficiently portable. Baxandall concludes that “it is difficult not to see this as part of the context to Pisanello’s revival of the portrait medal.” Michael Baxandall, “Guarino, Pisanello, and Manuel Chrysoloras,” Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes, vol. (): . Vasari, La vita di Michelangelo, :–. He never reached Loreto but instead stopped for well over a month in Spoleto at a remote Franciscan monastery. William E. Wallace, Michelangelo: The Artist, the Man and His Times (New York: Cambridge University Press, ), –. “A l’alta tuo lucente dïadema / per la strada erta e lunga . . . e la lena mi manca a mezza via.” Saslow, Poetry of Michelangelo, . Donald Weinstein, Savonarola: The Rise and Fall of a Renaissance Prophet (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, ). Girolamo Savonarola, Prison Meditations on Psalms and , ed. and trans. Patrick Donnelly (Milwaukee, WI: Marquette University Press, ), . Savonarola, Prison Meditations, . Ibid., . “By that voice he was immediately knocked flat and stood upright: knocked flat in body, stood upright in mind. You awakened the sleeper, you opened eyes heavy with sleep, you poured in your light, you showed your face, you poured forth your indescribable mercy.” Ibid., . For more on Michelangelo and Pauline theology, see Barolsky, Michelangelo’s Nose, –. Saslow, Poetry of Michelangelo, . “S’a tuo nome ho concetto alcuno immago, / non è senza del par seco la morte, / onde l’arte e l’ingegno si dilegua. / Ma se, quell c’alcun crede, i’ pur m’appago / che si ritorni a viver, a tal sorte / ti servirò, s’avvien che l’arte segua.” Saslow and Ryan both acknowledge the idea that these passages seem to allude to reincarnation, an idea that Saslow rightly points out is heretical. I wonder, however, if we might not more accurately understand the lines in terms of being “born again” or redeemed. Christopher Ryan, The Poetry of Michelangelo: An Introduction (London: Athlone Press, ), . See also Barkan, Life on Paper, –. That Paul was also struck blind during his conversion provides another link between Savonarola’s interpretation of the psalm and Michelangelo’s impresa. In this way, Michelangelo’s incomplete spiritual journey nicely parallels his artistic journey and the concept of the non-finito. In the quest for physical and artistic perfection, Michelangelo abandons many of his works midstream, cognizant of their inability to match his interior conception. For more, see Jean-Pierre Barricelli, “Michelangelo’s Finito: In the Self, the Later Sonnets, and the Last Pietà,” New Literary History , no. (Summer ): –. It was suggested to me by Sarah Rolfe Prodan that Michelangelo might also have understood the creation and circulation of this object as part of the way in which he might obtain grace. Margaret Kuntz has observed that “the Cappella Paolina was essential to the ceremonial functions of the papal palace, which explains why it was built as a small, intimate space in a problematic location.” In other words, the space was used primarily by the Pope, the College of Cardinals, and the papal court. It was not a room envisioned for use by the general public. For more on the function of the chapel, see Margaret Kuntz, “Designed for Ceremony: The Cappella Paolina at the Vatican Palace,” Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians , vol. (June ): –.
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CHAPTER TWO
PUBLIC Collaboration and Religious Art in Rome
D
espite the continuing debate about the work, Michelangelo’s Last Judgment, like the Battle of Cascina Cartoon before it, became a site of pilgrimage for younger artists eager to draw and learn from the composition. Michelangelo was reported to have remarked, “Oh, how many men this work of mine wishes to destroy,” when noticing the crowd of artists copying his work in the Sistine Chapel. In the wake of the ongoing criticism over the fresco, the value of the artist’s influence was certainly cause for personal concern. Michelangelo might well have wondered if he was leading artists who followed his example to artistic glory but religious ruin. And many younger artists were eager to use Michelangelo’s example, particularly when it came to religious art. In the s and s, Michelangelo’s complicated figures provided seemingly endless models for artists to follow, not only in his native Florence but also in Rome. Artists such as Pellegrino Tibaldi translated the artist’s complex interlocking figures into large altarpieces, as in the Adoration of the Shepherds (Figure ). Heinrich Wölfflin commented that Tibaldi had “mixed up everything: bodies of athletes, sibyls, and angels of the Last Judgment.” Although perhaps unfair in its critical tone, Wölfflin’s description seems to aptly describe the crush of bodies in the tight space of the composition. Our eye bounces from figures taken from the Sistine Ceiling, the Last Judgment, and the Battle of Cascina, almost overshadowing the small Holy Family isolated on the left side of the painting. What the Michelangelesque figures have to do with Mary, Joseph, and the
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. Pellegrino Tibaldi / Adoration of the Shepherds / / Rome: Galleria Borghese / Art Collection / Alamy Stock Photo
Christ child is not immediately apparent, nor is it clear how they advance the religious narrative of the work. Such images, like the Last Judgment that inspired them, drew the ire of commentators because they focused attention on “improper gestures” that “do not excite to devotion at all.”
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Although contemporary artists may have been delighted to emulate Michelangelo’s artifice, the artist’s own response in his religious work was more circumspect. Concentrating on his architecture, sonnets, and private drawings, Michelangelo more or less withdrew from the “traditional institutions and repertoire of religious art.” To make such an argument, however, we must summarily ignore one of the central features of Michelangelo’s last years: public collaborations with younger artists. Preferring collaboration to creating works by his own hand in this period, Michelangelo still participated in the traditional structures of religious imagemaking through these relationships. For example, Marcello Venusti produced at least two major Roman altarpieces in the s and s after drawings by Michelangelo, and Daniele da Volterra adopted the master’s work into major fresco cycles for family chapels in Trinità dei Monti. Despite the high-profile works that these relationships produced, there is little consideration of why Michelangelo would seek these collaborations, particularly in the case of Marcello Venusti. Although these relationships produced nearly all of Michelangelo’s public religious iconography after , a comprehensive view of why he engaged in them and what he might have gained from the partnerships does not exist. Even more surprising is that there is a singular lack of engagement with the iconographies that were produced by Michelangelo, Venusti, and Daniele in this period. Though Michelangelo’s artistic relationship with figures such as Sebastiano del Piombo might be well covered, such is not the case with his collaborations in the s and s. This is not to say that the phenomenon of producing more finished works from Michelangelo’s drawings in the period has not been examined. An excellent example is the catalog for the D’apres Michelangelo show in Milan. This scholarship, however, tends to focus on “presentation drawings” that are copied and reinterpreted. The drawings for the Roman nobleman Tommaso de’ Cavalieri and for poet and intellectual Vittoria Colonna, for example, were intimate gifts shared between friends. Because of Michelangelo’s great fame, they were circulated among a group of intellectuals and artists who turned these private gifts into everything from prints to paintings to engraved gems to majolica. These works, in turn, have been examined as objects that allude to an individual maker’s relative intimacy with Michelangelo’s inner circle and as evidence of how Michelangelo’s iconographies were reinterpreted and reappropriated by artists and patrons alike. The subtext of most of these investigations is that Michelangelo never intended for his drawings to become public. To use Alexander Nagel’s terminology, the drawings the artist made for Vittoria Colonna mark “a deliberate retreat from the traditional forms of religious art . . . and from the entire economy of piety.” Although Nagel specifically refers to the artist’s late religious works, the same argument is often made for all of the artist’s late presentation drawings. This trend in scholarship privileges a kind of “accidental” collaboration over one that is clearly sought
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and negotiated between Michelangelo and other artists. One is acceptable in scholarship; the other is anathema. In contrast, this chapter will be concerned with instances where Michelangelo made deliberate and specific interventions into public religious art of the s and s through collaboration. Michelangelo’s relationships with Venusti and Daniele attest to at least two distinct methods of collaboration. Through these processes, Michelangelo was able to produce experimental and original religious iconography for public consumption but much more cautiously than he had done in the past. Using the younger artists’ brushes, Michelangelo gained a measure of distance from the works produced. Rather than taking on all the work and all the risk himself, as he had in the Last Judgment, these efforts were shared between the artists, allowing each party to benefit from the relationship. Moreover, the works Michelangelo produced with Venusti and Daniele indicate how much he engaged with the invectives of his critics. Michelangelo was able to temper or even criticize some of the more problematic aspects of his own disegno through these collaborations. Instead of focusing on the creation of beautiful, complicated bodies, Michelangelo’s partnerships with his younger colleagues eschew them almost entirely, as in the case of Venusti, or use them as a form of critique, as in the case of Daniele. At the core of these relationships and the works they produced is a fundamental reevaluation of religious art in public spaces and the pursuit of a new direction for public religious art in Counter-Reformation Rome. . MARCELLO VENU STI AND TH E ANNU NCIATIONS
Most of what is known about Marcello Venusti concerns his relationship with Michelangelo. The two artists met sometime in the s, during or just after the completion of the Last Judgment. Venusti’s most famous work is a painted copy of the fresco, now in Naples (Figure ). Having arrived reportedly from Mantua in the s, it is unclear if the artist worked in the Sistine Chapel alongside Michelangelo; nevertheless, he became a part of the team working in the Pauline Chapel. Venusti was a trusted confidant, producing panel paintings after the artist’s designs, the most famous of which replicate Michelangelo’s Crucifixion and Pietà drawings for Vittoria Colonna (Figures and ). Because of Venusti’s close association with the images and the sheer popularity of the painted reproductions in the sixteenth century, we have a tendency to ascribe any small, reasonably competent work after a Michelangelo design to Venusti. The result is that, despite the efforts of recent scholars, we simply do not have a thorough understanding of Venusti’s catalog, nor do we have much of a sense of his style prior to his arrival in Rome. Considering how quickly Venusti was brought into Michelangelo’s inner circle, whatever he was doing must have been attractive to the older artist.
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. Marcello Venusti / Last Judgment (copy after Michelangelo’s Last Judgment in the Sistine Chapel) / / Naples: Capodimonte Museum / Art Collection / Alamy Stock Photo
As William Wallace points out, although Venusti’s paintings are not in vogue today, Michelangelo clearly admired and appreciated the effects the younger artist was able to render with his brush. Another problem plaguing any discussion of Venusti is the tacit understanding of the artist as a miniaturist. Because so many of the works he produced
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. Marcello Venusti / Pietà (after Michelangelo) / c. / Rome: Galleria Borghese / Scala / Art Resource, NY
after Michelangelo’s designs are small, we tend to think of Venusti as someone who hardly ever worked in a large format. In fact, Venusti produced two large altarpieces after designs by Michelangelo on the subject of the Annunciation, one for the Cesi Chapel in Santa Maria della Pace and one in St. John the Lateran. Their relative obscurity in the oeuvres of both artists is due to the fact that the Cesi altarpiece is currently lost. The altarpiece in the Lateran has been moved to the sacristy and has only recently been cleaned and restored
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. Marcello Venusti / Crucifixion (after Michelangelo) / c. / Private Collection / The Picture Art Collection / Alamy Stock Photo
(Figure ). This means that any small-scale copies Venusti created after these designs – and he made quite a few – are far more well known than the originals. The splendid little panel in the Corsini Gallery in Rome, for example, is far more likely to be reproduced, and reproduced in color, than the altarpiece in the Lateran (Figure ). Far more people have seen the Corsini panel in person as well. The large altarpieces, though, should be understood as critically important interventions by Michelangelo into public, religious art in the s and s.
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. Marcello Venusti / Annunciation (after Michelangelo) / c. / Rome: St. John the Lateran / Photo Vatican Museums’ Images and Rights Department
They are his first artistic statements after the unveiling of the Last Judgment, and they were produced during a time when Aretino’s and Dolce’s criticisms were being written and published. Although perhaps not direct responses to the criticism he faced, the altarpieces demonstrate Michelangelo’s understanding of the terms of the debate over the Last Judgment as well as a marked change in his
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. Marcello Venusti / Annunciation (after Michelangelo) / c. / Rome: Galleria Corsini / Gallerie Nazionali di Arte Antica, Roma (MiC) – Bibliotheca Hertziana, Istituto Max Planck per la storia dell’arte / Enrico Fontolan
religious and artistic direction. In them, Michelangelo argues for and promises to facilitate a kind of intimate devotional encounter with God. Rather than a bombastic show of artistic prowess in the service of erudite theological ideas, Michelangelo instead promotes simple faith, quiet study, and contemplation. As such, the altarpieces seem to be designed, from the beginning, to be reproduced on a smaller scale. Moreover, Michelangelo uses Venusti’s
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particular interpretation of colore to promote engagement with the subject and downplay Buonarroti’s own distracting disegno. If his last public commission was too artificial and too little focused on religious ideas, then his next public commissions could not be criticized on the same grounds. Through this collaboration, Michelangelo not only distances himself from contemporary artists and altarpieces in Rome but also offers a critique of current trends in Roman religious art – even if he was the originator of such trends. The way that Michelangelo came to be involved in the creation of the Cesi Annunciation was fairly routine. Vasari indicates that Tommaso de’ Cavalieri intervened on behalf of Cardinal Cesi to procure the work from Michelangelo. Cavalieri, a young Roman nobleman, was the artist’s friend and muse. Michelangelo was friendly with Cesi and his family during this time, and the altarpiece should therefore be understood as “an instance . . . of favor, gift giving, and reciprocal relations.” The space may have provided further inducement for the artist to create the altarpiece, despite his busy schedule. Cesi’s family chapel in Santa Maria della Pace was right next to the Chigi Chapel with its frescoes by Raphael. Whatever Michelangelo produced in the space would immediately be compared to Raphael’s contributions next door. As Michelangelo seemingly never shied away from entering into competition with Raphael, even many years after the younger artist’s death, such an opportunity must have been too much to resist. Sometime before or , Michelangelo agreed to create the work, produced drawings for the altarpiece’s design, and handed the designs to Venusti to paint. The graphic record of Michelangelo’s involvement in the Cesi altarpiece is reasonably well documented, as several drawings by his hand have been traditionally associated with the project. Johannes Wilde calls Michelangelo’s preparation for the Cesi Annunciation “elaborate” and identifies at least a “cartonetto” that the artist worked up to pass along to Venusti. Although not full-sized cartoons, the cartonetto and drawings are highly finished and show the final arrangement of the figures as well as the basic iconography. The cartonetto for the Cesi altarpiece is in the Pierpont Morgan and, together with smaller copies by Venusti, such as those in the Corsini Gallery and the Rijksmuseum, offer us a reasonably accurate idea of what the lost original might have looked like (Figures and ). They also provide us with a sense of how Michelangelo worked with Venusti. Having determined the basics of the composition in rough sketches, Michelangelo then produced the more finished, but not full-sized, cartonetto. It was from this drawing that Venusti presumably sized up the drawing and painted the panel. It is certainly possible that Michelangelo created a full-sized cartoon, as he did for Ascanio Condivi in the s. However, only two such cartoons survive from the artist’s oeuvre, so their prevalence in these cases is difficult to quantify. The altarpiece in Saint John the Lateran has some
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. Marcello Venusti / Annunciation (after the Cesi altarpiece) / c. / Amsterdam: Rijksmusem / Album / Alamy Stock Photo
significant changes between the Uffizi cartonetto and the painting, particularly in the face and attitude of the Virgin (Figure ). Such changes indicate that Venusti either had significant freedom in his execution or that the careful work of editing happened in consultation with Michelangelo and during the painting process. If this is the case, then there is also the question of whether
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. Michelangelo Buonarroti / Annunciation / c. / New York: Pierpont Morgan Library / Archivart / Alamy Stock Photo
or not Venusti collaborated on the cartonetti before he began to paint, offering suggestions that would help the design better fit his painting style. However much Venusti collaborated on the drawing process and Michelangelo might have critiqued the painting, there was a more or less clear division of labor. Michelangelo provided the bulk of the design, and Venusti the bulk of the painting. Although it is the result of a relatively straightforward collaboration, the Cesi altarpiece is anything but ordinary. Its uniqueness has often been
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. Michelangelo Buonarroti / Study for an Annunciation (n. f ) / c. / Florence: Uffizi Gallery / Scala / Ministero per i Beni e le Attività culturali / Art Resource, NY
mentioned, yet it has rarely been explored in depth. The resulting Annunciation is not only unusual in terms of its iconography but also in terms of its relationship to contemporary altarpieces. Despite the fact that artists such as Tibaldi might have been making use of Michelangelo’s prior works as a kind of pattern book for figural composition, Michelangelo himself did not seem to be interested in perpetuating that particular aspect of his work. The cartonetto for and the copies after the altarpiece in Santa Maria della Pace attest to a composition that was spare, elegant, and lacking the kind of difficultà and figural excess we so closely associate with the artist of the Sistine or Pauline Chapels and his followers in Counter-Reformation Rome. Using the Pierpont Morgan drawing and small copies, such as the one in the Corsini Gallery, we can assume that the Cesi altarpiece likewise depicted Mary in a sixteenth-century bedroom. She sits at a small desk at the foot of her bed. Behind her, a green, draped canopy rises over the bed between herself and the hovering angel. This is a well-to-do contemporary bedroom. The floor is elegantly tiled, the fabrics plentiful, and the window in the background opens onto a city. Through it, we can just see part of a domed building. Mary has turned from her desk, twisting up and to the right to look into the face of the half-dressed angel. Each figure reaches toward the other. Combined with her gaping mouth, Mary’s gesture seems to indicate shock at the heavenly
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creature’s sudden appearance in her bedchamber. Her palm is turned up as her fingers separate into a gesture of question and alarm. Her other hand holds a book, seemingly marking her place with one elegant finger. Taken together, we should assume that this is the beginning of the narrative as described in Luke. Mary’s initial emotional reaction is one of surprise and fear. This is confirmed by the actions of the angel. He reaches out and down, extending his index finger not toward Mary’s stomach but toward her head in a kind of anointing gesture. The movement of the angel’s hand recalls his initial greeting to Mary, when he calls her “full of grace.” The angel’s other hand points to his stomach, perhaps prefiguring his news to Mary that she is about to become pregnant with the savior. Michelangelo has reversed the typical orientation of the two figures in the space. Mary is on the painting’s right side, while the angel enters from above and left. Rather than filling the rest of the interior with complicated figures, more angels, or even God the father himself, the two artists instead create a comfortable domestic interior populated only by the two protagonists. The lone indication of the heavenly beyond is provided by Venusti’s radiant color – shifting through a spectrum from yellow to red – around the small dove of the Holy Spirit at the very top of the composition. Mary, recently startled by the angel, turns away from the small cabinet in front of her that has been covered with a green cloth and, with the addition of a chair, is serving as a kind of desk. The Virgin carefully cradles the book from which she must have been reading. This is a wholly conventional aspect of the Annunciation. Mary, a serious student of the word of God, reads and understands the prophets of the Old Testament. She is not only a pious woman but further understands her grander role in the fulfilment of prophecy as the Virgin who will conceive and bear the messiah. Less conventionally, the table also holds a small bronze statuette of Moses smashing the tablets of the law. In a theological sense, the fact that Mary turns away from the statue and toward the angel, combined with Moses’s destruction of the “old law,” symbolizes the incarnation of the new law and the word made flesh that is Christ. Together with the household implements in the cabinet underneath the tabletop – a jug, a basket, and a candle – the bronze statuette would have provided both a recognizable domestic object for any viewer as well as a great deal of symbolic content. The jug, for example, could easily be connected to either the sacraments of baptism or communion. As a whole, the image created by Michelangelo and Venusti focuses on a simple, intimate, domestic, and contemporary encounter with God. Rather than figural, theological, or philosophical bombast, the emphasis in the Cesi altarpiece is on the rewards of personal piety and on seeing the Virgin as a kind of contemporary Roman exemplar. This emphasis even extends to the way the incarnation is portrayed in the work. Although the dove of the Holy Spirit hovers above the angel, the
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connection between heavenly and earthly is largely accomplished through cloth and color. The dove’s glowing radiance, for example, falls on the green cloth canopy of the bed. Its regular folds mimic rays of light, streaming the magnificence of heaven down toward the earthly woman. Green fabric of the same hue, moreover, continues around Mary’s shoulder and across her lower stomach, and terminates on the table beside her underneath the statue of Moses. The green fabric, then, effectively links the old law of Moses, the word of the book Mary holds, the Virgin’s womb, and the messenger of God. It is the progress of the green fabric through the composition that communicates the interconnected theology of prophecy and incarnation. The fact that the green fabric also links Mary, the angel, and the bed behind her further reminds the viewer that this scene is one where Mary is impregnated by the Holy Spirit as though in a marriage bed. Michelangelo leans heavily on Venusti’s skillful color to communicate this fundamentally important aspect of the Annunciation’s theology. From the luminous color around the angel to the careful placement of green fabric, it is Venusti, not Michelangelo, who depicts the progress of the Holy Spirit from the heavenly sphere to the word made flesh. Michelangelo’s complex and twisting Mary merely provides a superior and expressive form for it to wind around. Adding to the domestic character of the scene, the sculpture of Moses highlights another important aspect of the altarpiece: its function as a call to personal and intimate devotion. Though strongly symbolic in its content, the small bronze on Mary’s tabletop indicates that, prior to her forceful turn to gaze at the angel, she was contemplating either the statuette or the religious text in her hand or both. Small bronze statues were often used in this way in the Renaissance era – providing sensitive viewers the opportunity to consider form, narrative, or both in an intimate scale and setting. Such study would also have been physical – in addition to being gazed upon, these small bronzes were equally likely to be touched or picked up by those who studied them. Like religious texts, these objects were also used to prompt prayer and religious reflection. Vittoria Colonna, for example, Michelangelo’s great friend, wrote that gazing on an image of the Pietà prompted her to meditate on and write about the lamentation of the Virgin in her Pianto sopra il passione di Cristo. In other words, the prominent and unusual inclusion of the small statuette of Moses might have reminded contemporary viewers to pause and contemplate the scene in front of them with equal attention and fervor. In this sense, the small bronze works well with the moment chosen by Michelangelo and Venusti for this Annunciation. The Angel greets a startled Mary, and viewers who recognized this would have felt prompted to prayer by repeating the heavenly being’s opening salvo: “Hail Mary, full of Grace.” Both the overall scene and the details within it, therefore, are calls for personal devotion.
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What viewers find, then, is a composition tailormade for a kind of serious, quiet, and intense religious contemplation. This is partially demanded by the subject, which does not easily lend itself to large crowds of figures or an overly complicated composition. Nevertheless, Michelangelo and Venusti have stripped the subject down to its essence: two figures, meaningful gestures, luminous color, and a domestic interior. Each precisely selected element has been given space so that it can be considered individually and as a part of the larger narrative. In this way, we can appreciate the Moses statue as both a singular element of contemplation and a part of a larger theological message. As if to emphasize the quiet study seemingly demanded by the composition, the angel in this Annunciation does not point to Mary’s womb but to her forehead instead. The angel anoints the mother of God and also appears to implant the image of God in her mind. This gesture simultaneously encourages viewers to imprint the image of the Annunciation in their mind. As Christian Kleinbub has convincingly argued, this gesture is drawn from Michelangelo’s “anatomical poetics,” specifically the theory of the incarnation advanced by Thomas Aquinas in his Summa Theologica. Michelangelo and Venusti’s Annunciation is a visualization of the notion that the Virgin “received the Annunciation by way of imaginative and intellectual vision.” Aquinas here advances theories of sight put forward by St. Augustine. It was only after this superior, intellectual perception that the word became flesh and was incarnated in Mary’s womb. Gabriel’s secondary gesture toward his stomach further supports Aquinas’s ideas about the incarnation – “the mental conception of Christ must have preceded incarnation in the body.” Importantly for this study, this imaginative and intellectual vision was not limited to the Virgin. As Kleinbub points out, Augustine wrote that Christians should “marvel at . . . Mary . . . in the depths of their souls” and in their “heart.” This interior vision would cause Christians to likewise “conceive” Christ. In other words, the very gestures of the angel Gabriel appeal to serious, internal contemplation and meditation so that the viewer may know God. Taken together, the features of the work – its domestic setting, the sparseness of the composition, and its support for personal devotion – make it seem much better suited to a Roman interior than a large, public altarpiece. Altarpieces that are roughly contemporary to Michelangelo’s and depict the same subject, such as Francesco Salviati’s Annunciation in San Francesco a Ripa (), do not have the same characteristics (Figure ). For example, Salviati’s Virgin is clearly in a church filled with large columns that opens to a grand landscape beyond. She reads at an impressive, sculpted kneeler and is formally greeted by the angel. He bows to the Queen of Heaven, and she gracefully inclines her head. The whole interaction feels choreographed as though it were a mystery play acted out in the church itself. Combined with the Michelangelesque Godhead, who sends down the dove of the Holy Spirit
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. Francesco Salviati / Annunciation / c. / Rome: San Francesco a Ripa / jozef sedmak / Alamy Stock Photo
from the clouds, the ensemble lacks the intimacy and immediacy of Venusti’s painting. Although Salviati’s work might find a home in a domestic setting, it is clear that he thought of it, first and foremost, as being above an altar in a church. The collaboration between Venusti and Michelangelo, however, seems to have been envisioned from the first as something that works equally well on a
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smaller scale and with more intimate viewing – the kind of contemplation demanded by the bronze Moses statuette, for example. The relative simplicity of the figures and the intensity of their interaction function similarly in a smaller format to the way they do above an altar. In combination with the sparseness of the composition, the simplicity of the figures also makes the altarpiece easier to replicate in a smaller, painted format. The intimate character of the work and the careful handling of paint and color by Venusti may even be emphasized in a smaller copy. These features, along with the altarpiece’s allusions to solitary and domestic devotion, seem to indicate that Venusti’s many copies after the Cesi altarpiece were anticipated – even sought – by both Michelangelo and Venusti. In other words, the small-scale copies are a feature of both the panel and the collaboration, not an unintended consequence. If this is so, then Michelangelo could hardly have chosen a better collaborator for the project. Venusti’s earliest known commission in Rome, after all, was a copy after Michelangelo’s Last Judgment. Venusti had proven, from the beginning of his relationship with Michelangelo, that he could competently translate a large-scale work into a smaller one, even for a fresco as complex as the Last Judgment. Federico Zeri, one of Venusti’s most ardent supporters, also saw in the artist’s work qualities that would have been ideal not only for the commission of the Annunciation but also for all of the small domestic copies that followed it. As he notes, Venusti’s paintings have a “private intimacy,” even in his large public commissions. Such a quality could only have been beneficial to Michelangelo when embarking on the altarpiece and any subsequent replicas. Even if Venusti was the perfect collaborator with whom to create an altarpiece that was anticipated to be replicated in numerous smaller copies, this still does not answer the question of why Michelangelo chose to expect such an outcome. Why design a major altarpiece so that it functions almost better as a small, domestic religious painting? Part of the answer may have to do with the fact that Michelangelo’s drawings and finished works were already being copied, either as entire compositions or as fragments incorporated into other works. In a sense, by providing not only an eminently reproducible design and a competent copyist to complete it, Michelangelo was taking back a measure of control over the image. Because he never established a relationship with a printmaker, as Raphael did, this might also have been a way for Michelangelo to disseminate his work to a broader audience. However much Michelangelo might have wanted to have control over his images and their dissemination, it is also hard not to imagine him questioning the stakes and direction of the large-scale altarpiece in the s – perhaps even questioning the current direction of large-scale religious art in general. At a time when contemporary altarpieces and significant religious works in Rome
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were filled with complicated allusions to other artists, appealed to an erudite cognoscenti, and overwhelmed viewers with their aesthetics, the Annunciation in the Cesi Chapel participates in few of those trends. The antidote to the figural and compositional excess of Tibaldi, the Cesi altarpiece argues instead for a clear iconography, a relatively simple composition, and a legible message. In this sense, Michelangelo responded to the new age of religious art heralded by the criticism of the Last Judgment. If the Last Judgment led people away from God, confused the unsophisticated, and contained bodies in vulgar contortions and combinations, then the Annunciation in the Cesi Chapel is as far away from those problems as one could imagine. Moreover, contemporary altarpieces that used Michelangelo’s Last Judgment for figural references fell into the same trap that Buonarroti had found in the Sistine Chapel. They often distracted from the central message of their devotional works, calling attention instead to an oppressive artistic “genealogy.” The need to quote older masters and to speak to an educated, rather than devout, crowd ultimately subverted the very function of the altarpiece. In offering a relatively simple, domestic version of the Annunciation that promotes contemplation and prayer, Michelangelo consciously ran counter to contemporary trends in Rome – many that were of his own making. In so doing, he summarily pointed out the limitations of contemporary altarpieces to bring the faithful to God and offered, as the undisputed artistic leader of the time, a different way forward. This new path was also exceedingly copyable, thanks to the careful and simple model provided by Michelangelo and Venusti in the Cesi altarpiece. Considering the vociferous debate Michelangelo had ignited with his last major religious work, it is probably not surprising that he chose to collaborate on the Cesi altarpiece. Using Venusti’s brush not only enabled Michelangelo to complete the commission and distribute the design in the form of smaller copies, but it also offered Buonarroti some small measure of distance from the finished altarpiece. Although it was understood in its own time as a collaboration between the two artists, in much the same way as Michelangelo’s works with Jacopo Pontormo, one can imagine Buonarroti being able to deflect any potential criticism back onto the process of collaboration. He did not need to take full responsibility nor full credit for the finished product. But Venusti offered Michelangelo something else in this collaboration besides an expedient means to an end, a convenient fall guy, or a readymade copyist. Venusti also provided a method of painting and a mastery of colore – understood as both color and finish – that was attractive to Michelangelo, popular in the sixteenth century, and, perhaps most importantly, tempered Michelangelo’s often overwhelming and much criticized disegno. Michelangelo’s devotion to artifice over religion had troubled critics, but Venusti’s specific kind of colore promised to mitigate the older master’s obsession, creating an altarpiece (and copies) that would attract the faithful.
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Venusti’s paintings, particularly those after Michelangelo, are characterized by a sophisticated, affecting use of color and careful finishing of the surface. The Corsini Annunciation, for example, is luminous with clear, sumptuous colors – yellow, orange, pink, blue, and green. The subtle transitions between these colors, moreover, demonstrate the proficiency of a sensitive and skillful painter. The radiant light of God that suffuses the scene and emanates from the dove of the Holy Spirit changes from bright yellow, to orange, to reddish, as though Venusti were painting the refined gradations of a sunset. Although so many colors in so small a space might have the potential to be overwhelming, Venusti’s careful hand ensures that the effect is jewellike. The painting fairly glows from within, attracting attention from across a crowded gallery and inviting viewers to engage with it more closely. Similar effects can also be seen in copies after the Lateran altarpiece. A small panel in the Lowe Art Museum attributed to Venusti and replicating the Lateran painting shows the angel Gabriel dressed in the unusual color combination of a pale lavender robe with a soft blue sash that flutters away behind him (Figure ). Those same colors are repeated in tiny hatched and blended strokes in the heavenly creature’s wings. The effect is unusual and sophisticated. Moreover, there is an intense delight for viewers when such effects are noticed and understood. Again, the call to study the panels in a close, careful, and intimate manner is made through a combination of Michelangelo’s design and Venusti’s execution. In terms of attracting viewers, Venusti’s colore might have been even more persuasive than Michelangelo’s underlying drawing. Venusti’s painting was described by Giovanni Baglione in the seventeenth century as “devout, diligent, and vago.” The final term is one that Stuart Lingo has translated to mean “alluring” or “attractive,” and his study on Federico Barocci argues that vago and vaghezza are critical terms for understanding the art of the mid-sixteenth century. Vago and vaghezza had undeniably sensual overtones, implying the kind of allure often associated with a lover rather than with religious paintings. Nevertheless, the term, in the religious art of the sixteenth century and the circle of Vittoria Colonna, came to have significant importance. Religious paintings and spiritual poetry were able to embody the seemingly contradictory terms devout and vago at the same time. Indeed, such a combination “express[es] an ideal for modern religious images” and poetry alike in the period. Moreover, vago was a term “particularly linked to the allure of color.” Religious painting (and poetry in the circle of Vittoria Colonna) was not only supposed to be didactic but also beautiful and attractive. The combination of the two created an effective means of bringing souls to the faith. The collaboration on the Cesi, therefore, enabled Michelangelo to make use of Venusti’s colore and vaghezza, and he deliberately chose a collaborator whose method of painting and use of color would be attractive to a contemporary public. In addition, this colore and
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. Marcello Venusti / The Annunciation / Sixteenth century / Oil on panel. in. (framed) / .. / Gift of Maitland Smith / Courtesy of the Lowe Art Museum, Coral Gables, Florida
vaghezza effectively blunted Michelangelo’s often overwhelming disegno. In this sense, Michelangelo and Venusti simultaneously appealed to both educated and uneducated religious viewers in the sixteenth century given that disegno is most closely associated with intellect and colore with emotion. Using
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both, they created a religious work that was appealing to many different kinds of worshippers. For example, Michelangelo designed the Virgin in a twisting, complicated figura serpentinata. The entire pose is a kind of intellectual and artistic tour de force that attests to the artist’s understanding of anatomy, movement, and sprezzatura. Although her movement and pose make narrative sense, Michelangelo has still embellished and exaggerated the dramatic tension of her startled turn toward the angel. In many ways, this is the artist displaying an anticipated characteristic of his disegno – those in the sixteenth century expected Michelangelo’s bodies to contort in this way. They equally celebrated and condemned him for it. Moreover, the Virgin’s body type and clothing are a reference to an ancient sculpture in the collection of the Cesi family. The Virgin’s allusion to the classical past would have been particularly flattering to Cesi and satisfying for an elite group of viewers in sixteenthcentury Rome. Nevertheless, Venusti’s careful handling of Mary’s clothing, from the green that falls over her shoulder and across her lap, to the clear blue of her gown, to the cangiante on her belt, softens the effect of her twisting pose, providing a counterpoint in color to Michelangelo’s difficult design. The clear, radiant colors of the Virgin’s gown and Venusti’s deft handling of the brush are vago, attracting viewers who either do not understand Michelangelo’s elevated allusions or are not primed to appreciate his sophisticated disegno. In following Venusti’s colore through the composition, a viewer would have enacted the other sense of vago – wandering. Meandering through the painting, viewers may even have been emotionally moved by Venusti’s colore. Though the Cesi family might have recognized the allusions or appreciated Michelangelo’s disegno, the public in Santa Maria della Pace would have been seduced by Venusti’s alluring color. Both sets of viewers would then have been prompted to prayer, reflection, or contemplation by the scene in front of them. Again, although this strategy produced a strikingly original altarpiece in Santa Maria della Pace, the combination of disegno and colore would have worked equally well on a small panel in a domestic setting, provided that Venusti himself created the copy. In this sense, Michelangelo, through his collaboration with Venusti and his reliance on Venusti’s colore, finds a way to bring many different kinds of people to God, countering the criticism that his designs were confusing or opaque to the average worshipper and appealed only to the elite members of the Roman Curia. Michelangelo’s interest in sophisticated combinations of disegno and colore are characteristic of this period in his life. For example, he combined disegno and colore in his drawings for Vittoria Colonna to erudite and refined effect. Although he had a reputation for disdaining the affective and alluring qualities of colore as being the domain of women, the elderly, and the uneducated, Michelangelo clearly made savvy use of it in the case of his collaboration with
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Venusti. The result is a work that fits equally well in a prominent family’s public chapel or a domestic interior. The Cesi altarpiece is a work that can prompt both the intellectual elite and the everyday worshipper to think about the Incarnation, prayer, and devotion. It is also a public acknowledgment that one’s religious art cannot be based solely on intellect, disegno, or artifice. Recognizing the swirling critiques of his fresco and adjusting his religious images to suit the shifting attitudes of his day, Michelangelo’s collaboration with Venusti was an experiment in religious art and a change of course that happened in a public forum. The result is two works that are iconographically and religiously significant, however overlooked they might be in current scholarship. The collaboration between Venusti and Michelangelo was not limited to scenes of the Annunciation. The Madonna del Silenzio, for example, in addition to finding a ready audience for numerous copies, explores the theology of the Virgin and encourages viewers to meditate on the scene before them (Figure ). This image, like many designs Michelangelo produced in this period, is a modification of existing iconography. In this case, Michelangelo has reworked the cozy, often domestic, images of the Holy Family with St. John into something more ambiguous and quietly contemplative. Both Joseph and St. John, for example, cover their mouths using silencing gestures – an exhortation not to speak but to turn inward when confronted with the paired bodies of Christ and Mary in the foreground. As scholars have noted, St. John’s silencing gesture in particular seems directed at the viewer – a reminder that holy mysteries are best understood when one is silent or in the quiet of one’s own meditations and contemplations. The “all-wise” Queen of Heaven is here crowned with a cherub – a sign of her superior understanding. She holds a book in one hand and with the other both indicates toward and hovers over her son. Christ sleeps awkwardly on her lap, his body limp as though dead and not slumbering. The intense focus of the figures on the sleeping/dead infant Christ, the sparseness of the setting, and the particular interest in the Virgin’s understanding of her son’s future death is of a piece with Michelangelo’s other collaborations with Venusti. The design’s emphasis on quiet, meditative study, both through subject matter and composition, seems to have ensured the work’s reproduction throughout the sixteenth century and beyond. Venusti and others were kept quite busy making copies. Michelangelo and Venusti revisited the theme of the Cesi altarpiece for the Annunciation in St. John the Lateran some five years later. The result was a work that demonstrates the changing dynamic between the two artists. Venusti seemingly had a much freer hand in the painting’s execution, as the physiognomy of the Virgin, the angle of her gaze, and a few other details have been altered from the cartonetto in the Uffizi. For example, although the Uffizi drawing retains the bronze Moses statuette, that detail has been
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. Marcello Venusti / Madonna del Silenzio (after Michelangelo) / c. / London: National Gallery / © National Gallery, London / Art Resource, NY
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eliminated from the final painting. The encounter between earthly and heavenly has been substantially altered as well. Rather than looking up at a hovering angel, Mary meets Gabriel on the same ground, his gesture this time indicating her heart, not her head. The background, which played such an important role in the previous iteration of the theme, has been distanced from the foreground figures and no longer provides the conduit for the holy streams of light between the two figures. Venusti’s colore, too, has been markedly toned down. We are missing the sunset hues of the Corsini panel, for example. Nevertheless, the spare elegance of the composition remains intact between the two works, as does the intimate, contemplative mood. The darker palette of the painting not only complements the quiet mood of the work but also reveals the two foreground figures as if on a stage. Their interactions, though highlighted in a different manner, are still communicated through Venusti’s careful colore. This work was created for St. John the Lateran, one of the oldest and most important churches in the holy city. If ever there were a time for complicated figures, a swirling God-head, erudite allusions, and overwhelming disegno, surely Michelangelo would have employed it here. Instead, the altarpiece in the Lateran quietly and simply relates the story of the Incarnation of Christ and encourages personal devotion. Adapting to the demands of the CounterReformation, as well as anticipating domestic copies, Michelangelo once again runs against the trends he helped to create in contemporary Roman religious painting. Using Venusti’s skillful brush and careful colore, Michelangelo mitigates his own overwhelming disegno and sets his sights on bringing souls to God. . DANIELE, MICHELANGELO, AND THE DELLA ROVERE CHAPEL
Though Venusti was entrusted with interpreting only designs that were more or less finished, Daniele da Volterra was seen as capable of understanding and using much less complete ideas. It was only after Michelangelo’s more private drawings came to light that scholars began to understand the degree to which he gave small, often very preliminary sketches to Daniele to scale up, change, and adapt to his purposes. Hampered by both an incomplete understanding of Michelangelo’s drawings and Vasari’s jealous characterization of Daniele in the Lives, the degree of intimacy between the two artists has only really been recovered in modern scholarship. One of the most commonly studied cases of this is Daniele’s tour de force Deposition fresco in the Orsini Chapel, which is now widely accepted to be adapted from a small Michelangelo composition in Haarlem (Figures and ). That Michelangelo was giving Daniele incomplete sketches in an era when he was notoriously private with such sheets attests to the personal and professional intimacy of their relationship. The working relationship between Michelangelo and Daniele was seemingly more a meeting of the minds than the collaboration between Michelangelo and
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. Daniele da Volterra / Deposition / c. / Rome: Trinità dei Monti / Scala / Art Resource, NY
Venusti. Artistically, at least, Daniele was understood by the older artist as being on much more equal footing. Morten Steen Hansen calls them “kindred spirits.” Daniele was one of Michelangelo’s closest friends and colleagues in the waning years of his life.
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. Michelangelo Buonarroti / Studies for the Deposition / c. / Haarlem: Teylers Museum / The Picture Art Collection / Alamy Stock Photo
This focus on individual and specific instances of Michelangelo’s influence on Daniele is of a piece with much of the scholarship on the younger artist. Because of Daniele’s working relationship with Michelangelo and his training in Perino del Vaga’s workshop, discussions of Daniele’s work have largely been about parsing influences. There is an ongoing debate about the role Raphael, Michelangelo, and other artists played in Daniele’s work in both certain
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. della Rovere Chapel, general view (decoration) / – / Rome: Trinità dei Monti / Andrea Jemolo / Scala / Art Resource, NY
instances and in terms of his overarching career. This is perhaps most particularly the case in the della Rovere Chapel in Trinità dei Monti (Figure ). Completed in the late s and early s for Lucrezia della Rovere, the chapel features scenes from the life of the Virgin. Among the most striking are the altar wall, which depicts the Assumption of the Virgin, and the wall to the right of the altar, which shows the Presentation of the Virgin in the Temple (Figures and ). Lacking a specific drawing by Michelangelo to aid Daniele, scholars have wrangled over whom Daniele cites the most in the
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. Daniele da Volterra / Assumption of the Virgin from the della Rovere Chapel / c. / Rome: Trinità dei Monti / Andrea Jemolo / Scala / Art Resource, NY
chapel. Ciardi and Moreschini, for example, see Daniele looking to Raphael’s Stanza dell’Incendio for inspiration, especially for the beggars on the steps of the temple in the Presentation. Other scholars have understood the chapel to be broadly Michelangelesque or, as Sydney Freedberg put it, “strongly dependent on Michelangelo for its anatomies and canon.” Whatever Michelangelo’s influence, it was probably not direct. We have no surviving drawings from the older artist, for example, that inform Daniele’s composition in the way that we do for the Orsini Chapel or for Michelangelo’s altarpieces with Venusti. In this sense, Michelangelo’s influence is broad and nonspecific, more drawn from the ongoing conversations and relationship between the two artists than from any graphic works exchanged. Despite this enduring debate about the question of influences, there has been a paucity of analysis on what such borrowings might mean. One of the few scholars to speculate on the reason for Daniele’s appropriations in the chapel, Hansen argues that the younger artist sought to distinguish himself as “Michelangelo’s elect follower.” By borrowing from him broadly in the della Rovere Chapel and elsewhere, Daniele would cast himself as “Il Divino’s” true artistic successor. In Hansen’s analysis, this is largely accomplished in both the Orsini and della Rovere Chapels by Daniele’s reinterpreting Michelangelo’s controversial figures from the Last Judgment into more
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. Daniele da Volterra / Presentation of the Virgin from the della Rovere Chapel / c. / Rome: Trinità dei Monti / ART Collection / Alamy Stock Photo
appropriate religious settings. For example, the nude beggars in the Presentation of the Virgin are placed in a “setting where nakedness was justified by abject poverty.” In this way, Daniele “made an argument for the exemplarity of Michelangelo’s artifice for church imagery.”
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Although I agree that Daniele addresses the contemporary censure of Michelangelo in this fresco, I would argue that Daniele does so with a much more critical tone than Hansen admits. Michelangelo’s relationship with Daniele – one where they were friends and confidants – is intimate enough to suggest that Daniele understood the degree to which Michelangelo was grappling with the religious and artistic demands of the age. The della Rovere Chapel, then, is not an attempt to excuse Michelangelo’s artifice but instead to criticize it, at least in terms of its effectiveness in devotional painting. The program of the chapel, particularly in the Presentation and Assumption, offers criticism of Michelangelo’s art in a similar vein to that offered by Aretino, Gilio, and others. Simultaneously, it demonstrates the need for artists to find a new way forward in the changing religious atmosphere of sixteenth-century Rome. Michelangelo and Daniele, through thoughtful collaboration and discussion, signal not only their recognition of the shifting religious and artistic landscape but also how Michelangelo’s art might fit into it. In addition, the frescoes echo the penitent and contrite message of Michelangelo’s portrait medal. Daniele accomplishes this through his specific appropriations of Michelangelo’s figures, how he incorporates portraits of Michelangelo himself into both compositions, and how he constructs his compositional space both within the individual frescoes and in the chapel as a whole. One of the most overt instances of Daniele’s borrowing from Michelangelo in the chapel comes in the fresco of Presentation of the Virgin at the temple. The entire composition is bisected by a strong diagonal created by the corner of the long staircase that leads up to the doorway of the temple. With light pouring in from the viewer’s left, the fresco’s entire right side is highlighted by the brightness of the white marble steps. The fresco’s left side is strongly shadowed. Equally dark are the areas at the top of the composition where the tall columns and the porch of the temple building – implied, but not depicted – cast the priests, Mary, and her family, and even worshippers coming out of the temple into deep shade. In the foreground of the fresco, a man dressed in gold and green prepares to ascend the first step on his way into the temple, simultaneously turning back and gesturing to his companion, who follows from the viewer’s left. It is this young man who offers our easiest path through the composition. We follow his ascent to see that he is one of at least three worshippers taking the same path into the sanctuary – a path flanked by nude beggars in contorted poses. It is only when we follow the line of worshippers and beggars to the top of the composition that the main subject of the work – the presentation of the young Virgin Mary to the temple priests by her mother and father – comes into view. This is a central moment in the young Madonna’s life. As related by the Proto-Evangelium of James, Mary resided in the temple because of her particular favor with God and to preserve her allimportant virginity. Although seemingly occupying the same staircase, the
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vignette of Mary and her family has almost no connection to the beggars and worshippers that dominate the lit foreground of the work. Only Mary’s father, Joachim, peeks out from under his hood to gaze at the action on the far side of the steps. It is the worshippers going up the steps of the temple and the beggars accosting them on their route that dominate our experience of the fresco in the chapel, or at the very least distract us from the purported “subject” of the scene itself. The visual weight, the lighting, and the composition all conspire to draw attention away from the bright, precocious Mary and her family in the background. Viewers focus instead on the almost grotesque figures on the other side of the steps. Part of this is certainly Daniele making a statement about his influences. Whether we accept that the Stanza dell’Incendio or Michelangelo’s Ignudi are his inspiration, it is clear that he wants to highlight these figures and give them a disproportionate visual weight. Moreover, Hansen is not wrong that, by casting out the angelic Ignudi from the Sistine Ceiling and rendering them as beggars on the streets of Jerusalem, Daniele is making their artificial excesses “decorous.” But turning Michelangelo’s formally sublime figures into awkward vagrants also contains no small measure of critique, particularly considering the disproportionate emphasis Daniele gives them in the composition. Daniele transforms the angelic and complicated figures of the older artist, rendering them empty and wanting. The otherworldly quality that Michelangelo’s figures have on the Sistine Ceiling or in the Last Judgment is completely missing from Daniele’s beggars. Their contorted poses, rather than deftly communicating the creativity and skill of the artist or the figures’ closeness to God, instead relate their anguish, pain, and hunger. And this is done in a not altogether convincing manner. They look more like actors overplaying their roles than truly hungry and desperate men clamoring for a spare coin. The first beggar on the viewer’s left, for example, leans back for no discernible reason, his exaggerated limbs both holding up his brawny torso and lifting his cup as though it were some precious object of veneration, not as though he expects anything to fall into it from the passerby. The result are figures that call into question Michelangelo’s nudes from the Sistine Chapel as fitting models for other artists to follow, especially when rendering religious narratives. When Daniele uses Michelangelo as a source in other frescoes in the chapel, this implicit critique is not always present. The older artist’s complicated figures work well in the Massacre of the Innocents (Figure ), for example, located directly across the chapel from the Presentation in the Temple. Here, the exaggerated musculature and poses, the intentional and evident difficultà, work together to create an image of frenzy, violence, and chaos. From the soldier who leans against the column in a studied contrapposto reminiscent of the David to the soldier who wrenches the baby from the grasp of the woman in
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. Daniele da Volterra and Michele da Alberti / Massacre of the Innocents from the della Rovere Chapel / c. / Rome: Trinità dei Monti / Dipper Historic / Alamy Stock Photo
the foreground, each figure seems drawn directly from Michelangelo’s example. Yet each advances the narrative of viciousness and terror. The nonchalant soldier in contrapposto shows a callous disregard for human life, particularly as his comrades are engaged in tearing babies and toddlers limb
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from limb. Again, this is not the most flattering light in which Michelangelo’s muscular nudes might be recast, but at least such borrowings help the viewer understand the religious narrative and empathize with the afflicted mothers and children. This is not the case in the Presentation fresco, where the beggars’ poses and physiques detract from the rest of the composition. Daniele may be using Michelangelo’s visual language, but the effect is to distract from his religious narrative. Rather than focusing on the miraculous woman entering the temple, viewers are absorbed by parsing the unrealistic drama of the foreground. Daniele models one of the central critiques of the Last Judgment in this way – that Michelangelo’s figures do not lead souls to God but instead draw attention away from him. His nudes, like Michelangelo’s in the Last Judgment, have obscured the meaning of the fresco, obscured the religious themes, privileged art over faith, and made viewers uncomfortable. In this sense, Daniele agrees with Michelangelo’s critics on the Last Judgment and is most likely offering this critique either with Buonarroti’s blessing or at his request. Perhaps the most open critique of his friend, however, comes in the form of the surreptitious and clueless figure in dark clothing at the top of the stairs. The colors of the figure’s clothing and the way he crosses his legs are a reference to the long-recognized portrait of Michelangelo by Raphael in the Stanza della Segnatura (Figure ). Rather than looking off into the distance, Daniele’s seated figure is absorbed in the text he holds on his lap. Oblivious to the drama of the beggars, the miraculous event happening behind him, and even the man
. Raphael / School of Athens (Philosophy) from the Stanza della Segnatura / – / Vatican City: Vatican Museums / incamerastock / Alamy Stock Photo
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attempting to offer him a coin, he exists apart. Wrapped up in his intellectual pursuits, Michelangelo’s proxy cares neither for the human drama spread out before him nor for the miraculous woman behind him. In this sense, his willful blindness and his disregard for those around him render him as inept and useless as the transported Ignudi who gyrate on the steps below him. Neither the seated figure nor the beggars advance the religious narrative or even seem aware of the holy event taking place near them. This fresco, while still conforming to the requirements of the program and overtly using Michelangelo as a reference and guide, does so in less than strictly glowing terms. Acknowledging the swirling controversy, both Michelangelo and Daniele craft a new direction and offer a plea via the altar wall to those visiting the chapel. The altar wall of the della Rovere Chapel, like the Orsini Chapel across the nave, is a tour de force (Figure ). In the foreground, two figures lean on the altar table, engrossed in a conversation, a book closed beneath one of the figure’s elbows. Framing the central vignette and the other figures are two red marble columns, which, although painted, seem to exist as part of the architecture of the chapel. They hold up a portico whose roof is opened by an oculus. This opening is seemingly lit by the actual window of the chapel above, and, when standing in the chapel, the visitor sees a natural elision between the painted opening of the oculus and the actual opening of the window. It is through this opening that Mary is lifted into heaven to sit at the right hand of God. Surrounding her ascent are the apostles. Brightly dressed – some in cangiante – they gesture to the Virgin and to each other, clearly unable to comprehend the miraculous event taking place in front of them. Surprisingly few of the apostles look at Mary as she is raised on a cushion of clouds supported by a circle of putti. Instead, like the two figures leaning on the altar table, they engage with each other, debating, shouting, and contemplating. Two of the apostles look to us – including one dressed in a pink robe on the viewer’s right. This apostle is also a portrait of Michelangelo and is the only figure to point specifically to the miraculous event happening above him and to engage directly with the viewer’s gaze. Although Michelangelo’s figure has a counterpoint on the viewer’s extreme left, this apostle does not gesture to Mary but merely invites us to consider the scene as a whole in front of him. In this fresco, the reference to Michelangelo has undergone a stunning transformation. No longer an allusion to Raphael’s Stanza portrait, Michelangelo here takes his own shape. A portrait clearly drawn from life, Michelangelo’s purpose and attitude in the scene have also shifted dramatically. Neither self-absorbed nor ignorant of the scenes happening either in front of or behind him, Michelangelo as apostle seems to know precisely what is happening. He turns to face the viewer and engages our gaze directly, but
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points back and beyond him to the ascending Virgin. An interlocutor who directs us to the most important aspect of the fresco, he insists that we move beyond him and that we focus our gaze directly on the divine. Certainly, characterizing Michelangelo as an apostle is a way of highlighting the artist’s piety, but Daniele does so in a curious manner. Michelangelo offers himself as a kind of tortured guide. Though he knows the audience should be focused on the Virgin’s ascent, he does not turn around and participate in the other apostles’ adulations and exclamations over the event. Like his previous iteration in the Presentation, this Michelangelo appears unable to see the miraculous event for himself. In this sense, both figures exhibit a kind of metaphorical blindness, which is rendered even more potent by the actions and expressions of the apostle directly behind Michelangelo. This man, dressed in yellow, throws his arms wide in amazement and looks heavenward with solemn awe, taking in the full splendor of the Virgin’s ascent. Although Michelangelo as apostle implores the viewer to look to the Virgin, to heaven, to the beyond, he cannot seem to complete that action himself. The two Michelangelo figures, then, represent his evolution as a religious artist and even anticipate the artist’s self-characterization in his portrait medal. Though not physically blind like the pilgrim, both figures are unable to see the important events, people, and ideas taking place all around them. In the Presentation fresco, Michelangelo is so wrapped up in his own concerns that he refuses to acknowledge the world around him. In the Assumption, however, the artist has learned the error of his ways. He knows what the focus should be on, even if he himself cannot train his gaze upon it. Both men seem out of step with their religious settings and powerless to change their behavior. Particularly in the Assumption fresco, Michelangelo seems to be searching frantically for a way to present this miracle to the viewer and settles on using the visual language and talent of a friend rather than his own expertise. It is fitting, too, that the apostle Michelangelo gestures to a Virgin who is, in her own right, Michelangelesque. Some have seen in her a reinterpretation of Sebastiano del Piombo’s collaborative Pietà with Michelangelo. This may be the case, but a closer precedent both geographically and visually might be the Rachel or the Contemplative Life, from the tomb of Julius II (Figure ). The flame-like twist of her body as she gazes heavenward is not unlike that of Daniele’s Virgin. Hansen notes that having Michelangelo point to an adaptation of Michelangelo’s own invention in a fresco painted by Daniele is a way for the younger artist to mark “a dual or shared authorship.” But the allusion must have religious meaning as well. Why are Michelangelo and Daniele so keen to gaze on this contemplative woman whose eyes are trained on heaven? In a certain sense, this Michelangelo offers a solution to the problem raised by the Presentation fresco. In the Presentation fresco, Michelangelo and the figures born of his imagination overwhelm the narrative, preventing viewers from
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. Michelangelo Buonarroti / Rachel or the Contemplative Life / c. / Rome: San Pietro in Vincoli / Bildarchiv Monheim GmbH / Alamy Stock Photo
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adequately concentrating on and contemplating Mary’s story. In the Assumption, both the artist and his creation implore and model meditative, devotional behavior for a viewer. Daniele’s adoption of Michelangelo’s devout female figure with her eyes trained on heaven is a literal and figurative elevation for one of the older artist’s less celebrated creations. At the same time, the heroic male nudes, ostensibly Michelangelo’s greatest legacy, are seen as ineffective and distracting to the religious narrative. Both frescoes offer potent commentaries on what makes effective religious art and how to bring souls to God using Michelangelo’s example. Daniele’s creation of space in the chapel reinforces the unequal abilities of the two modes of making religious art, both born of Michelangelo’s oeuvre. Although the individual figures tell part of the tale, it is the viewer’s place within the real and fictive space of the chapel that helps us understand which is more effective as a religious painting. Daniele visually dissolves the walls of the chapel and places his figures in spaces that are, more or less, an extension of our own when we stand in the space. The framing red marble columns on the altar wall, for example, do look like they are holding up the gold and white molding that separates the lower scenes from those above. The color of the marble that he favors for both his columns and the balustrade that runs around the bottom part of the Presentation and Massacre frescoes is drawn from the real architectural details of the chapel. The actual doorways that lead from the della Rovere Chapel to the chapels on either side of it are made of arches of the same red stone as the painted balustrade, arches, and columns on the walls of the chapel. Daniele even adds similar arched doorways in paint in the same position as the real ones. In other words, the narratives of the Assumption, Presentation, and Massacre appear to be spaces into which the viewer could walk – they are continuous with the space of the chapel in which we stand. This illusion is particularly striking on the altar wall, where Mary appears to fly up through fictive architecture that looks like the real thing while two apostles lean on both a painted altar table and the actual altar table in the chapel at the same time. All that worshippers standing in the space need to do is go around to the side of the altar in order to take their place next to the other apostles. Participating in the rituals enacted on the altar table, we can stand shoulder to shoulder with them, following the imploring and inviting gestures of both Michelangelo as apostle and his counterpart on the fresco’s right side. The ability to be absorbed into the holy mystery taking place in front of us is possible because of Daniele’s configuration of the fictive space of the fresco and its relationship to the actual space of the chapel. We are invited to see the scene depicted as happening in front of us, as being a part of our realm. The two frescoes on the side walls, however, both invite this kind of interaction and then forcefully deny it at the same time. At key moments in both frescoes, Daniele ruptures the carefully crafted elision between the space
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of the chapel and the space of the narrative. The moment in the Presentation is most striking, as Daniele announces the artifice of his construction at the same place he invites the viewer to enter the painting. The male figure in yellow and green who prepares to ascend the steps is framed by the broken red marble balustrade that links fictive and actual arched doors in the chapel. Rather than devising an architectural solution to admit the central figure (stairs, for example), Daniele simply cuts it off, leaving the partial stump of a baluster behind. Parts of the architecture are artificially erased in order to afford us a full view of the man in yellow and green. After painstakingly creating his fictive architecture, Daniele completely undermines his naturalistic effects in this supremely distracting moment. Viewers have to spend time on this vignette, struggling to make sense of it in the overall chapel, before moving on to the rest of the fresco. Directly up from this confusing segment of the fresco are Michelangelo’s Ignudi figures, recently transformed into beggars on the streets of Jerusalem. Daniele’s decision to do this is particularly potent because he had another model from which to work when constructing his fictive architecture. As Bernice Davidson has noted, the immediate precedent for Daniele’s conversion of “the entire wall surface to an illusionistic space” would have been Il Sodoma’s fresco of the Marriage of Alexander and Roxane in the Villa Farnesina (Figure ). Sodoma designed a cunning solution to admit the viewer into the space of the life-size figures on the wall of the Villa. As Anthony Blunt describes, “In the middle this barrier is broken, and the artist has painted a short
. Il Sodoma (Giovanni Antonio Bazzi) / The Marriage of Alexander and Roxanne / c. / Rome: Villa Farnesina / Volgi archive / Alamy Stock Photo
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flight of steps which invites the spectator to pass from one world to the other.” Although it might be possible to imagine oneself stepping through the ruptured balustrade to join the other figures on the steps of the temple, the abruptness of that break stops us in our tracks. Moreover, it calls attention to the artificial nature of the fictive architecture and spaces that make up the walls of the chapel. Most of the chapel insists on an elision between our space and the space of the frescoes, but the broken balustrade denies that possibility at the same time. The invitation, then, is to enter the sacred space, and the message from the painted architecture is to announce its own artificiality, thereby denying our ability to step into the holy narrative. In effect, Daniele criticizes most religious art of the time, but especially that of Michelangelo. Artifice, the quality that was most prized by supporters and most condemned by critics, is here rendered as a potential positive but ultimately as antithetical to the goal of religious art. The viewer cannot, as Michelangelo exhorts on the altar wall, focus their gaze on the heavenly beyond and become absorbed into their worship and contemplation of holy things. Instead, Daniele’s conscious play with artifice in the chapel highlights how it can become distracting and take the attention away from God. The Presentation fresco, from balustrade to beggars to Michelangelo’s proxy, is a lesson in how to overwhelm the central narrative. The altar wall, in the meantime, attempts to refocus our attention, draw us into the narrative, and encourage us to meditate on the sacred, not on Daniele’s conscious representation of the sacred. Like his collaborations with Marcello Venusti, Michelangelo’s involvement with Daniele and his influence on his art points to a different direction for religious art in the reform era. Through both Venusti and Daniele, but in strikingly different ways, Michelangelo argues for art that prompts viewers to prayer, devotion, and a personal encounter with holy images. This path, encouraged by Venusti’s altarpieces and their domestic copies, as well as the della Rovere Chapel, also signals Michelangelo’s engagement with the criticism that dogged the Last Judgment. What he charts through his collaborators is how to find one’s way back to a religious art that brings all souls – not simply the educated viewers of the Roman Curia – to God. In so doing, Michelangelo also anoints the next generation of religious artists – those who might be able to both rescue his legacy and further the kind of religious art Michelangelo created in his later years. These artistic collaborators and inheritors would be able to remind future generations of Michelangelo as the blind pilgrim seeking absolution, not the arrogant man who filled the Pope’s chapel with indecorous nudes. This is not to say that all of Michelangelo’s late collaborations were equally successful. Perhaps encouraged by Ascanio Condivi’s ability to promote Michelangelo’s own vision of his life in writing, Buonarroti entrusted one of
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the strangest and most haunting drawings he ever produced to the younger artist to execute in paint. Michelangelo’s so-called Epifania all but demands that a viewer contemplate the holy figures at an uncomfortably close distance (Figure ). Pushed to the front of the picture plane, a seated Mary occupies most of the center of the drawing from top to bottom. She turns to her right to address a male figure
. Michelangelo Buonarroti / The Epiphania cartoon / c. / London: British Museum / © The Trustees of the British Museum / Art Resource, NY
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whose emphatic, foreshortened gesture points out and to the front with an upturned palm. Mary turns away from another figure, sometimes identified as Joseph. Her left arm reaches back toward him in a gesture some have read as pushing him away. Between Mary’s knees, the infant Christ child half sits, half lies on a cushion while his head leans up against the inside of Mary’s left thigh. It is not clear if he is sleeping, though his posture and heavy lids suggest that he is dozing in an unlikely and uncomfortable position. His young cousin, St. John the Baptist, wears an animal skin and peers around the Virgin’s left knee to gaze at his slumbering savior. Originally, Mary’s arm inclined down toward the young St. John but was reoriented and hidden by drapery during the design process. Mary’s head has likewise been shifted from just off center to its final location at the heart of the composition. At least two other figures are schematically rendered and visible behind the frieze-like assemblage of bodies in the front. Curiously, despite their closeness to the viewer, none of the holy figures addresses the viewer or seeks to draw a faithful worshipper into their space. Instead, we are strangely isolated from them – forced to contemplate what they could possibly be doing together, pushed into uncomfortable proximity, yet barred from sharing the same space. Nevertheless, the sheet has been widely praised in the literature on Michelangelo’s drawings. Aside from the range of effects that Michelangelo was able to produce using his various drawing techniques, the work is so prized because it is one of only two surviving cartoons from the artist’s hand. Created from twenty-six separate sheets of paper that have been glued together, the drawing’s ultimate purpose was to create a design for transfer to a panel for Ascanio Condivi to paint. Condivi never completed the panel, and what he left behind is hardly inspiring (Figure ). Scholarship on the relationship between the cartoon and the unfinished painting has always stressed the gulf of talent between the two artists. Hugo Chapman, for example, has described Michelangelo’s drawing as a work of “solemn majesty” with an “austere hermetic quality.” Conversely, Condivi’s painting, in Chapman’s estimation, is a “labored effort” from a pupil of “pedestrian abilities.” Chapman does take some pity on Condivi, though, conceding that neither the theme nor the various pentimenti in the cartoon were particularly helpful for the younger artist and that he probably was left to infer quite a lot about Michelangelo’s intent for the panel. Although there were choices to be made on the level of composition, Condivi equally had to make some difficult decisions about the iconography. In modern scholarship, the figure to the Virgin’s right has been identified variously as St. John the Evangelist, the prophet Isaiah, and St. Julian. Johannes Wilde simply called him “the speaker,” although the British Museum points out that the figure’s gender is “not unambiguous.” Indeed,
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. Ascanio Condivi / Epiphania (after Michelangelo) / c. / Florence: Casa Buonarroti / Associazione Metamorfosi, Rome / Photo Scala, Florence / Art Resource, NY
the wrangling over who the various figures are and what exactly is depicted has dominated most, if not all, of the scholarship around the work. The cartoon and accompanying painting are large, indicating that they were probably destined for an altarpiece of some considerable importance. Ernst Gombrich has attempted to connect the project to an altar in San Giovanni dei Fiorentini. Though this has not gained wide acceptance, the impulse to attach the design to that kind of space and function seems correct.
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The implications of this are important but as yet unexamined in the scholarship on these two works. If we understand this collaboration, however unsuccessful it might have been, in the same light as those with Venusti and Daniele, we will notice some remarkable similarities. They all are large public interventions into religious art in the mid-sixteenth century. Each takes up established iconographies and changes them significantly – in the case of Condivi, it alters the iconography so much that it is practically unreadable. Moreover, all three encourage – even exhort – viewers to slow down, to contemplate, to focus their attention on the image before them, and to try to understand all manner of holy mysteries. Through these public statements, Michelangelo offers images that inspire prayer and devotion, that bring minds to God. They are also noticeably free of the kinds of figures that raised such ire on the part of his critics, except in Daniele’s Presentation fresco, where they are heavily critiqued. Moreover, these images, with their emphasis on devotion and contemplation, point to a new interest in Michelangelo’s life, one that would come to dominate his religious art as he neared death. In creating absorbing, contemplative works that urged viewers to prayer, he could also be understood as encouraging viewers to meditation. A centuries-old practice that promised to bring practitioners into contact with the divine, meditation would have been most readily modeled for Michelangelo through his friendship with Vittoria Colonna. Like his collaborative works, the drawings he created for his friend were made to inspire devotion and encourage contemplation of the divine. NOTES
A good discussion of reproduction and drawing after the Battle of Cascina can be found in Joost Keizer, “Michelangelo, Drawing, and the Subject of Art,” Art Bulletin , no. (September ): –. Giovanni Battista Armenini, On the True Precepts of the Art of Painting, ed. and trans. Edward J. Olszewski (New York: Burt Franklin, ), . Excerpted from Die klassische Kunst, translated by Hansen, In Michelangelo’s Mirror, . Wölfflin goes on to note that, although the painting appears to be a satire, it is one of the most earnest imitations of Michelangelo in the s. Heinrich Wölfflin, Die Klassische Kunst: Eine Einführung in die italienische Renaissance (Basel: Schwabe, ), . Contemporary supporters of the maniera would not have had any such trouble. See Bosch, Mannerism, Spirituality, and Cognition, particularly chap. . Hall, Sacred Image, –. Here, Hall applies Fra Ambrogio Catarino Politi’s words to works like Tibaldi’s. Nagel, Michelangelo and the Reform of Art, . Nagel’s argument is largely centered around the Man of Sorrows imagery and how Michelangelo uses it to “reform” the altarpiece in the sixteenth century. Perhaps because of the subject matter, Michelangelo’s collaborative altarpieces are not considered by Nagel in the context of altarpieces in the age of reform. Nevertheless, the exclusion of these works is somewhat puzzling, considering Nagel’s interest in Michelangelo’s altarpieces.
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William Wallace is one of the few exceptions to this and reminds readers, “Venusti was much more than a factotum. It would be a grave mistake to dismiss him as one of the colorless ‘pupils’ of Michelangelo, or worse, as a mere imitator. The fact is that late in his life Michelangelo discovered in Venusti a talented and trusted associate who could realize the master’s designs in paint.” William E. Wallace, “Michelangelo and Marcello Venusti: A Case of Multiple Authorship,” in Reactions to the Master: Michelangelo’s Effect on Art and Artists in the Sixteenth Century, ed. Francis Ames Lewis and Paul Joannides (Burlington, VT: Ashgate, ), –. There has been some recent scholarly engagement with Michelangelo’s collaboration with Pontormo, which produced the Noli me tangere. For example, see Christian K. Kleinbub, “To Sow the Heart: Touch, Spiritual Anatomy, and Image Theory in Michelangelo’s Noli me tangere,” Renaissance Quarterly , no. (Spring ): –. For example: Robert S. Liebert, “Raphael, Michelangelo, Sebastiano: High Renaissance Rivalry,” Source: Notes on the History of Art , no. (Winter ): –; Elena Calvillo, “Authoritative Copies and Divine Originals: Lucretian Metaphor, Painting on Stone, and the Problem of Originals in Michelangelo’s Rome,” Renaissance Quarterly , no. (Summer ): –; and Matthias Wivel, Michelangelo and Sebastiano (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, ). Alessia Alberti, Alessandro Rovetta, and Claudio Salsi, D’après Michelangelo (Venice: Marsilio, ). Nagel, “Gifts,” –. On the prints, see Barnes, Michelangelo in Print, –. I think it is an open question whether or not Michelangelo thought his gifts would be circulated beyond the recipient, at least in the beginning. As time went on, however, he could not have been ignorant of the likelihood that his presentation drawings would have lives of their own and spawn copies far beyond his reach. Maria Ruvoldt notes that more than a dozen copies in various media were made after Michelangelo’s Dream, a drawing for Tommaso de’ Cavalieri. Maria Ruvoldt, “Copies after Michelangelo’s Dream for Ottavio Farnese?,” Source: Notes on the History of Art , no. (Summer ): –. For more, see Maratsos, “Michelangelo, Vittoria Colonna,” –. Nagel, Michelangelo and the Reform of Art, . Nagel also doesn’t engage with the printed and painted reproductions of these drawings. Wallace, “Michelangelo and Marcello Venusti,” . A good overview of the scholarship on the Venusti can be found in Thomas Kren, ed., The Renaissance Nude (Los Angeles: J. Paul Getty Museum, ), . Venusti was not from Mantua but Valtellina, near Milan. For more, see Massimo Romeri, “Le origini lombarde di Marcello Venusti,” in Intorno a Marcello Venusti, ed. Barbara Agosti and Giorgio Leone (Soveria Mannelli: Rubbettino Editore, ), –. Wallace, “Michelangelo and Marcello Venusti,” . Federica Kappler and Massimo Romeri, “Michelangelo e Venusti: dal prototipo alla replica. Il problema delle Annunciazioni,” Nuovi Studi , no. (): –. Georg W. Kamp, Religiöse Kunst im Umfeld Michelangelos (Egelsbach: Hänsel-Hohenhausen, ). Michelangelo was godfather to Venusti’s son, also named Michelangelo. William E. Wallace, “Michelangelo and Venusti Collaborate: The Agony in the Garden,” Source: Notes on the History of Art , no. (Fall ): –. Wallace, “Michelangelo and Venusti,” . As Kappler and Romeri point out, this is a legacy that can be traced back to Vasari. Federica Kappler and Massimo Romeri, “Michelangelo and Marcello Venusti: le Annunciazioni: prototipi, repliche, derivazioni,” in Michelangelo e “la maniera di figure piccole”, ed. Marcella Marongiu (Florence: Edifir, ), . Capelli hypothesizes that the Cesi altarpiece was removed in the s because it was too big for the renovated, baroque altarpiece frame. That frame is now cm, meaning that Venusti’s original would have been bigger than this. Simona Capelli, “Michelangelo
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Buonarroti, Marcello Venusti, e l’Annunciazione di Santa Caterina dei Funari in Roma: un recupero dell’arte controriforma nel primo seicento romano,” Studi Romani , nos. – (): . Donati places the measurements at cm. Andrea Donati, “La verità su Marcello Venusti nella chiesa di Santa Maria della Pace a Roma,” Arte/Documento no. (): . Venusti also showed an ability to create large-scale works without the aid of Michelangelo. The Cappella Capranica in Santa Maria Sopra Minerva, for example, shows him working in a larger format. Even the Corsini panel, which is typically attributed to Venusti, has come under suspicion in recent years. Simona Capelli’s article suggests that the work is by Tommaso de’ Cavalieri, not Venusti. That this could even be suggested indicates just how little understood Venusti’s catalog is. Capelli, “Michelangelo Buonarroti,” . Michelangelo made many such gifts of artwork throughout his lifetime. For more, see Eric Hupe, “Michelangelo’s Strozzi Tondo?: Securing Status with Art,” in Michelangelo in the New Millennium: Conversations about Artistic Practice, Patronage, and Christianity, ed. Tamara Smithers (Leiden: Brill, ), and footnotes. Wallace, “Michelangelo and Marcello Venusti,” –. Although outside of the concerns of this study, I would stress that Michelangelo borrows from and echoes both the poses of the sibyls for his Mary and the angels for his Gabriel. The intense focus on color in the altarpiece, to be discussed, also seems to be a response to Raphael’s rainbow hues in the gowns of the sibyls. Clearly, the competition was not over for Michelangelo. Kappler’s recent archival discovery indicates that work was probably completed between and June , when the cornices were installed in the chapel. Federica Kappler, “Una nota di cronologia sui disegni Michelangelo per la pala Cesi di Santa Maria della Pace,” Mitteilungen des Kunsthistorischen Institutes in Florenz , no. (): –. Andrea Donati disputes this dating, saying that it was probably completed no later than and that the documents Kappler consulted refer to another painting with a design by Michelangelo in the same church. Donati, “La verità,” . Johannes Wilde, “Cartonetti by Michelangelo,” Burlington Magazine , no. (November ): –. Capelli argues against this reading and holds that the Lateran and Cesi altarpieces were largely the same and came from the same cartonetto. Further, she posits that an altarpiece in Santa Caterina dei Funari is the lost original from the Cesi. Capelli, “Michelangelo Buonarroti, Marcello Venusti,” –. The Pierpont Morgan cartonetto has come under increasing scrutiny in recent years, with scholars debating the drawing’s traditional attribution to Michelangelo. Ruggieri and Marciari seem to be leaning toward giving the drawing to Venusti; Bambach still holds that it is Michelangelo’s. For a fuller discussion, see John J. Marciari, “Michelangelo Buonarroti,” Pierpont Morgan Library, accessed May , , www.themorgan.org/drawings/item/. The British Museum’s “Curator’s Notes” are particularly helpful in parsing the relationship between the artists and the cartoon. Daniel Godfrey, “Curator’s Notes,” British Museum, accessed March , , https://research.britishmuseum.org/research/collection_online/ collection_object_details.aspx?objectId=&partId=. There is evidence of spolvero in other of Venusti’s paintings after Michelangelo designs, so full-sized cartoons are certainly in the realm of possibility, created by either Venusti or Michelangelo. See Maria Beatrice De Ruggieri, “Versioni dai ‘cartonetti’ michelangioleschi in Galleria Corsini alcune proposte per Marcello Venusti attraverso le indagini tecniche,” in Agosti and Leone, Intorno, . Carmen Bambach, “Michelangelo’s Cartoon for the ‘Crucifixion of St. Peter’ Reconsidered,” Master Drawings , no. (Summer ): –. Vasari calls it a “cosa nuova.” Vasari, “Michelagnolo Buonarroti,” . And Carratù offers a short iconographic analysis, highlighting its unique qualities, some of which are repeated here. Tullia Carratù, “Marcello Venusti e le invenzioni di Michelangelo: uno sguardo ravvicinato sull’Annunciazione e la Madonna del Silenzio o Il Sonno della Galleria Nazionale
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d’Arte Antica in Palazzo Corsini,” in Agosti and Leone, Intorno, –. Wallace notes the “novelty of Michelangelo’s conception” and claims “the picture is unlike anything else in Michelangelo’s oeuvre.” Wallace, “Michelangelo and Marcello Venusti,” . Many of the particulars I will discuss in this section are also present in the Rijksmuseum copy, although they attribute the work to the “school of Marcello Venusti.” Carratù calls the building “Bramantesque.” Carratù, “Marcello Venusti e le invenzioni di Michelangelo,” in Agosti and Leone, Intorno, . Luke :. See Don Denny, “The Annunciation from the Right: From Early Christian Times to the Sixteenth Century” (PhD diss., New York University, ). Wilde, “Cartonetti,” . This is also a moment where Michelangelo revised his earlier conception of the Moses. See also Emily A. Fenichel, “Michelangelo’s Moses in the s,” Source: Notes on the History of Art , no. (Spring ): –. See, for example, Richard E. Stone, “Organic Patinas on Small Bronzes of the Italian Renaissance,” Metropolitan Museum Journal (): . She doesn’t indicate whether or not it was a sculpture or a painting, though one could easily imagine her using either interchangeably. “Il giorno del Venere, e l’hora tarda mi convitano a scrivere del pietoso affetto di veder Christo morto in braccio alla madre.” All translations of the Pianto are from Vittoria Colonna, “Pianto sopra il passione di Cristo,” in Who Is Mary? Three Early Modern Women on the Idea of Mary, ed. Susan Haskins (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, ), . Luke :. Kleinbub, Michelangelo’s Inner Anatomies, , –. Ibid., . Ibid., . Ibid., . Ibid., . Salviati’s interest in Michelangelo’s art is attested to in David McTavish, “From Rome to Florence to Venice: Some Observations on the Painter’s Art about ,” in Francesco Salviati: spirito veramente pelligrino ed eletto, ed. Antonio Geremicca and Barbara Agosti (Rome: Campisano Editore, ), –. For Cardinal Ercole Gonzaga, procured by his secretary, Nino Sernini. Barnes, Michelangelo’s Last Judgment, . Federico Zeri, Pittura e controriforma: l’arte senza tempo di Scipione da Gaeta (Turin: G. Einaudi, ), . A serious concern in an era without strong copyright protection. Lisa Pon, Raphael, Dürer, and Marcantonio Raimondi: Copying and the Italian Renaissance Print (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, ). Sydney J. Freedberg, Painting in Italy, – (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, ), . Michelangelo’s strategy clearly did not always work. Gilio criticized Venusti’s Annunciation in the Cesi Chapel as an example of Michelangelo’s bad religious art as well. Gilio said the Virgin’s posture in the work made him laugh. Quoted in Capelli, “Michelangelo Buonarroti,” . As quoted in Lingo, Federico Barocci, . Ibid., –. Ibid., –. Ibid., . Ibid., . Una Roman D’Elia, “Drawing Christ’s Blood: Michelangelo, Vittoria Colonna, and the Aesthetics of Reform,” Renaissance Quarterly , no. (Spring ): . David Summers, Michelangelo and the Language of Art (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, ), .
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Wallace, “Michelangelo and Marcello Venusti,” –. Lingo, Federico Barocci, –. D’Elia, “Drawing Christ’s Blood,” –. Hollanda, On Antique Painting, –. Antonio Vannugli, Imitating Michelangelo: A Methodological Philological Survey of the Engraved and Painted Versions of the Madonna of Silence (Rome: Edizioni di Storia e Letteratura, ). Carratù, “Marcello Venusti e le invenzioni di Michelangelo,” . Here Carratù echoes Parilla. Ibid., . Kleinbub notes that this shift in Gabriel’s gesture does not preclude the Augustinian interpretation of the previous altarpiece. Indeed, “Michelangelo has interpreted Augustine’s ‘mind’ broadly . . . placing such a mental incarnation in the two organs most frequently associated with thought in his time,” the brain and the heart. Nevertheless, Kleinbub also argues that this iteration of the theme focuses more on the fleshly incarnation than the spiritual one. The angel and Mary meet on the same ground, for example, rather than the visionary experience shown in the Cesi. Kleinbub also demonstrates that the shifting of the figures’ abdomens toward the front of the picture plane also “addresses the viewer’s more carnal understanding of the event.” Kleinbub, Michelangelo’s Inner Anatomies, –. Letizia Treves, “Daniele da Volterra and Michelangelo: A Collaborative Relationship,” Apollo (): . See Hansen, In Michelangelo’s Mirror, . Francesca Alberti, “La ‘Descente de croix’ de Daniele da Volterra: iconographie, fonction et contexte,” Artibus et Historiae , no. (): –; Michael Hirst, “Daniele da Volterra and the Orsini Chapel – I: The Chronology and Altarpiece,” Burlington Magazine , no. (September ): –+; Bernice Davidson, “Daniele da Volterra and the Orsini Chapel – II,” Burlington Magazine , no. (October ): –+; Carolyn Valone, “Elena Orsini, Daniele da Volterra, and the Orsini Chapel,” Artibus et Historiae , no. (): –; Mary Vaccaro, “The Orsini Chapel Reconsidered and Two New Drawings by Daniele da Volterra,” Master Drawings , no. (Autumn ): –. Hansen, In Michelangelo’s Mirror, . A good review of the literature can be found in Teresa Pugliatti and Giulio Mazzoni, Giulio Mazzoni e la decorazione a Roma nella cerchia di Daniele da Volterra (Rome: st Poligrafico e Zecca dello Stato, ), –; Roberto Paolo Ciardi and Benedetta Moreschini, Daniele Ricciarelli: da Volterra a Roma (Volterra: Cassa di Riparmio a Volterra, ), –; and Paul Barolsky, Daniele da Volterra (New York: Garland, ), –. Carolyn Valone, “The Art of Hearing: Sermons and Images in the Chapel of Lucrezia della Rovere,” Sixteenth Century Journal , no. (Autumn ): –. Ciardi and Moreschini, Daniele Ricciarelli, . Hall, Sacred Image, , and Freedberg, Painting in Italy, . Valone, for example, focuses on the patron as the major influence on the chapel’s iconography. Valone, “Art of Hearing,” –. Hansen, In Michelangelo’s Mirror, . Ibid., –. Ibid., –. Lily C. Vuong, trans. The Proto-Evangelium of James (Eugene, OR: Cascade Books, ), –. Hansen, In Michelangelo’s Mirror, . The portrait has a famous cartoon that has been pricked for transfer, now in the Teylers Museum in Haarlem. Hansen, In Michelangelo’s Mirror, .
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See Chapter . Hansen, In Michelangelo’s Mirror, . Howard Hibbard, Michelangelo (New York: Harper and Row, ), –. Hansen, In Michelangelo’s Mirror, . Davidson, “Daniele da Volterra,” . Anthony Blunt, “Illusionist Decoration in Central Italian Painting of the Renaissance,” Journal of the Royal Society of the Arts , no. (April ): . The title comes from an inventory but is not generally thought to be an accurate reflection of the work’s subject today. Godfrey, “Curator’s Notes.” Ibid. Bambach, “Michelangelo’s Cartoon,” –. This goes back to Vasari, who claimed that Michelangelo “felt so sorry for his [Condivi’s] hard work that he assisted him with his own hands, but it was of little use.” As quoted in Ernst Gombrich, New Light on Old Masters (Chicago: Chicago University Press, ), . Vasari, “Michelagnolo Buonarroti,” . Chapman, Michelangelo Drawings, –. Ibid., –. Ibid., –. Godfrey, “Curator’s Notes.” Ibid. Gombrich, New Light, –. Considering Michelangelo’s friendship with Colonna, it is interesting that his collaborations with Daniele at Trinità dei Monti are both for female patrons. See Alberti, “La ‘Descente de croix,’” and Valone, “Elena Orsini” and “Art of Hearing.”
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CHAPTER THREE
PRIVATE Michelangelo, Vittoria Colonna, and Meditation
M
ichelangelo and Vittoria Colonna met sometime in the mid- to late s when he was working on the Last Judgment and she was residing in a convent in Rome. Colonna and Michelangelo were friends who visited each other regularly, wrote often, and exchanged poems and drawings for almost a decade. The relationship between the two was rich, complex, long lasting, and deeply spiritual. This friendship also occasioned the creation of some remarkable works of art. It was for Colonna that Michelangelo produced drawings depicting the Pietà, the Crucifixion, and the Samaritan Woman, the last of which is now known only through printed copies. In exchange for these drawings, Colonna gave Michelangelo a set of sonnets, which the artist treasured until the end of his life. Michelangelo’s Pietà for Colonna is the most iconographically daring of the three drawings (Figure ). Mary and Christ sit on the rocky summit of Golgotha beneath a Y-shaped cross inscribed with a passage taken from Dante’s canto of Paradiso. The Virgin, her lips parted and her gaze heavenward, seems to speak the line written on the cross: “Non vi si pensa quanto sangue costa” (No one thinks how much blood it costs). Even discounting the unexpected inscription, much of the work subverts viewers’ expectations of the theme. Instead of placing Christ perpendicular to Mary’s torso and across her lap, Michelangelo shows Christ poised between the Virgin’s solid knees, his legs dangling. This creates a momentary illusion that the two figures are one entity and that Christ’s legs complete Mary’s seated
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. Michelangelo Buonarroti / Pietà for Vittoria Colonna / – / Boston: Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum / Art Library / Alamy Stock Photo
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form. The savior’s powerfully ideal body is rendered with great sensitivity but also with considerable ambiguity. It is unclear whether he is being hoisted into Mary’s lap or descending from it with the assistance of the two strapping putti who hold his arms. This discrepancy is not clarified by the actions of the putti, one of whom twists his back to the viewer and seems to recede from the picture plane, while the other strides forward. Moreover, the body they lift is paradoxically both weightless and corporeal in this vision. The muscles and tendons in Christ’s shoulders strain as the rest of the weight of his body pulls on them from below. The putti, however, show no struggle when lifting the body of Christ – easily twice their size. In the middle of the movement of his body, the savior’s legs have slipped off the stone stair on which his mother sits. The length of his limbs leads the eye to the crown of thorns at his feet. The Madonna, in contrast, moves upward, raising her face, hands, and arms to the heavens. Mary recalls early Christian orant figures through her uplifted arms and the position of her body, which mimic the Y-shaped cross behind her. Her pose places her at odds with her son; his entire body inclines downward as hers opens to the sky. Indeed, the Virgin seems unaware of her son’s presence. Instead of focusing her attention (and thus the viewer’s attention) on mourning the dead Christ, Mary sets her sights on the celestial beyond. Scholars have most often interpreted Colonna and Michelangelo’s friendship and its artistic products in light of the reformist group known as the spirituali. Led by theologians such as Bernardino Ochino and cardinals such as Ercole Gonzaga and Reginald Pole, the group proposed radical changes to Catholic theology. Colonna met regularly with Cardinal Pole and other members of the spirituali in Viterbo throughout the late s and early s. They discussed theological ideas from Juan de Valdés, Bernardino Ochino’s Prediche, and Benedetto da Mantova’s Beneficio di Cristo. All three men advocated a theology known as sola fide and believed that one could read the Bible, “bypass the institutions and fathers of the church,” and be saved through faith and a relationship with God alone without recourse to good works. Much of the focus of writers and thinkers in this circle centered on the sacrifice of Christ during the Crucifixion as the moment that such salvation was given for free. The Pietà and the Crucifixion Michelangelo created for Colonna have been analyzed as a crystallization of the reformist theologies expressed in the Beneficio di Cristo or the Prediche. There are, however, several problems with interpreting these drawings solely through the lens of spiritualist theology, the first and most glaring of which is uncertainty regarding Michelangelo’s involvement with the reformist group outside of his friendship with Colonna. That he discussed the theology of sola fide with Vittoria Colonna is beyond doubt, particularly considering the content of their letters and poems. Whether or
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not the artist met with Cardinal Pole and others in Viterbo cannot be gleaned from the documentary evidence, and we have no surviving correspondence between Michelangelo and these men. Indeed, when Gonzaga’s or Pole’s correspondence does mention Michelangelo, it is directed at Colonna, who functioned as a go-between for the artist and the cardinals. The second major issue has been the way in which Colonna’s writings have been consulted in order to interpret Michelangelo’s drawings. In addition to the collection of sonnets she wrote for Michelangelo, a number of which treat the Crucifixion as a central theme, she also wrote the Pianto sopra il passione di Cristo. This prose work recounts Colonna’s meditation on the lamentation over Christ’s body and has been utilized by several scholars as the key to interpreting the Pietà Michelangelo created for her. As Abigail Brundin notes, “One particular image does come to mind when reading her account [in the Pianto]: Michelangelo’s Pietà.” However, Colonna’s literary output is seen by scholars almost exclusively as a mere reflection of other reformists’ work and completely in line with the theology of sola fide. In other words, both Michelangelo and Colonna emphasize the notion of grace freely given to those who believe. The problem with such interpretations is that they do not take into account the novelty of Colonna’s prose work. Indeed, the role that she creates for the Virgin in her Pianto is not merely a reflection of the theology of Ochino, Mantova, Valdes, and others. Instead, her nuanced interpretation preserves Mary as a model for female worshippers – a model that was still deeply indebted to traditional understandings of the Madonna as vital to the work of salvation. If we accept that there is a close relationship between Colonna’s writings and Michelangelo’s drawings, then his drawings cannot be mere reflections of sola fide theology, either. Most importantly, scholars have not seriously questioned the implications of Michelangelo’s images supporting theologies that quickly became heterodox in the late s. In the privileged view of historical hindsight, it is easy to see why church institutions would consider the theology of the spirituali to be heretical. They were, in many ways, more closely aligned with the Protestants than the Catholics in their insistence on faith alone. These beliefs were so dangerous to the Catholic Church that many of the members of the spirituali were exiled from Italy or brought before the Inquisition. Even Colonna herself attracted the attention of the Inquisition. Nevertheless, painted and printed copies of Michelangelo’s drawings for Colonna proliferated even after the downfall of the spirituali as a group. If Michelangelo’s drawings can only be properly understood using the heretical notions of Ochino, Valdes, and others, how are we to explain the ongoing popularity of the images? Further, how are we to understand these images as functioning as a kind of “private exchange” when they were almost immediately circulated to a wider audience and continued to be circulated for decades after the deaths of Colonna and
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Michelangelo? Would Michelangelo’s artistic reputation have been enough to overcome any charges of heresy, or is there more to the artist’s iconography than scholars have previously understood? Although I will not attempt to extricate Michelangelo from the spirituali, nor will I deny the importance of sola fide to both Colonna and Buonarroti in the s, I do want to expand our understanding of the spiritual and artistic exchange that happened between Colonna and Michelangelo. The drawings were clearly important well past the moment of the spirituali, as was Colonna to Michelangelo’s life. This chapter will address that legacy. A major part of this legacy was the religious practice that produced both Colonna’s Pianto and Sonnets for Michelangelo. Focusing on the unique representation of Mary in the drawing of the Pietà and Colonna’s Pianto, this chapter will argue that Michelangelo clearly understood how Colonna might use the images he created during her meditation. Colonna’s support of new religious orders such as the Capuchins as well as her autograph writings attest to her dedication to affective meditation. An ancient Catholic practice that found new urgency in the sixteenth century, meditation was likewise a legacy from Colonna that survived in Michelangelo’s life and art well past the downfall of the spirituali. Michelangelo’s Florentine Pietà, purportedly created for the artist’s own tomb well after the disbanding of the spirituali, clearly announces that the artist not only understood the importance of meditation in Colonna’s life but was a proponent of the practice himself. Indeed, meditation became the tool by which Michelangelo could again combine art and religion without unnecessarily privileging artifice. Michelangelo’s engagement with meditation through the drawings he made for Colonna will further help explain their ongoing popularity in the face of the condemnation of the spirituali for heresy. . COLONNA AND MEDITATION
Devout Christians have long been encouraged to ruminate inwardly on the life of Christ by figures as diverse as the Church Fathers, St. Bernard, and St. Francis and through treatises on prayer such as Zardino de Oratione or the incredibly popular Meditations on the Life of Christ, thought to be written by St. Bonaventure (now ascribed to an anonymous author known as the PseudoBonaventure). Meditation, especially the affective meditation advocated by St. Francis and the Pseudo-Bonaventure, was intensely visual, and authors exhorted readers to envision the Passion of Christ or other events from his life in minute detail. The Pseudo-Bonaventure, for example, describes meditation thusly: “You must bring yourself to be present at those things which are related as said or done by Christ, as if you heard them with your own ears, and saw them with your own eyes, your whole mind being diligently, gratefully, and carefully applied to them.” The visual character of meditation could also take
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on a decidedly artistic tone, particularly as described by the Franciscan monk Ugo Pantiera da Prato, who said, “In this first stage, when the mind begins to think about Christ . . . Christ seems to be written into the mind and imaginative faculties; in the second he appears to be outlined; in the third outlined and shaded; in the fourth, colored and lifelike; and in the fifth he seems to be sculptured in the flesh.” Meditation is therefore understood as a profoundly creative endeavor. The goal of affective meditation was empathy. Envisioning, even mentally reliving, the events of Christ’s life, allows worshippers to better understand the suffering of Christ and to empathize with others. They could also use the strength of their empathic emotions to achieve greater spiritual understanding. For example, the Pseudo-Bonaventure in the Meditations on the Life of Christ explains that people who practiced his prescribed meditation could expect to have increased strength against “vain and fleeting things,” as well as spiritual fortification against “tribulations and adversaries.” Contemplating images was often a necessary first step for worshippers. Members of the spirituali who advocated meditation supported the practice for two additional reasons. First, they sought, by recourse to texts such as De imitatione Christi, to revive what they viewed as a simpler and purer form of faith from the past. Second, meditation was seen as a way for the worshipper to create a closer, more personal bond with God – one that did not depend upon the intervention of the Church or intermediaries such as priests. Instead, much like the theology of sola fide, meditation was uniquely dependent upon the interpretation and faith of the worshipper alone, without recourse to works. In addition to her spiritualist associations, Colonna would have been aware of the importance of affective meditation through her involvement with the Capuchins and the Poor Clares. Dedicated to the original rule of St. Francis, the Capuchins wanted to live as the thirteenth-century saint had demanded. The Capuchins further sought to disassociate themselves from the squabbling Observant and Conventual factions of the Franciscan order, who split in . Neither group was seen as orthodox enough in its dedication to the Rule of St. Francis for the Capuchins, who yearned, like many reformers, to return to older religious practices. Certainly, Meditations on the Life of Christ by an author who was then understood to be St. Bonaventure, an early Franciscan, would have been an integral part of this return to a simpler, more orthodox monastic practice. Colonna became involved with the Capuchins in the s, during a time when the head of the order and one of its founding members, Bernardino Ochino, was her personal spiritual advisor. Colonna put her support for the Capuchins into writing, sending letters to powerful cardinals in the mid-s, a time when their survival as an order was in doubt. Colonna’s appeals may even have been instrumental in the papal bull issued in that finally
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established the Capuchins as a separate and distinct order. Considering her vocal support of the Capuchins, it is perhaps not a coincidence that they eventually settled in the Roman church of San Nicola dei Portiis, close to Colonna’s familial home on the Quirinal and her chosen monastic lodging of San Silvestro. She was also influential in securing a building for the Capuchins in Ferrara. Even after her relationship with Ochino was ruptured due to his exile and accusations of apostasy, Colonna’s commitment to the order did not waver. She was still helping them with expenses just before her death in . For Colonna, however, the appeal of the Capuchin lifestyle was more than abstractly theological. After her husband’s death in , Colonna petitioned Pope Clement VII for permission to enter the life religious. Her request was refused, largely due to her brother’s wish that she remarry. Even though she never took the veil, Colonna nonetheless lived in religious communities for the remainder of her life. This quasi-monastic lifestyle, together with her relationship with Ochino as a spiritual advisor, indicates that Colonna was not only a patron of the Capuchins but that she probably imitated their religious practices as well. The Capuchin Constitutions, written at the group’s founding in , set aside a section detailing the great importance of personal prayer. As the document notes, such prayer is the “spiritual mistress of the friars,” and it was desired by the “Seraphic Father” (Francis) that “the true spiritual Friar Minor pray always.” For those “tepid” practitioners, however, prescribed times of personal prayer were included after the recitation of certain hours of the day. In addition, the Constitutions are quite specific as to the kind of prayer the monks are to practice. Friars are instructed to “pray mentally” to “enlighten the mind and enkindle the affections” rather than to mechanically “frame words.” Simply put, friars of the Capuchin order were required to enter into meditation for no fewer than two hours every day. Moreover, this period of meditation was affective – that is, it was meant to encourage their emotions and engender empathy. The other religious community to which Colonna was dedicated was the Poor Clares. When in Rome, she resided with the Poor Clares in the convent of San Silvestro in Capite. Like the Capuchins and the Franciscans, to whom they were closely connected, the Clares were also dedicated to prayer and contemplation. In fact, Meditations on the Life of Christ – an important guide for medieval meditation championed by reformers as representing a desirable, simpler faith – was in fact written for a Clarissian nun. St. Clare, the order’s founder, indicates the fundamental importance of prayer and “contemplation” to those attempting to live the authentic lifestyle of the Poor Clares. For the cloistered order, private prayer and meditation were as important as their
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unyielding vows of poverty and their complete withdrawal from the secular world. If her patronage of the Capuchins and her association with the Poor Clares constitute tacit support for their lifestyle, Colonna’s surviving writing openly advocates meditation as a fruitful spiritual practice. Furthermore, her writing demonstrates that she not only advocated mental prayer but that she also actively practiced meditation. Nowhere is this more apparent than in the opening of her Pianto, where she says, “Friday and the late hour prompt me to write of my sorrow at seeing the dead Christ in His mother’s arms.” In beginning thusly, Colonna tells her readers that what follows is the result of her meditating on the Pietà (perhaps a painting or sculpture) on Good Friday. Her sonnets for Michelangelo, too, highlight the notion of “seeing” the events of the Passion in front of her through meditation. Although many of her sonnets highlight vision, sonnet is perhaps the most overt, as it begins, I see my Lord naked and hung upon the cross with nails driven through his feet and hands and his right side cut open and his head adorned only with thorns, tormented on all sides by a vile throng.
This concrete and narrative vision of Christ crucified allows her to begin to comprehend more abstract virtues such as the “patience, humility,” and “true obedience” mentioned later in the sonnet. In this way, the sonnet clearly shows Colonna following the prescribed steps of affective meditation. First, she envisions the scene as if it were happening in front of her, and, second, her meditation engenders empathy and emotional understanding. She comes to recognize what patience, humility, and obedience are by empathizing with the example of Christ and his suffering. Colonna also writes that images provided important inspiration for her meditations in sonnet . In this poem, Colonna considers “Luke’s Virgin,” the miraculous image thought to be created by the gospel writer (Figure ). According to Colonna, “Although the painting is not lifelike . . . it is enough that her gentle air, her humility, when we gaze upon it, turns our hearts to God, inflames and moves them . . .” In other words, devout images, even if they do not conform to the practices of good disegno, can be an effective means of bringing the worshipper closer to God. Tellingly, she uses the same language as the Capuchin Constitutions when contemplating the good that meditation on this image can do. Both speak of a heart and spirit burning or aflame. Colonna’s letters further attest to her close and careful study of images. After receiving one of the drawings from Michelangelo, she writes to him that she studied the sheet thoroughly, using a lamp, a mirror, and a glass to examine it to the best of her ability.
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. Saulus Populi Romani / CE / Rome: Santa Maria Maggiore / agefotostock / Alamy Stock Photo
That Colonna seems to start from an image – either mental or physical – allows us to explore how Michelangelo’s drawings with their specially crafted iconography were meant to be used during Colonna’s worship and meditation. Responding to Colonna’s worship practices, Michelangelo’s Pietà has the
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necessary iconographic flexibility to aid his friend in her meditative journeys. Further, Michelangelo’s complex, inventive, and even ambiguous iconography also reflects Colonna’s singular understanding of the Virgin Mary in the Pianto and the Sonnets for Michelangelo. . MICHELANGELO’S PIETÀ AND COLONNA ’S PIANTO
The Virgin in Michelangelo’s Pietà (Figure ), in a moment of iconographic ingenuity, lifts her arms toward heaven, opens her hands, splays her fingers, and tilts her head back and toward God. The Virgin’s posture indicates that this particular position of her body is transitory. Her hands might eventually both turn their palms toward the viewer or toward heaven. Her face, although not bathed in tears as some have claimed, seems to betray several emotions at once. The parted lips and staring eyes convey an intense focus on the heavens, although the emotion behind this focus is less certain. Her facial expression is not blank, nor is it immediately revealing. One can see triumph, grief, joy, and gratitude there, especially when considered in concert with her uplifted arms and the torso that rises below them. This composition, so arresting and active, is also next to impossible to read in any definite fashion but is open to myriad interpretations. Mary’s posture could be understood as a supplication to God, in which the Virgin demands to know why she and her son must suffer so horribly. Read in another light, Mary’s response is one of grief bordering on frenzy – a parallel to Christ’s agonized cries on the cross and a manifestation of the Virgin’s equivalent emotional pain. Indeed, with her arms outstretched and mimicking the Y-shaped cross, Mary seems ready to endure the same physical torment that has recently ended her son’s life. Thus, the equivalence of Mary’s emotional pain and Christ’s physical pain are explored in one deceptively simple gesture. Likewise, Mary’s open arms should be understood as a gesture of praise and worship in the style of early Christian orant figures, expressing gratitude for the gift of Christ and salvation in his death. It is also a gesture of obedience. Mary, ever the handmaid of the Lord, gives up control of her son and her life to God. Mary’s heavenward gaze anticipates her son’s resurrection and ascension into heaven, as well as her own future position as the Queen of Heaven. Finally, Mary’s dual nature as a mortal woman positioned between man and God is emphasized in this pose, as she is seated on the ground but focused on the heavens above. In this case, her pose can be read as expressing her role as intercessor. The Madonna’s exalted role and divine knowledge are further attested by the seraph that the artist places over her heart. When one considers the composition of Mary and Christ together in this image, the Madonna’s roles expand further. Mary is the mother of God, with Christ literally issuing forth from her lap. Even at the end of his life, Christ’s
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birth and death are inexorably linked theological events. Christ must be born fully human from Mary in order to die for the expiation of sin. The connection of the two figures as equal sufferers and Co-Redemptors of humanity is also underscored by the interconnectedness of their bodies in Michelangelo’s imagining. Instead of placing Christ perpendicular to Mary, he superimposes their bodies one atop the other, creating the fleeting illusion that Christ’s legs extend from Mary’s torso, or that they are one in the same being and one in the same fount of God’s grace. Michelangelo’s Virgin is Mother, co-sacrifice, intercessor, model of faith, and consummate worshipper. This Mary is the complex and pious model of worship and meditation that Colonna envisions in her sonnets and neatly suits Colonna’s meditation and Mariology. Moreover, Michelangelo’s iconography is emotionally flexible, enabling Colonna to explore many kinds of empathetic reactions during her meditations. For example, in the Sonnets for Michelangelo, Colonna often meditates upon the vision of Christ on the cross and, in a series of three poems (–), imagines the reactions of Mary during and after the Passion. Although these are not the only sonnets that consider the Virgin, they are a concentrated series that helps illuminate how Colonna used Mary in her meditations and how she viewed the Virgin theologically. They also help us understand how Michelangelo pictured the Virgin in his Pietà for Vittoria Colonna and why Mary is portrayed in such an active and ambiguous manner. In sonnet , Colonna imagines Mary as she “clasped her dead son.” She writes a series of heart-wrenching images and seemingly contradictory emotions on the part of the Virgin. Colonna first calls to mind the image of the Pietà and then, instead of expounding on the Virgin’s grief, as one might expect, claims, “But in your faithful mind / you saw the glory and the holy victory.” The next image is of Christ’s “bitter wounds and sweet, humble countenance,” which increases the Virgin’s “harsh and potent torment” but also excites emotions in Mary’s soul of a “new and pure delight.” The sonnet ends with the final contradiction: Mary understood in a supernatural manner that God would be “certain to resurrect it [read: Christ’s body] into a glorious life,” but “as a human mother . . . your . . . heart was robbed of any joy.” In Colonna’s meditation, Mary is both heartbroken and overjoyed by the death of her son, expressing the conundrum common to the faithful when thinking about the Passion in the sixteenth century. Worshippers are understandably both depressed by the prospect of their savior being tortured and dying and delighted by his granting them everlasting life. Colonna also argues for Mary as “full of grace” or as the person closest to God. Mary understands, through her exalted pregnancy and position between God and Man, the full implications of the Passion. Her supernatural knowledge of events allows her to feel the complex range of emotions she describes in the sonnet. Colonna can then also feel them through her empathetic and affective meditation.
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In sonnet , Colonna meditates on the Virgin as she watches “the living light gradually draining from the eyes of your sweet crucified son.” Rather than giving herself over to grief, Colonna believes that Mary’s “spirit went to the place of his spirit,” giving the reader a notion of the intertwining of the two souls beyond time and place. When Christ closes his eyes at the final death, Colonna relates that Mary “withstood the mortal blow.” Colonna ends by addressing Mary directly, claiming that “every elected soul nurtures its hope in your favor.” Colonna again uses the events of the Passion to meditate on the Virgin’s emotional pain and turmoil. In this instance, however, Colonna makes a powerful case for the Virgin as Co-Redemptrix because the Virgin seems to suffer along with Christ, even intermingling spirits with the crucified savior. The Virgin suffers a “mortal blow” like her son but is allowed to survive. Her equal and terrible emotional suffering not only allows the Virgin to be a fitting exemplar for the meditating Colonna but also, as the last line makes clear, makes the Madonna the path to salvation, the Co-Redemptrix, and the mediator between herself and her son. Sonnet does not take the Passion as its subject but instead treats Mary’s eventual ascension into heaven and solidifies many of the Virgin’s roles explored in the previous two poems. In this work, Mary is explored as the “blessed mother with holy charity” and “saintly love” that was “confined” on earth but allowed to flourish and expand in heaven. In her comportment during the linked events of Christ’s life and death, the Virgin is “his companion, refuge, servant, and mother, filled with humility and love.” At the end of the sonnet, Colonna understands Mary to have been given “a perfect reward” by “your sweet husband, the eternal father, and beloved son.” In other words, Mary is an important companion to Christ, both on earth and in heaven, which complements her other roles of Mediatrix, Co-Redemptrix, and woman “full of grace.” The Virgin in Colonna’s sonnets is both gratefully overjoyed by her son’s death and nearly destroyed by her simultaneous grief. She is the intercessor, the Co-Redemptrix, the mother of God, the perfect worshipper, and the guide to Christ’s followers. Michelangelo’s Mary is, likewise, capable of embodying all these roles. In her frantic gesture toward the heavens, this Mary burns with gratitude and love yet is consumed by her grief. She is beautifully and appropriately ambiguous, seemingly embodying all the roles, emotions, and beliefs of Colonna’s sonnets at once. In this way, Michelangelo’s unorthodox and ambiguous depiction of the Virgin would have been the ultimate meditation aid for his friend, allowing her to ascend ever higher in her religious understanding through an emotional response to the Passion. At each stage in Colonna’s meditation, she might return to Michelangelo’s image, read something new in Mary’s pose or
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expression, and begin a fresh path of worshipful meditation focused on the Virgin. Through the ingenious iconography of her close friend Michelangelo, Colonna would be able to fulfill her fervent desire to “stride behind” the Lord as he bore “his cross along the steep and narrow path.” That Michelangelo’s Mary turns away from Christ in the Pietà and lifts her eyes toward heaven effectively visualizes the meditative process that Colonna employed and detailed in her Pianto. Though the initial phases of meditation often focus on an image or concrete event, the goal is to transcend the physical and push toward a deeper emotional and theological understanding of that event. In Colonna’s account, the meditation properly begins when Mary touches the body of her son, but as readers and meditators, we are encouraged to be like Mary, who moves beyond the corporeal and gives herself over to the emotional. The corporeal reality of Christ is merely a starting point in both Colonna’s meditation practice and the image Michelangelo produces. Christ’s body, though sensitively and exactingly rendered, becomes weightless in the grasp of the attending angels. They should not be able to lift the bulk of Jesus’s body so readily, yet in their hands he seems to have no mass at all. Moreover, Christ is not lovingly beheld by Mary, as one might expect in an image of this kind. The Virgin seems almost totally unaware of her beloved son on her lap. Both Mary’s inattention and the dematerialization of Christ’s body are visual manifestations of turning from the corporeal to the emotional. It is clear, both in Colonna’s writing and Michelangelo’s images, that the corporeal body of Christ, however important it may have been for the spirituali as a fount of grace, was not an end in and of itself but a place to begin when contemplating the love of God. Indeed, the Virgin Mary’s mental activity in the Pianto moves rapidly from the contemplation of the physical body of Christ, to Mary giving herself over to her potent emotions, to a kind of theological understanding. The Virgin is supposed to guide us in our own meditative practice and gives us some indication as to how Colonna might have used Mary as a personal exemplar in her own affective meditation. It also gives us a fascinating insight into the iconography of Michelangelo’s Virgin in the Pietà he draws for his friend. The Pianto begins with the image of Mary taking Christ on her lap after he is crucified. Although for Mary this is necessarily a physical action, for the meditator it conjures up images of the Pietà and provides the point of departure. From this action and image, both Mary and the reader as they follow her mental process will come to understand the events of the Passion, the emotional import of these events and of Christ’s death, and, finally, their theological importance. In the beginning of the work, the taking of Christ on her lap is an occasion for Mary to release all the mourning she has held inside during the Passion. This grief “consumed and penetrated the depths of her soul,” causing her to
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weep “in bitterest tears.” The “Queen of Heaven” then “mourned him in many ways.” This mourning, perhaps not surprisingly, begins with Mary mourning the physical aspects of her son, even lamenting him “limb by limb.” She is then, however, “raised to a loftier thought” and begins to contemplate his many virtues revealed through his actions during the Passion, his service on earth, and his final sacrifice. For Mary, this leads to the revelation that her tears are painful to Christ’s followers and a recognition of “her duty, that of redeeming her descendants” as intercessor. Mary is also characterized as the leader of the disciples as “she alone had to thank Joseph, satisfy John, [and] comfort the Magdalene.” Eventually, through her contemplation of the Passion, the redemption of humanity, and her son’s death, Mary reaches a state of gratitude where she thanks the Heavenly Father, the Holy Spirit, wisdom, Christ, the sun, the earth, the stones, the air, “and, further, those bodies that rose to accompany and serve Him.” Mary reaches the climax of her own meditation (as does the reader in following her mental journey) in which she wants “to melt away, to be consumed, even immolate herself in the fire of love, and in her tears of compassion to remove ingratitude from the world and herself, and to render God the humanity and worship that were due him.” The Madonna (and the meditative reader and even Colonna herself ) is, at the end of the Pianto, given over to immense suffering, gratitude, and burning love. She is no longer in the physical world but has transcended it on the strength of her emotional response. Indeed, considering together the two images Michelangelo produces for Colonna, Mary’s theological understanding might be seen to outstrip Christ’s. That Michelangelo inscribes the cross with the passage from Dante’s canto in Paradiso – “Non vi si pensa quanto sangue costa” – and turns Mary’s focus toward the heavens indicates that she is cognizant of the larger picture, despite the overwhelming pain of her son’s death. Mary’s parted lips speak the words on the cross, allude to the larger canto, and demonstrate that she understands the reason for the bloodshed and suffering. In the context of the canto, the line spoken by Beatrice examines the importance – indeed the cost – of proselytizing the true faith throughout the world and how such a mission can become perverted. Instead of focusing on the importance of the scriptures and the sacrifice of Christ, priests, according to Dante, are eager to “make a good impression,” feeding their “sheep” on “air.” Mary’s words, while referencing the larger context of the canto, bring the focus back to the true faith. Her son’s Passion and death, however painful, spread God’s message of grace throughout the world. Mary’s divine sight, connection to God the Father, and prescience are thus highlighted in this image. By contrast, in the Crucifixion, Michelangelo depicts the moment recounted in Matthew and Mark, where Christ cries out, “My God, My God, why have you forsaken me?” (Figure ). In the frenzy of pain, Christ feels God’s
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. Michelangelo Buonarroti / Crucifixion for Vittoria Colonna / – / London: British Museum / The Picture Art Collection / Alamy Stock Photo
abandonment, echoes the words of David the psalmist, and calls out for the return of the divine vision and grace that have left him. In this sense, Colonna’s identification with Mary through her meditation and Michelangelo’s image might have been a more direct and accessible path to theological understanding than the image of Christ’s mystical blindness.
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In the Pianto, although she is aware of the larger picture, the Virgin’s suffering is so great, so equal with her son’s, that Colonna tells us, “Only faith kept her in life”; in other words, Mary’s pain allowed her to function as a CoRedemptrix with her son. Mary’s soul is even seen as “indivisible” from that of her son. Worshippers are left, at the end of the Pianto, contemplating their great debt to Mary, who is the source of “all the treasure that the Christian can obtain.” Michelangelo’s Mary is likewise indivisible from her son and is focused heavenward, away from the physical reality of her son and toward God the father and the potential treasure awaiting the faithful Christian both in this life and the next. His image of the Pietà would have spurred his friend to ever greater empathetic heights of understanding during her meditations and reminded her, in the weightless body of Christ and the uplifted gaze of the Virgin, to transcend the physical reality of this world and to be inflamed by the emotional love of God. . MARIOLOGY AND THE SPIRI TUA LI
Benedetto di Mantova’s Beneficio di Cristo – perhaps the consummate spirituali text – meditates on the Passion, much like the Pianto, and in many ways Colonna might be seen to be participating in a kind of reformist meditation were it not for the centrality of the Virgin Mary in both the Pianto and the sonnets. The Beneficio, which barely mentions the Madonna, is of a kind with other reformist writings by men. Ochino’s Prediche, for example, have so few mentions of Mary that Emidio Campi uses quotation marks when discussing Ochino’s “mariologica.” Spiritualist marginalization of the Virgin is consistent with their sympathy for the Protestant Reformation. Martin Luther was highly critical of the importance accorded to Mary, seeing it as a distraction from Christ. Echoing Luther, reformists such as Ochino viewed Mary as the human mother of God but nothing more. She could be a manifestation of God’s grace on earth, but other titles frequently associated with the Madonna – the second Eve, Mediatrix, Queen of Heaven – were assiduously avoided. Despite Colonna’s holding up Mary as an exemplar, using her role in the Passion to meditate, depicting Mary as a fount of grace similar to her son, and living in a Clarissian convent where Mary was the primary meditative exemplar, many scholars are reluctant to see her Mariology as different from that of fellow members of the Viterbo group. In the estimation of some scholars, Mary had become merely the earthly mother of Christ for both the spirituali and for Colonna. Her autograph writing, however, does not bear out this analysis. Mary is referred to as the “Queen of Heaven” in the Pianto, for example. One of the
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most important and traditional of Mary’s roles, the Queen of Heaven sits at the right hand of the savior as an intercessor to the faithful and the heavenly spouse of God. In addition, Mary’s near equivalent emotional suffering to Christ’s physical suffering at the foot of the cross is preserved in Colonna’s text (perhaps most particularly as an aid to meditation). At one point in the Pianto, the emotional and psychological pain is so great that Mary almost swoons, being saved only by clinging to Christ. In contrast to Ochino’s Mary, Colonna preserves the tradition of Mary as “all wise” and able to understand even to the point of prophecy the coming joy of Christ’s resurrection. At another point in the Pianto, Mary even sees Christ’s soul descend into Limbo and looks ahead to the coming resurrection. No mere human mother would have been blessed with such prophetic sight. As Eleonora Carinci notes, the Pianto was most likely written in response to Ochino’s work because it “reasserts humanity’s debt of gratitude to the Virgin and her importance for all Christians.” In addition to the sections of the Pianto already analyzed, Colonna wrote a nearly contemporary commentary on the Ave Maria, the Orazione sopra l’Ave Maria. Although dismissed as “little more than a literary exercise full of commonplace tropes,” its very existence speaks to the traditional importance Mary held for Colonna – that of an intercessor. Furthermore, Colonna even expands Mary’s role in salvation in this text. As Brundin notes, those who pray to Mary are not only asking for the Virgin’s intercession but also for her “to be generous in bestowing the grace of her son upon them.” Carinci’s persuasive analysis sees the Ave as an important parallel to the Pianto in that Colonna’s Mariology in both is deeply indebted to medieval devotion to the Virgin Mary. She attempted, as the only female member of the spirituali, to find a way of retaining the traditional and feminine figure as well as making her relevant in a time of reform. As Carinci contends, “Colonna exalts Mary’s constant faith, humility, and obedience, portraying her as a woman who is active and aware of the significance of events taking place around her.” She is a powerfully human and divine exemplar, particularly for faithful women. Moreover, Colonna addresses the Ave to Mary, choosing a form of the prayer that maintains Mary’s powerfully traditional role as intercessor. By reasserting the importance of the Ave, Colonna likewise reasserts Mary’s importance in the work of salvation. She is still, for Colonna, “full of grace,” which she “diffuses constantly.” In her writings, Colonna argues for the continued and personal significance of the Virgin in the life of faith, a position that must have seemed simultaneously radical and regressive to her reformist circle. It is fundamentally significant that this understanding of the Virgin comes from the only woman in the group. The Madonna in the sonnets and the Pianto is maintained as an important and somewhat traditional role model for Colonna, both in her own personal meditative practice and as the model she posits to several other
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. Michelangelo Buonarroti / Pietà / – / Vatican City: St. Peter’s Basilica / NICK FIELDING / Alamy Stock Photo
women across Europe during this time. Furthermore, it is this model of faith that Michelangelo sought to create in his Pietà for Colonna. Michelangelo’s iconography of the Pietà likewise responds to Colonna’s reconciling of new and old. The Pietà is an ancient iconography, the traditional form of which Michelangelo would have known intimately. After all, his first major, successful commission required him to create a traditional Pietà of the Virgin with Christ on her lap and no ancillary figures (Figure ). Though reimagined in the restrained emotions and humanist aesthetics of the late quattrocento, the sculpture still has much in common with earlier, northern examples. What Michelangelo offers Colonna in his drawing certainly alludes to that older form but departs from it in significant ways. In shifting Christ from lying across Mary’s lap to hanging vertically from her lap and likewise shifting Mary’s attention from the body of her son to the heavens, Michelangelo mirrors Colonna’s new and nuanced understanding of the Virgin in her writings. Colonna’s Pianto is not merely a lamentation and neither is Michelangelo’s drawing. Instead, both allude to the inner life of the Virgin and her understanding of God’s plan as a woman both all wise and deeply connected to her son. This deep connection is rendered in Michelangelo’s conception as one that is strikingly physical and dependent on Mary’s pregnancy and birth of Christ. Even in his dead form, Christ slips from between her knees as though being born. Moreover, Mary’s divine understanding of the significance of Christ’s death in God’s plan for salvation is made explicit not only by Mary’s simultaneously prayerful, joyful, and
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grief-stricken pose but also by the words on the cross. By alluding to Mary’s words in Dante’s Paradiso, Michelangelo mirrors Colonna’s literary Mary. Both understand, on a celestial level, the cost of salvation and true faith. Finally, Mary’s role in the Pietà has shifted from passive mourner to spiritually active woman, as Colonna envisions in the Pianto. Not depicted with her head humbly bowed, Michelangelo’s Mary instead moves powerfully and purposefully, rising upward as though inflamed by the love of God that consumes Colonna at the end of her meditation. The numerous copies made after Michelangelo’s drawing are evidence that the Mary found in Colonna’s meditations and Michelangelo’s images had a more universal appeal than one might suppose, considering their spiritualist origins. Although quietly exchanged between the two friends, the images did not remain private for long. Colonna’s spiritualist friends clamored for painted copies of the drawn originals. They were not the only ones to want these images, however, because copies, both printed and painted, proliferated in the decades following the creation of Michelangelo’s drawings. For instance, at least four such painted copies exist by Marcello Venusti’s hand alone. This does not count the various copies of lesser quality that exist, in addition to the prints made after Michelangelo’s drawings, published in , , and (printed by Giulio Bonasone, Nicolas Beatrizet, and Agostino Carracci, respectively). Considering the fact that Ochino was accused of apostasy and left Italy in , and that the spirituali as a whole were under suspicion from the Inquisition (founded in the same year), it is strange that so many heretical images would still be circulating in Italy decades later. Even Michelangelo’s stupendous fame would not have prevented truly heterodox images from coming under significant scrutiny. If, however, we recognize the central importance of the traditional roles of Mary to Colonna’s theology and devotion through meditation, and Michelangelo’s depiction of that form of worship and theological importance in his drawing, then the popularity of the images among the general public becomes much easier to explain. Colonna’s delight with these images, as well as their general popularity, created a path for combining art and religion for Michelangelo – two vital aspects of his life that had become irreconcilable in the eyes of many critics after the Last Judgment. The drawings for Colonna were proof that Michelangelo could again inspire the minds of the faithful to contemplate divinity. By considering his friend’s meditational practice, he had been able to produce images that inflamed her heart and turned her mind to holy truths. According to both Vasari and Michelangelo’s critics, this ability to turn minds to God was the primary way of proving whether an artist was a true Christian. What follows in Michelangelo’s oeuvre demonstrates that the lesson he gleaned from these drawings was that meditation, not spiritualist theology, was the way to begin the reconciliation of art and religion. Importantly, this
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combination also had the potential to save his soul. The rest of his life, particularly his private works, would be dedicated to the combination of meditation and art. Vittoria Colonna died in February and, though he had often written of her in his sonnets, Michelangelo again felt compelled to commemorate his friend. In sonnet , he rails against God, who “has taken her back from an unwary world / and robbed our eyes of her.” Nevertheless, Michelangelo reminds the reader (and perhaps himself ) that “though her body is dead, / he can’t make us forget / her sweet, her lovely and her sacred writings.” The woman whom Michelangelo describes in another poem as “that great fire which burned and nourished me” left behind a cache of writings for the artist, which, although a poor substitute for his friend, would certainly have provided comfort, guidance, and inspiration. In Michelangelo still treasured and guarded the sonnets that Colonna had given him perhaps a decade earlier. Colonna’s influence on Michelangelo’s art and worship did not end with her death. Moreover, Michelangelo’s devotion to Colonna did not even end when she, along with many of the other spirituali, were brought under suspicion by the Inquisition. This suggests that their relationship was about more than the theology of sola fide. Inspired by Vittoria Colonna’s passionate meditations, Michelangelo would turn – again and again – to private prayer and reflection. Meditation and contemplation also became a major source of inspiration for the artist, particularly as he considered his tomb monument – a final public, religious, and artistic statement. Although Michelangelo is certainly neither the first nor the last artist to be inspired by the vivid mental visions brought on by meditation, he is among the first to begin to combine his art and his prayer in meaningful ways. The Florentine Pietà marks the beginning of the artist’s integration of his artistic practice and his prayerful meditations. . THE FLORENTINE PIET À
Michelangelo reportedly began the Florentine Pietà as a monument to grace his tomb (Figure ). As an artist who had completed tomb monuments in at least three other important commissions, one can assume that he did not undertake such a task lightly. The artist was also wildly ambitious in his vision. The work as it stands is a mixture of the desires to both surpass ancient sculptors by carving four figures out of one block and simultaneously provide evidence of the artist’s profound faith. The result was, apparently, untenable, and in the end the artist mutilated the work in some way. It was then discarded and later partially finished by Tiberio Calcagni. The work’s ruined state has led some scholars to use the word “failure” to describe the artist’s effort. It is not clear, however, that the artist saw the
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. Michelangelo Buonarroti / Florentine Pietà / – / Florence: Opera del Duomo Museum / Terry Smith Studios / Alamy Stock Photo
work in this way. It should more correctly be understood as an important and necessary developmental bridge between the artist’s meditation and his artistic practice. Begun in , just after the death of Colonna, the Florentine Pietà represents an intermediary stage in the union of sculpture and meditation that
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culminates in the late Crucifixion drawings and the Rondanini Pietà. The Florentine Pietà presents Michelangelo, immortalized for all eternity in marble, engaged in an unending meditative prayer as both creator and participant. The Florentine Pietà is the artist’s meditative vision revealed to the viewer, who is likewise invited to meditate and participate in the work of redemption. The sculpture group is also the first indication that the artist was actively engaged in a meditational practice himself and not simply aware of it through his friendship with Colonna. For years, the important interplay between the figures that reveals this important meditative message has been difficult to see. In most extant photographs, the sculpture group is rotated in such a way that one is met first with the dominating, languid body of Christ. Next, we notice the comparatively diminutive and static Mary Magdalene, who looks away from the rest of the figures and past the approaching viewer. All that is visible of the Virgin Mary from this vantage point is an extended arm beneath Christ’s armpit and a roughly carved shoulder and face, which cants awkwardly back and away from the viewer. Finally, a figure variously identified as Nicodemus or Joseph of Arimathea looms over the entire scene, his shoulders and chest pushed forward, his hooded visage in near profile gazing down and to the left at the merging of the heads of Mary and Christ. In many ways, these presentations of the sculpture overemphasize the importance of Christ and the puzzling figure of Mary Magdalene in the scene while simultaneously deemphasizing the importance of Mary and the Nicodemus or Joseph figure. The recent reinstallation of the work follows the proposal of Jack Wasserman and dramatically changes how one views the work and understands the importance of the various figures. By rotating the sculpture group so that the roughed-in base is flat across the front, the viewer’s experience of the work changes considerably. The focus is no longer only Christ’s torso but the poignant interaction between Mary and Christ as their faces press gently together. Christ’s lifeless head tilts back, and the Virgin leans forward to unite her forehead with her son’s in a gesture of heartbreaking intimacy. The looming figure of the old man gazing down from beneath his hood now stands directly over the viewer with a focused attention on the interaction of Mary and Christ. As viewers, we gaze up into his intense expression punctuated by heavy brows and Michelangelo’s familiar, broken nose. When the sculpture is viewed from its correct orientation, the most important elements of the work are highlighted – namely the connection of Mary and Christ and the artist, in the guise of Nicodemus, in focused contemplation of the holy figures. . MICHELANGELO, MEDITATION, AND NI CODEMUS
Many have understood Michelangelo’s identification through self-portraiture with the figure most often identified as Nicodemus to be further evidence of
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the artist’s connections with the reformist religious community in sixteenthcentury Rome. The Nicodemites were interested in Protestant ideas but insisted on reforming the church from within and avoiding schism. It has been argued that the artist signaled his associations or sympathies with the group in creating the Florentine Pietà. That the Nicodemites were understood in later years, much like the Viterbo group, to be heretical has also been used to explain why the artist destroyed the work. What has not been generally acknowledged is that Nicodemus and Joseph of Arimathea are both important figures during Christ’s Passion and descent from the cross, particularly in meditation literature. St. Bonaventure, for example, dedicates an entire chapter to the wealthy men who were devoted to Christ and who brought with them many pounds of myrrh and aloe when they came to mourn their dead savior. In the Meditations on the Life of Christ, it is Nicodemus and Joseph of Arimathea who take the body down from the cross and deliver it to the lap of Mary, who stay to comfort the Virgin, and who gently remind her when it is time to relinquish the body and bury it. Vittoria Colonna likewise gives special privilege and honor to the two men, who are alone worthy of “the triumph and glory of the most beautiful work that could ever be done” – taking Christ down from the cross. Both men, in their popular understanding, are also figures of great charity and importance. Joseph of Arimathea offers his tomb to Christ, and Nicodemus, a sculptor, carves an image of the dead savior’s face, now identified as the volto santo in Lucca. Joseph of Arimathea and Nicodemus were also especially important figures to meditating men. By including them in their treatises, authors such as St. Bonaventure highlighted the important service of these men at the time of Christ’s Passion. They are offered as examples of how to act, how to comfort the grieving, and how to be charitable in the face of death and unimaginable pain. These two men, in consoling Mary, emphasized and even mirrored her appropriate and pious emotional response. As such, the figures of Joseph of Arimathea and Nicodemus are understood as demonstrating male response “triangulated through Mary.” The result is a kind of double meditation. Meditating men look to Joseph of Arimathea and Nicodemus, who in turn contemplate Mary, and thereby obtain an emotional response. For men, this “triangulated response” would have been a valuable way for them to engage the empathic emotional response that is so clearly the desired result of meditation. Women of the period could look to or even embody the Virgin (and were encouraged to do so) for guidance on how to act and how to grieve in their meditations. Colonna’s Pianto is a prime example of this phenomenon. For men, it may have been easier for them to look to Joseph or Nicodemus, who in turn look to the Virgin in order to calibrate their own emotional responses. In short, Joseph and Nicodemus would have been
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extremely sympathetic figures for male meditators. They were ideal candidates for Michelangelo to use to access the Passion through meditation as well as models of worshipful male behavior. Michelangelo could further relate to Nicodemus professionally because both men were sculptors. As a man engaged in meditation, however, Nicodemus provided Michelangelo with a way of getting close to Christ and the Virgin as well as meditating on the actions of pious men in the face of persecution and suffering. For an artist who had spent much of his life thinking about the body of Christ and the life of Mary, meditating on the actions of this pious man allowed him to be incredibly close to the redemptive sacrifice of the savior as well as the pious reaction of his mother. It is indeed Nicodemus who was the first to touch the body after Christ’s death, to deliver the sacrificed body to the Madonna, and to stay and console the Virgin in her darkest hour. In addition, Michelangelo as Nicodemus could meditate upon the reaction of the Virgin. Depending on the narrative, the Virgin either comforts the two men or is comforted by them, but in either case the mourning narrative is built around the Virgin, her reaction to her dead son, and the echoing of this reaction by a close circle of followers who support them. In giving the hooded figure his own features, Michelangelo reveals the image to be a prayerful meditation, inhabiting the vision in the guise of Nicodemus. As such, he is both participant and creator. The artist participates in the events of the Passion and feels the attendant emotions. Moreover, as the creator of the meditation, he is also allowed to direct the proceedings and present his vision to the viewer. The work thus contributes to a long tradition of art that reveals a visionary experience to the viewer. Michelangelo relates a highly personal, intimate, and emotionally charged account of events. In this sense, his sculpture might be understood as a personalized, sculpted response, counterpoint, or even continuation of Colonna’s Pianto. In the Florentine Pietà, Michelangelo envisions and depicts himself as Nicodemus so that he might comfort both Marys and help guide the body of Christ onto the lap of the Virgin. It is Michelangelo, in the guise of a biblical figure, who both meditates on and facilitates the proceedings. At this fateful moment, the physical sacrifice of the savior, the emotional sacrifice of the mother, and the pious mourning of the Virgin converge as their physical bodies meet. Christ’s lifeless body, the evidence of his physical torment, leans softly against Mary’s head and torso, indicating a transfer of suffering from Christ’s body to Mary’s emotions. Mary’s equivalent suffering is thus communicated not only through the Virgin’s expression and pose but also through physical contact with her son. Michelangelo/Nicodemus’s intense and steadfast gaze on the bittersweet connection of Christ’s and Mary’s heads further directs the spectator’s attention – it is this moment of the visionary experience
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that should garner our focus. Importantly, his focus highlights the physical interaction of Christ and Mary, their coequal suffering, and their shared work in salvation. Moreover, Mary’s outward grief, although evident, causes her neither to faint nor to weep and tear her hair. The Virgin’s mourning in Michelangelo’s meditation is pious, appropriate, and quiet. Michelangelo as Nicodemus contemplates the scene with a mix of wonder and the reflected grief he sees in the Virgin. In directing our gaze from his hooded figure to the entwined figures of Christ and Mary, Michelangelo impresses upon the viewer the intense personal and theological importance of his creative vision. It is the meeting of Christ and Mary, the union of their two bodies, that forms the crux of Michelangelo’s meditative experience. We become spectators not only to a visionary presentation of the Passion narrative but to Michelangelo’s personal understanding of that narrative, at which he arrived through meditation. Finally, the artist, by inserting himself into this scene, offers up a perpetual prayer for his own salvation. As his funeral monument, the work stands proxy for the departed soul of the artist in constant meditation. This stone Michelangelo will continue to pray and meditate on the salvation offered by Christ and Mary during the Passion long after his physical body dies. This is the first time that Michelangelo explicitly overlaps and combines the creativity of meditation and sculpture. By casting himself as the man who delivers the body of Christ to Mary, takes the body away again, and stays to comfort the Virgin in her time of overwhelming grief, Michelangelo seems to conceive of this sculpture as a kind of visual response to Colonna’s Pianto. He is an important yet ancillary figure in the meditation created by Colonna. In a certain sense, this means that Michelangelo recreates Colonna’s Pianto in another visual format, this time in stone and from another perspective: his own. Not able to embody the Virgin as Colonna could, he is left with a subsidiary role. In this scene, Michelangelo’s Nicodemus literally follows and enables Mary’s empathetic and emotional response. It effectively mirrors Michelangelo pouring over the poems and writings of his friend, Colonna. We might even be able to understand Mary in the sculpture as an embodiment of Colonna herself. Colonna’s death meant that Michelangelo was no longer able to prompt his spiritual guide to meditation through his artistic gifts. The Florentine Pietà, then, serves to reenact in stone his devotion to her spiritual guidance through the Pianto and the Sonnets for the rest of eternity. . MEDITATION AND SCU LPTURE – A BEGINNING
The Florentine Pietà also represents a flawed and incipient solution to Michelangelo’s ongoing problem in the period – how to make new religious
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art that prompts viewers to contemplate the divine and demonstrates the piety of the author. Seen in this light, the work is a concrete demonstration of Michelangelo’s own pious practice and an encouragement to viewers themselves to meditate. Scholars have commented that the notion of calling the work a Pietà is erroneous because the sculpture group conforms to no known iconography on the theme. Instead, the four figures indicate that the action of the work takes place sometime between the deposition, the lamentation, the Pietà, and the entombment. The body of Christ, having recently been taken down from the cross (which is not a part of the work), is supported under its right arm in its descent by Michelangelo/Nicodemus and is pushed onto the lap of Mary by the Magdalene. The now missing left leg of Christ is already positioned on his mother’s lap, and the twist of Christ’s torso shows that his right leg will soon join it. In continuing the motion, the body of Christ will come to rest on the lap of the Virgin, ending in a Pietà. Read another way, the Magdalene and Nicodemus could be helping the body of Christ off the lap of the Madonna. This reading of the work is consistent with the characterization of Nicodemus as the man who traditionally convinces Mary to relinquish the body of her son for burial. Christ’s missing leg, therefore, might be the first part of his body to become disengaged from his mother’s lap, the rest of his body twisting away from his Mary’s embrace. In this case the work should be read as somewhere between the moments of Pietà and entombment. That the Magdalene holds a sponge to Christ’s leg and seems to be washing the body for burial confirms this chronology. Regardless of the moment depicted, the sculpture explores the movement and process of the action. In short, it attempts to mimic the fluid nature of personal meditation – moving seamlessly from one event to the next. Nonetheless, Michelangelo found himself fighting to change the very fixed nature of marble carving. The medium itself is too static for the artist’s vision, stifling the motion that the artist desired to create. Instead of altering the way in which he sculpted, Michelangelo attempted to modify the iconography of the work. The sculpture as it stands refers to many moments in the artist’s meditation and in the narrative of the Passion but is not identifiable as any one in particular. By endeavoring to show all of his meditation at once, the artist in fact shows the viewer a work that is not iconographically identifiable. The result, although emotionally moving, does not demonstrate clearly the distinct moment of the artist’s meditation for the viewer, rendering the work difficult to follow and enter as a visionary experience. The sculpture group, however, even in its unfinished state, points to the ultimate resolution of the work, indicating that Michelangelo had every intention of completing his vision. The artist was not going to radically
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change the composition we see to this day but needed merely to refine the details of the figures. The finished nature of much of the sculpture suggests that Michelangelo, although applying ideas and images gleaned from meditation to his sculpting, was not yet actively creating as he meditated. The fluidity of his meditations had yet to be successfully united with his sculpting technique. That Colonna continued to have an impact on the artist seems beyond doubt, at least in certain aspects of his life. The Florentine Pietà stands as a testimony to the importance of Colonna’s influence on the artist and how such influence continued even after her death. Indeed, Michelangelo adopts her method of prayer and worship as well as her theology of the Virgin in his tomb monument. In what was meant to be his final public statement to the world, the artist boldly declares his loyalty to his friend as a spiritual exemplar and guide, combining her method of worship with his artistic practice. The result is an important experiment in the artist’s late career and the first time he attempts to merge meditation and art. Far from being a failure, the Florentine Pietà is ultimately a significant intermediary step for the artist in blending creation and meditation. The culmination of that search would come with Michelangelo’s late Crucifixion drawings, his Rondanini Pietà, and his relationship with the Jesuits. NOTES
The literature on Colonna and Michelangelo is extensive. An incomplete list of sources would include Nagel, Michelangelo and the Reform of Art; Campi, Michelangelo e Vittoria Colonna; Forcellino, Michelangelo, Vittoria Colonna; Abigail Brundin and Vittoria Colonna, Sonnets for Michelangelo: A Bilingual Edition (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, ); Prodan, Michelangelo’s Christian Mysticism; and Maratsos, “Michelangelo, Vittoria Colonna.” They met sometime in the late s, and Vittoria Colonna died in . To this list of intimacies we might tentatively add their long conversations recorded in Hollanda’s Dialogues, although their content should be taken with a grain of salt. Because the Samaritan Woman is lost, it has not received as much attention as the other two. Barnes and Prodan have begun to fill in that lacuna. Barnes, “Understanding.” Prodan, Michelangelo’s Christian Mysticism. Prodan’s analysis appears in the final chapter of the book, “Aesthetics, Reform, and Viterban Sociability.” Condivi indicates that the cross was originally Y-shaped, which is borne out by printed copies after the drawing, made presumably before the sheet was cut down. Condivi, Life of Michelangelo, . Prodan, Michelangelo’s Christian Mysticism, . It seems that the relationship between Colonna and Pole was particularly close and that he functioned very much like a mentor to her. Abigail Brundin, “Volume Editor’s Introduction,” in Brundin and Colonna, Sonnets for Michelangelo, –. This group and Michelangelo’s association with them has been treated by many scholars, including Campi, Michelangelo e Vittoria Colonna, and Forcellino, Michelangelo, Vittoria Colonna. Brundin and Colonna, Sonnets for Michelangelo, .
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For example, Nagel argued that the “private exchange” of drawings and poems between the two friends could be understood as a parallel to the reformist theology of the freely given gift of grace from Christ. See Nagel, Michelangelo and the Reform of Art, –. Moroncini has further argued that the “key” to understanding Michelangelo’s Pietà for Colonna lies in spiritualist literature, including the writings of Colonna herself, which characterize the Virgin as “without any influence on salvation.” Ambra Moroncini, “I disegni di Michelangelo per Vittoria Colonna e la poesia del Beneficio di Cristo,” Italian Studies , no. (Spring ): –; Maria Forcellino, “Vittoria Colonna and Michelangelo: Drawings and Paintings,” in A Companion to Vittoria Colonna, ed. Abigail Brundin, Tatiana Crivelli, and Maria Serena Sapegno (Leiden: Brill, ); Forcellino, Michelangelo, Vittoria Colonna, –; Campi, Michelangelo e Vittoria Colonna, –. Alexander Nagel even calls his inclusion “somewhat more than a matter of inference” and cites Hollanda’s dialogues as evidence that the artist went to San Silvestro al Quirinale to hear Fra Ambrogio Catarino Politi give sermons. Fra Ambrogio wrote a critique of the Beneficio di Cristo. Nagel, Michelangelo and the Reform of Art, . See Prodan, Michelangelo’s Christian Mysticism, especially part two on “Viterban Spirituality.” In a series of letters in , Gonzaga receives confirmation from Cardinal Pole that he can obtain a copy of one of Michelangelo’s works, which Gonzaga had desired since at least . Subsequently, Vittoria Colonna writes to Michelangelo to send it along, even if it isn’t finished (“se ben non è fornito”). She does tell Michelangelo that the work is going to Gonzaga, identifying him by his title only. Although the most direct route would have been through the artist himself, both Pole and Gonzaga go through Colonna, indicating that they were not close with the artist. For a good summary of this episode, see Maria Forcellino, “La Pietà di Michelangelo per Vittoria Colonna nelle fonti, nei documenti e la sua fortuna critica,” in La Pietà di Ragusa: storia e restauro, ed. Marco Bussagli, Costanza Mora, and Lorenza M. G. D’Alessandro (Rome: Gangemi Editore, ). For the letters that passed between Michelangelo and Colonna, see Barocchi and Ristori, Carteggio, :–, –, –, –, . Abigail Brundin, Vittoria Colonna and the Spiritual Poetics of the Italian Reformation (Burlington, VT: Ashgate, ), . Alexander Nagel, for example, argues that “the drawing, like Vittoria’s text, is concentrated not on the drama of lamentation, but on the mystery of redemption through Christ’s sacrifice.” Nagel, Michelangelo and the Reform of Art, . Bernardino Ochino, for example, left Italy and converted to Protestantism in the s. For a good overview of the Inquisition’s interest in Colonna, Pole, and others, see Targoff, Renaissance Woman, –, and Wallace, Michelangelo, God’s Architect, –. Maratsos notes that this aspect of the many copies made after Michelangelo’s drawings complicates our notion of them as “intimate” objects of private exchange. Maratsos, “Michelangelo, Vittoria Colonna.” For more on the history of meditation, see Louis Martz, The Poetry of Meditation (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, ), –, especially –, and Sarah McNamer, Affective Meditation and the Invention of Medieval Compassion (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, ), –. Saint Bonaventure, The Life of Christ, trans. Cardinal W. H. Hutchings (London: Rivington’s, ), xxxii. As quoted in Summers, Michelangelo and the Language of Art, . In mentally envisioning the life of Christ, one would gain a greater understanding of the emotional turmoil felt by Christ and his followers. Thomas Aquinas states that one of the important goals of meditation was “to excite the emotions which are more effectively aroused by things seen than by things heard.” As quoted in David Freedberg, The Power of Images: Studies in the History and Theory of Response (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, ), . Colonna echoes such positive effects of meditation and the use of images in an
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undated letter to Michelangelo in which she states, “Li effetti vostri excitano a forza il giuditio de chi la guarda et per vederne più experientia parlai de accrescer bontà alle cose perfette.” Barocchi and Ristori, Carteggio, :. Bonaventure, Life of Christ, xxviii. Brundin explains the practice thus: “The starting point for the meditative exercise can be material (a physical image upon which the meditator concentrates in order to focus her mind), or else a form of recollection and internal visualization of real images that the protagonist has seen and remembered.” Brundin, Spiritual Poetics, . Ibid., , and Nagel, Michelangelo and the Reform of Art, –. Goffen has a succinct history of this, as well as copious resources in n on the same pages. Rona Goffen, “Friar Sixtus IV and the Sistine Chapel,” Renaissance Quarterly , no. (Summer ): –. Affective meditation has often been understood as Franciscan in its origins, though recent scholarship disputes this. McNamer, Affective Meditation, –. Because Colonna’s friend Caterina Cibo Varano was a supporter of the fledgling group as early as the s, it is possible that Colonna herself knew of them much earlier than her earliest documented involvement. Marjorie Ann Och, “Vittoria Colonna: Art Patronage and Reform in Sixteenth Century Rome” (PhD diss., Bryn Mawr College, ), . Popes kept offering and then rescinding their support of the order throughout the s and s. Och, “Vittoria Colonna,” . Och and da Alencon, in reading the few documents that remain from this transaction, detect the hand of Colonna, although her involvement is not widely publicized. Ibid., . Forcellino, “Vittoria Colonna and Michelangelo,” . Brundin, Spiritual Poetics, . “The Capuchin Constitutions of ,” in The Catholic Reformation: Savonarola to Ignatius Loyola, Reform in the Church –, ed. and trans. John C. Olin (New York: Harper and Row, ), . Ibid., . Ibid., . For more on the development of mental prayer and meditation within the Franciscan and Capuchin communities, see Ignatius Brady, “The History of Mental Prayer in the Order of the Friars Minor,” Franciscan Studies , no. / (September–December ): –. It might even have been composed by a nun. Sarah McNamer, Meditations on the Life of Christ: The Short Italian Text (South Bend, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, ). This quote comes from a letter by Clare to Agnes. Agnes was a princess who declined to marry Emperor Frederick II of Hungary, preferring instead to become a Clarissian nun. Because of her political importance, her efforts on behalf of the Poor Clares and her decision to live according to their rule were often stymied by her male relatives. She and Clare wrote back and forth, with Clare often offering council and guidance about how to navigate these trials. Clare’s solution, in at least two of the four surviving letters, was to remind Agnes to contemplate both Mary and Christ, whom she calls the “mirror.” As Joan Mueller explains, “Clare’s letters . . . demonstrate a subtlety in Christological understandings, a profound Trinitarian dynamism, a transforming sacramental vision, the integration of contemplative prayer with simple devotion, and a relational understanding of faith and works.” See Joan Mueller, Clare’s Letters to Agnes: Texts and Sources (St. Bonaventure, NY: Franciscan Institute, ), . “Il giorno del Venere, e l’hora tarda mi convitano a scrivere del pietoso affetto di veder Christo morto in braccio alla madre.” All translations of the Pianto are from Colonna, “Pianto,” in Haskins, Who Is Mary?, . Carinci also relates that the manuscript copy of Colonna’s Pianto held in the Vatican Secret Archives is given the title of Meditazione del Venerdì Santo with an alternate title of Sermone sopra la Vergine addolorata. These titles indicate that the context of the Pianto is a traditional
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meditation on the Pietà on Good Friday and that the focus of the prose is on the Virgin, not the sacrifice of Christ. Eleonora Carinci, “Religious Prose Writings,” in Brundin, Crivelli, and Sapegno, eds., A Companion to Vittoria Colonna (Leiden: Brill, ), . “Veggio in croce il mio Dio nudo e disteso / Coi piedi e man chiodate e del destro lato / Aperto e il capo sol di spine ornato, / e da vil gente d’ogni parte offeso.” The numbering and translation of all sonnets comes from Brundin and Colonna, Sonnets for Michelangelo, . “Pazienza, umiltà, vero ubidire.” Brundin and Colonna, Sonnets for Michelangelo, . There were two such images in Rome in the sixteenth century, one housed in Santa Maria del Popolo and the other in Santa Maria Maggiore. For an account of the worship of these images in Rome, see Hans Belting, Likeness and Presence: A History of the Image before the Era of Art, trans. E. Jephcott (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, ), –. “Quel vivo no’l mostrò . . . Basta che’l modo umil, l’atto soave / A Dio rivolge, accende, move, e quando / Si mira il cor d’ogni atra nebbia sgombra.” Brundin and Colonna, Sonnets for Michelangelo, . In addition, Clare uses this language when advocating contemplation and meditation to Agnes. Clare reminds Agnes of Christ on the Cross and adds, “seeing this . . . you must burn more strongly.” Mueller, Clare’s Letters, . Barocchi and Ristori, Carteggio, . Tolnay, Michelangelo, :. Moreover, Mary’s parted lips seem to indicate that she is speaking the verse from Dante inscribed on the cross. This is seemingly a visual parallel to the other drawing Michelangelo creates for Colonna, where Christ appears to appeal to God, “My God, My God, why have you forsaken me?” See Charles de Tolnay, “Michelangelo’s Pietà Composition for Vittoria Colonna,” Record of the Art Museum, Princeton University , no. (): . This is in contrast to works Colonna commissioned from Titian for private devotion. She requested that he make a Mary Magdalene that was as “lacrimosa” as he could make it. As Agoston points out, “Lacrimosa could describe both the penitence of the saint and the impact on the viewer, Colonna herself.” Laura Agoston, “Male/Female, Italy/Flanders, Michelangelo/Vittoria Colonna,” Renaissance Quarterly , no. (Winter ): . Other sonnets that primarily treat the Virgin include numbers , –, , , –, and . “il tuo figlio sul petto / Stringesti morto.” Brundin and Colonna, Sonnets for Michelangelo, –. “ma il fido pensero / Scorgea la gloria e ‘l bel trionfo.” Ibid., –. This is also a characterization of Mary as a prophet. “L’aspre sue piaghe e il dolce umile aspetto / T’accendeva il tormento acerbo e fero.” Ibid., –. “nuovo alto diletto.” Ibid., –. “Che Dio non la lasciava, anzi avea cura / Di ritornarla gloriosa e viva; / Ma perché vera madre il partoristi, / Credo che insino a la tua sepoltura / Di madre avesti il cor d’ogni ben priva.” Ibid. –. “i vostri spiriti andar nel loco/D’suoi . . .” Ibid., –. “Lo scudo de la fede in voi sofferse / Il mortal colpo, onde ogni alma ben nata / Nel favor vostro sua speme nudrica.” Ibid., –. “Con che pietosa carità sovente / Apria ‘l gran figlio i bei concetti a voi, / Madre divina . . .” Ibid., –. “Per compagna, rifugio, ancella e madre, / Seco vi scorgò con umile affetto . . .” Ibid., –. “Ed ora il dolce sposo e l’alto padre / Col caro figlio a voi rendon Perfetto / Guidardon del vostro almo e puro zelo.” Ibid., –. One might also call this iconography paradoxical. As David Summers reminds us, “Such ambiguity does not make interpretation impossible, only more difficult, since it has its own
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sense and consistency. Paradox and the dialectical intricacies of paradox were the favored terrain over which the deeply Christian mind of Michelangelo moved.” Summers, Michelangelo and the Language of Art, . This points to another advantage of using images in meditation: “By concentrating on physical images, the natural inclination of the mind to wander is kept in check, and we ascend with increasing intensity to the spiritual and emotional essence of that which is represented in material form before our eyes – our external eyes and not the eyes of the mind.” Freedberg, Power of Images, –. From sonnet , which reads, “Con la croce a gran passi ir vorrei dietro / Al Signor per angusto erto sentiero.” Brundin and Colonna, Sonnets for Michelangelo, –. This progression in the Pianto from physical to mystical has also been remarked upon by Brundin, Spiritual Poetics, . All translations are taken from Haskins, Who Is Mary? Colonna, “Pianto,” in Haskins, Who Is Mary?, . Ibid., . Ibid., . Carinci describes this as a “sort of transformative process.” Carinci, “Religious Prose Writings,” . Colonna, “Pianto,” in Haskins, Who Is Mary?, . Ibid., . Ibid., . Ibid., . Dante Alighieri, The Portable Dante, ed. and trans. Mark Musa (New York: Penguin Books, ), . Condivi, Life of Michelangelo, . It is also Condivi who notes that Mary is speaking the words written on the cross. I should point out that Colonna’s analysis of this moment in the Crucifixion is quite different. In the Pianto, she explains that this moment is evidence of Christ’s perfect patience. She translates “My God, My God . . .” to mean “why do you make me sacrifice myself, when through love and patience I would prefer not to provide it so soon, but endure it much more slowly?” Colonna, “Pianto,” in Haskins, Who is Mary?, . Ibid., . Ibid., . Ibid., . Indeed, Brundin comments that “a manuscript of the Pianto in the Vatican archives and bearing autograph corrections by Colonna has the title Sermone sopra la Vergine addolorata, more aptly reflecting the content of the work and also suggesting (in the use of the word sermone) that it may have been intended at some point for oral delivery.” Brundin, Spiritual Poetics, . Campi, Michelangelo e Vittoria Colonna, –. Carinci also notes that Catholic authors tended to avoid Mary as a subject altogether in the mid-sixteenth century because the Council of Trent had yet to “adopt a clear stance” on Mary’s theological importance. Carinci, “Religious Prose Writings,” . “It was not enough that they venerated the saints and praised God in them, but they actually made them into gods. They put that noble child, the mother Mary, right into the place of Christ. They fashioned Christ into a judge and thus devised a tyrant for anguished consciences, so that all comfort and confidence was transferred from Christ to Mary, and then everyone turned from Christ to his particular saint.” From Dr. Martin Luther’s Warning to his Dear German People () and as quoted in Derek Wilson, Out of the Storm: The Life and Agency of Martin Luther (New York: St. Martin’s Press, ), . Campi, Michelangelo e Vittoria Colonna, –. For example, Campi claims that “Colonna extinguished some of the brightest stars in the firmament of contemporary Marian spirituality.” Emidio Campi, “Vittoria Colonna and Bernardino Ochino,” in Brundin, Crivelli, and Sapegno, Companion, .
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Carinci, “Religious Prose Writings,” . Ibid., . Campi, “Vittoria Colonna and Bernardino Ochino,” . Abigail Brundin, “Vittoria Colonna and the Virgin Mary,” Modern Language Review , no. (January ): . Carinci, “Religious Prose Writings,” –. Ibid., . Ibid., . Ibid., . Most notably her cousin, Costanza D’Avalos Piccolomini, and the Queen of Navarre. See Brundin and Colonna, Sonnets for Michelangelo, . For more on this clamoring, see Forcellino, “La Pietà di Michelangelo,” –; Maratsos, “Michelangelo, Vittoria Colonna,” –; and Nagel, “Gifts,” –. Simona Capelli, “Le copie pittoriche della Pietà di Michelangelo per Vittoria Colonna: Marcello Venusti e i copisti anonimi. Attribuzioni e precisazioni,” Studi Romani , nos. – (): –. Tolnay, “Michelangelo’s Pietà,” –. Brundin, Spiritual Poetics, . The Last Judgment, for example, was famously edited after the artist’s death to cover the nudes. The artist would also lose friends Sebastiano del Piombo and Pietro Bembo, as well as his grand-nephew, in that year and one of his brothers in . These losses also came in the middle of professional and political setbacks, as well as a major illness. Wallace, Michelangelo, . “Iddio / dal mondo poco accorto se l’ha ripresa, e tolta agli occhi nostri.” Saslow, Poetry of Michelangelo, . “Né metter può in oblio / benché ‘l corpo sie morto, / i suo dolci, leggiardi e sacri inchiostri.” Ibid., . “del gran foco lo splendore / che m’ardeva e nutriva.” Ibid., . The total number of sonnets is by Michelangelo’s count. Barocchi and Ristori, Carteggio, . Both Vasari and Condivi mention that Michelangelo was carving this as a personal tomb monument. Vasari, La vita di Michelangelo, :; Condivi, Life of Michelangelo, . Paolo Giovio says that it was begun in . Wasserman, Michelangelo’s Florence Pietà (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, ), . Wasserman, following Vasari, suggests that Baccio Bandinelli’s tomb in Santissima Annunziata was completed according to Michelangelo’s original plan – that is, a sculpture group placed atop the altar table. Bandinelli’s version shows the artist as Nicodemus cradling the dead Christ. He has eliminated Mary in his composition. Both Condivi and Vasari in their lives of Michelangelo, however, claim that the sculpture was to be placed “at the foot” of the altar, calling into question this reading of the ultimate project. Wasserman, Michelangelo’s Florence Pietà, ; Condivi, Life of Michelangelo, . For more on the connections between the two tombs, see Kathleen Weil-Garris Brandt, “Bandinelli and Michelangelo: A Problem of Artistic Identity,” in Art the Ape of Nature: Studies in Honor of H. W. Janson, eds. Moshe Barasch and Lucy Freeman Sandier (New York: Harry N. Abrams, ), –. A general bibliography of the sculpture would include the following: Tolnay, Michelangelo, :–; Frederick Hartt, Michelangelo’s Three Pietàs (New York: Harry N. Abrams, ), –; William E. Wallace, “Michelangelo, Tiberio Calcagni, and the Florence Pietà,” Artibus et Historiae , no. (): –; Leo Steinberg, “Michelangelo’s Florentine Pietà: The Missing Leg,” Art Bulletin , no. (December ): –. The tomb of Cardinal Lagrasulas, the tombs of the Medici in the Medici Chapel, and the tomb of Julius II.
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Wasserman hypothesizes that Michelangelo carefully removed many of the missing limbs himself, perhaps to access parts of the group more freely or to rework parts of the sculpture. Wasserman, Michelangelo’s Florence Pietà, –. Wasserman also provides a good summary of the three contradictory ways Vasari describes the mutilation; see Ibid., –. Vasari claims the work broke, and then Michelangelo mutilated it. He gives three separate reasons for this mutilation. First, Vasari says the work had technical problems; second, he claims the artist was unsatisfied with what he had produced; and third, he claims that Michelangelo was driven mad by the nagging of his assistant, Urbino, to finish the work. For more, see Wallace, “Michelangelo, Tiberio Calcagni,” –. This perhaps explains the odd scale of the Mary Magdalene figure, as well as the misappropriation of the cherub crown, which is always an attribute of the Virgin for Michelangelo. James Hall calls the work “a spiritual as well as an artistic failure.” James Hall, Michelangelo and the Reinvention of the Human Body (New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, ), . Nagel does not specifically use the word failure but instead calls Michelangelo’s actions “a crude iconoclasm.” Nagel, Michelangelo and the Reform of Art, . Wallace has pointed out that Michelangelo could not have finished the work as designed. Among other problems, the artist left himself too little marble to sculpt details such as the Virgin’s hand on Christ’s body. William E. Wallace, “La bella mano: Michelangelo the Craftsman,” Artibus et Historiae , no. (): –. The Rondanini Pietà and the late Crucifixion drawings will be treated in Chapter . James Hall aptly described the Magdalene as a “pillar of salt.” Hall, Michelangelo and the Reinvention of the Human Body, . See Wasserman, Michelangelo’s Florence Pietà, –. Vasari, in a letter to Michelangelo’s nephew Lionardo, explains that the features of the old man at the top of the sculpted group are indeed those of the artist. The pertinent passage from the letter is reproduced in Ibid., . This is the only image Vasari identified as a selfportrait of the artist in Michelangelo’s lifetime. It remains one of the most widely accepted self-portraits of the artist’s career. Importantly, this orientation of the work conforms to the description offered by Condivi in his life of Michelangelo. Condivi describes Nicodemus, as well as the body of Christ, as important figures in the composition but spends most of his energy on the figure of Mary. It is her “breast, arms, and knee” that receive the dead body of Christ; it is the Virgin who is “assisted by Nicodemus”; and it is the Virgin who implicitly guides the viewer through the emotional turmoil of the scene as she is “visibly grieved” but “does not fail in the task.” Significantly, Condivi’s description emphasizes the interaction of the Nicodemus figure, the Virgin Mary, and Christ, as well as the “the beauty and the emotions,” and is a guide as to how viewers should understand the work today. Condivi, Life of Michelangelo, . For more on this, see Kristoff, “Michelangelo as Nicodemus”; Shrimplin-Evangelidis, “Michelangelo and Nicodemism”; and Timothy Verdon, Michelangelo teologo: fede e creatività tra Rinascimento e Controriforma (Milan: Ancora, ), –. Shrimplin-Evangelidis, “Michelangelo and Nicodemism,” . Ibid., . Bonaventure, Life of Christ, –. Colonna, “Pianto,” in Haskins, Who Is Mary?, . Kristoff, “Michelangelo as Nicodemus,” . Further augmenting his importance, it is through a conversation with Nicodemus, recorded in John :–, that Christ explains his notion of being “born again.” In declaring that no one shall enter the Kingdom of Heaven without being reborn, Jesus confuses Nicodemus, who expresses incredulity at the feasibility of being born again through his mother’s womb. Christ explains that “Flesh gives birth to the Flesh, but Spirit gives birth to the Spirit,” cementing the central notion of rebirth through the Holy Spirit in the Christian context. It is just after this point that Jesus offers himself as the way to be reborn, saying, “For God so loved the world, he gave his only begotten son, that whoever believes in him shall not perish but have eternal life.”
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Bonaventure, Life of Christ, –. McNamer has studied the responses of people within meditation narratives along gendered lines. Male and female figures react in gender-specific ways in order to appeal as models of behavior. For more, see McNamer, Affective Meditation, –. Although not in the scope of this particular line of inquiry, it is worth noting that Michelangelo’s closeness to the sacrifice of the Savior in the guise of Nicodemus has eucharistic implications. Cristina Acidini Luchinat, Michelangelo scultore (Milan: Federico Motta Editore, ), . In Colonna’s narrative, for example, the Virgin comforts the men, but many others reverse these roles. Nagel comments that, in the guise of Nicodemus, “his work in the group, symbolizing his work on the group, is the expression of a piety that belongs specifically to the sculptor.” Nagel, Michelangelo and the Reform of Art, . Freedberg, Power of Images, . Tolnay comments that the work is “a fusion of a Lamentation and a Deposition.” Tolnay, Michelangelo, :. Hartt’s analysis of the matter is perhaps the most complete. He reasons, “Since no cross was ever intended – nor any crown of thorns, nails, basin, sponge, slab or sepulcher . . . the generic name Pietà seems best.” Hartt, Michelangelo’s Three Pietàs, . The bands stretched across Christ’s chest would have aided in the body’s descent. For an interpretation of the missing leg as a sign of the spousal relationship of Christ and Mary, see Steinberg, “Missing Leg,” –.
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CHAPTER FOUR
PRIVATE The Jesuits, the Body, and Meditation
M
ichelangelo’s poem is an anomaly among his late written works. First, it is a fifty-five-line capitolo instead of a sonnet. Second, it does not explicitly take up religion or the salvation of the soul as its subject. Instead, we are treated to a long diatribe on the injustices of aging. Other poems from the s utilize imagery of travel and pilgrimage or cry out to God for guidance and aid. Conversely, poem complains about urination, heaps of shit at the artist’s doorstep, flatulence, and the artist’s various failing faculties, from the cricket that sings in his ear all night to the alarming state of his body – nothing more than “bones and strings inside my leather bag.” He rails against the neighbors who leave dead cats in his yard and complains bitterly about his increasing physical infirmity and ugliness. It is tempting to dismiss this poem as little more than the aging artist complaining fruitlessly about his neighbors and his long list of ailments. It belongs, however, to a broader tradition of humorous, often crude, poems most closely associated with the poet Francesco Berni. Yet Michelangelo’s scatological language and crotchety demeanor mask some of the more subtle and important ideas in the poem. There is a masterful nesting of physical experience in the lines. For example, Michelangelo complains that he is shut up in his home like “the pulp of a fruit by its husk, / like a genie bound up in a bottle.” The sense of claustrophobia and imprisonment is amplified by the next lines, which describe spiderwebs that leave him “little room to fly in his dark tomb.” Like his physical body within his home,
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PRIVATE: THE JESUITS, THE BODY, MEDITATION
Michelangelo’s soul is trapped by both constipation and congestion – slowly dying and waiting to be “unstopped” by death. This implicit comparison – between the artist’s body and house as similarly decaying and inhospitable shelters – is made explicit in the memorable lines in which he wryly compares himself to the haggard old Befana of the Roman Christmas season. He writes, “Whoever saw me would say I’m right for a part / on the Magi’s Feast, especially if he saw / my house among such splendid palaces here.” In these lines it is unclear if the house is a metaphor for Michelangelo’s physical shape or if he intends the wreck of his house to be a separate part of the festivities surrounding the nativity. James Saslow argues that the line alludes to the fact that Michelangelo’s home would aptly serve as the humble stable in which Christ was born, particularly when considered next to his neighbors’ houses. The fact that this ambiguity exists in these lines indicates that one of the major themes of the work is supplied by the longstanding analogy of architecture and the body. Michelangelo’s poem is a phenomenological exegesis on the aging of the body and on his experience of feeling confined in the carapace of bones and tissues that is crumbling around him. This sense of entrapment is made doubly potent by the placement of his soul inside a body inside a house that imprisons him in a humiliating, stinking, and neglected architectural shell. Although the poem is filled with memorable images, the overall impression that dominates the lines is one of embodied experience. This is especially highlighted by the artist’s repetition of “io” or “I,” as well as the way in which he describes his personal experiences to us. When he says his “face has a shape that’s enough to terrify,” he does not preface this by saying “when I look in a mirror” or “when I behold myself.” Instead, he has the face; it is a part of his embodied experience and shape. He knows the nature of his own features without ever having to consult a mirror or demonstrate that consultation to the reader. In addition, he lists the sights, smells, sounds, and feelings of existing in this aging form. If read carefully and in the context of his late works, this poem indicates a fundamental shift in Michelangelo’s conception of the body in the last years of his life. The Last Judgment might be understood as the apotheosis of Michelangelo’s investment in the body as an aesthetic vehicle for philosophical and religious ideas. The complicated, twisted, and intertwined bodies were meant to both visualize the theology of the perfected body granted to Christians after Judgment and provide a master class in difficultà. Michelangelo was fully invested in the body as an exterior and aesthetic site through which he could communicate ideas. The bodies in the Sistine Chapel do not, however, correspond to physical experience. In fact, when humans attempt to imitate the various poses in the Last Judgment and the Sistine Chapel ceiling, it becomes immediately apparent how much of a construction these poses are. Though we tend to accept them visually, they do not easily correlate to the lived
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experience of being in a body. What is clear from poem and the artist’s late drawings and sculptures is that Michelangelo’s faith in the body – particularly the nude – as a means of communication had undergone a dramatic shift. No longer was the body the Neoplatonic mirror to the soul. Instead, the body trapped and suffocated that soul. Michelangelo even opines in poem that “my soul’s wings have been fully clipped and plucked,” suggesting a strong repudiation of the Neoplatonic concept of ascent. Moreover, his heroic and difficult male nudes no longer communicated the artist’s increasingly pertinent embodied experience. Michelangelo’s late drawings and the Rondanini Pietà, however, are a testament to the artist attempting to use his investment in the body in a different way. These late works bear witness to Michelangelo’s phenomenological experience of the body and his endeavor to communicate something of that embodiedness to his viewer. This shifting interest in the body was gradual. As Cammy Brothers and William Wallace have acknowledged, both the artist’s Laurentian Library designs and the Pauline Chapel frescoes indicate that Michelangelo was considering how moving bodies interacted with architecture and paintings well before the s. This interest, however, had not yet necessitated a fundamental change in his working process. The artist’s drawing, design, and sculpting processes only changed as a result of his increasing age and his greater connection to meditation – particularly through his little-discussed relationship to the nascent Jesuit order. Although Michelangelo had been steeped in the culture of meditation in Reformation Rome through his friendship with Vittoria Colonna, the development and popularization of the Spiritual Exercises as a meditative practice offered a different perspective on mental prayer. This in turn profoundly influenced the artist’s creative processes and his relationship to the body as a subject and a site. He abandoned the drawing and sculpting practices that had served him for nearly seven decades in order to better render the phenomenological aspects of his meditations on paper and in stone. Michelangelo’s late series of Crucifixion drawings, drawings for the Porta Pia, and the Rondanini Pietà are images that attest to a kind of radical searching at the end of his life for a new religious visual vocabulary and a new religious and artistic process – one catalyzed by meditation and shaped by his evolving relationship to the body. . MICHELANGELO AND THE JESUI TS
Although his last twenty-five years in Rome coincide neatly with the rise of the Jesuit order, any connection between Michelangelo and the Order of Jesus has been denied or overlooked in much of the scholarship on the artist’s late period. Such scholarship ignores not only circumstantial evidence of his involvement with the Jesuit order but also more concrete connections with St. Ignatius of Loyola himself.
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Michelangelo was finishing the Last Judgment and had not yet begun the frescoes of the Pauline Chapel when Pope Paul III approved St. Ignatius’s request to found the Jesuit order in . It is hard to imagine that Michelangelo had no knowledge of this confirmation, considering his close relationship with the Pope and the fact that it was Cardinal Gasparo Contarini, a member of the spirituali and close friend to Vittoria Colonna, who presented the Jesuits’ petition to the Pope. Ludovico Beccadelli, Contarini’s longtime secretary, was likewise a close friend of Michelangelo’s. Perhaps even more persuasive is the fact that Vittoria Colonna herself offered aid to the early Jesuits in . In addition, the nascent order and the artist were neighbors. Until his death in , Michelangelo lived in a house near the markets of Trajan and at the foot of the Capitoline Hill, in a neighborhood called the Macello de’ Corvi. Immediately following the confirmation of the order, the Jesuits moved from a temporary location outside of Rome to a new base at the church of Santa Maria della Strada. This site, now occupied by the Gesù, is quite close to the Capitoline Hill, Michelangelo’s neighborhood, and Paul III’s preferred residence in the Palazzo Venezia. Though their numbers were small compared to the more-established mendicant orders, the Jesuits in that period were already gaining strength, growing from ten to twenty members in Rome in the space of a year. By , the Jesuits had more than three thousand members and many international chapters. Such growth would not have gone unremarked upon in Rome, especially because the Jesuits also ran a public ministry and encouraged all members to preach. But Michelangelo’s connections with the Jesuits were not purely circumstantial. On June , , the secretary of the company in Rome wrote an excited letter to a colleague to say that Michelangelo had accepted an offer to create a design for the church of the Gesù and that he hoped to begin quickly. Though he was the second architect they had retained for the job, the order seemed particularly pleased that Michelangelo had offered his services. St. Ignatius himself wrote of their good fortune in a letter dated July . According to the Jesuit founder, Michelangelo had also agreed to provide architectural plans “per devotion sola.” In other words, Michelangelo paid a great compliment to St. Ignatius and his order by helping the Jesuits for the love of God alone and without pay. Michelangelo claimed that he worked at St. Peter’s for the love of God as well, though he was, in fact, paid a handsome salary for his services by the pontiff. This claim, therefore, should perhaps not be taken at face value. Nevertheless, the fact that both projects were promoted as acts of faith, instead of traditional commissions, communicates something of how Michelangelo wanted to be seen publicly in his final years as well as how he felt about the religious stakes of designing both St. Peter’s and Il Gesù. In creating a design for the Jesuits’ home church, Michelangelo likely would have
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become at least somewhat familiar with the order’s mission and beliefs, if he was not already. Yet little or nothing survives of Michelangelo’s designs for the Jesuit home church, if he began them at all. The Jesuits and their particular brand of Catholicism would have been a natural extension of Michelangelo’s existing interests in the s and s. Though not as conservative as Vittoria Colonna’s Capuchins, the early Jesuits sought and promoted a new way to relate to God and practice their faith in the years following the Protestant defection. Moreover, both orders took Franciscan spirituality as a foundation for their own meditative practices. As Ewert Cousins explains, the Franciscans and Jesuits were alike in their “devotion to the humanity of Christ, which in each case flowered in meditation on the life of Christ.” Cousins also writes that the Franciscan influence present in the Spiritual Exercises probably filtered into St. Ignatius’s consciousness via Ludolph of Saxony’s Life of Christ, which incorporated large passages of text from the Pseudo-Bonaventure’s Meditations on the Life of Christ. In other words, the traditional Clarissian practices favored by Colonna, the meditation of the Capuchins, and the prayer of the Jesuits whom Michelangelo met in mid-sixteenth-century Rome all shared similar spiritual and theological backgrounds. Jesuit meditation, however, constituted a kind of revolution in prayer. Although drawn from medieval examples, what St. Ignatius proposed in his Spiritual Exercises was unlike his forbears’ practice in several important ways. The primary difference in Jesuit meditation stems from the nature of the text itself. The Spiritual Exercises were not written to be read by those already educated or practicing a religious life. Indeed, though the Exercises advocated that people participate in thirty-day meditative and spiritual retreats, they did so with the help of Jesuit guides who read the Exercises themselves and set the tasks to the individual on retreat. Those following the guidelines of the Spiritual Exercises for their meditation, therefore, did not often read them. Consequently, neither literacy nor scholastic sophistication was necessary for those seeking to pray or meditate in a Jesuit manner. The text emphasizes that those leading others on retreat should meet their students wherever they happened to be, spiritually. As a result, though nominally composed of four weeks or roughly thirty days, each week could be lengthened or shortened depending upon the specific progress of an individual. It also meant that those seeking Jesuit spiritual guidance did not necessarily have to make the optimal, full-scale, thirty-day retreat. The eighteenth, nineteenth, and twentieth “Introductory Explanations” sections of the Spiritual Exercises all pertain to persons who are simply “more disengaged” or who, for reasons of “age, education, and ability” or “pressing occupations,” cannot attend a retreat. In these cases, guides may adjust the daily contemplations as necessary, in extreme cases reducing the commitment of the person they are
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guiding to as little as an hour and a half a day. Seclusion, however, should be sought even in these short devotions, because, as Ignatius explains, “By concentrating instead all our attention on one alone, namely, the service of our Creator and our own spiritual progress, we enjoy a freer use of our natural faculties for seeking diligently what we so ardently desire.” Guides also instructed interested parties in the simple or “light” forms of Jesuit meditation. In the early days of the Jesuit ministry, it seems that this simplified version of the Spiritual Exercises was used most often and may have been what Michelangelo encountered in Rome alongside pervasive public Jesuit preaching. Importantly, the goal of this program of retreat and meditation was not explicitly prescribed by the text but set by those undertaking it. As Philip Endean explains, “The book [Spiritual Exercises] is only a means to an end: the free interplay of the Creator with the Creature, leading to the disposition of the creature’s life in such a way as to promote the soul’s salvation.” This free interplay means that both those on Jesuit retreat and those leading Jesuit retreats should be “open to whatever God might bring.” This is particularly the case when retreatants, at the end of the course prescribed by the Exercises, make an “election” or a decision. This could mean that they decide to enter the Jesuit order, and certainly this did happen. Equally, it could also mean that those on retreat could rededicate their life in the secular world to greater spirituality. Essentially, whatever the personal relationship they had built with God led them to over the course of the four weeks should be respected as a result of the open-ended and divinely driven nature of the Exercises. In this sense, the Jesuits echoed the religious wishes of both the Protestants and reformist groups such as the spirituali in that they encouraged a personal relationship with God. Because of this, the Exercises also explicitly require that, no matter the outcome of the decision or election, it be “within the life of the Church.” In this way, the Jesuits carefully separated themselves from groups that were regarded as heretical in post-Reformation Rome. For Michelangelo, such a position would have been desirable because it built on the kind of spirituality advocated by Colonna but in a manner that did not challenge existing orthodoxy. Because the spirituali had come under suspicion from the Inquisition, such an appeal to the orthodox teachings of the church would have been comforting. Despite a common ancestry in Franciscan theology, Jesuit meditation was different from Colonna’s meditation as described in her Pianto. Colonna’s is not a fully embodied experience. This removal is supported by the text, which is essentially visual in character. Although she alludes to sounds, her description is largely about the actions of the participants and engages with no other senses. She describes her meditation in almost exclusively visual terms, repeating the phrase “I see” as if she were describing an event for someone
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who could not see it. This results in a sense of detachment from the events themselves. Colonna sees the events but does not participate. She even opines, “O how envious will I always be of those who were there,” signifying that her meditation did not truly transport her to the side of Mary and Christ after his Crucifixion. Her role is like that of an omniscient narrator or a Greek chorus – she floats above the action, relating it for the reader or viewer and ascribing significance to the events taking place. She moves quickly from describing an action Mary takes, to describing how that action made Mary feel, to expanding that emotion into a theological exegesis. For example, Colonna describes Mary kissing Christ’s wounds, but in the very next breath she waxes philosophical regarding Mary’s gratitude for Christ’s grace. The image, at least in Colonna’s text, is merely a pretext for contemplating theological truths – she ascends from the aesthetic to the mystical quickly and continually over the course of the text. As David Rosand has observed, “The pious Marchesa passed easily from aesthetic detachment to religious engagement, if such a distinction ever existed for her.” Moreover, Colonna’s Pianto bears witness to her specific envisioning of the events, guiding the reader to see the events as she sees them and to draw the same theological conclusions. The prose work functions more as a persuasive document about the author’s own theological conclusions than as a guide to developing one’s own meditative practice or as a multisensory experience of the mourning of Christ. In this sense, it follows the traditions of older meditative texts in the Franciscan tradition. St. Ignatius’s prescriptions for meditation in the Spiritual Exercises were both an expansion of and a deviation from the affective meditation practiced by Colonna and others. They were more open ended than those of his medieval and contemporary counterparts, allowing those who followed them to develop their own means and methods of entering the scene on which they were meditating. They also demanded that those who meditated be more deeply engaged with their senses. As Endean notes, most days in the retreat described by the Exercises are divided into five separate periods of contemplation. The first two require meditators to place themselves within the Gospel scene provided by their Jesuit guide, ending their contemplations with an imagined conversation with some of the holy figures. The Jesuit guide provides no script and virtually no description of the scene. Those meditating are left to discover these elements on their own with the careful guidance of their Jesuit leader, or director. Already, this demands a more intimate, personal, and even embodied experience than Colonna describes. The most fully immersive and embodied experience, however, comes at the end of the day, when the fifth contemplation requires retreatants to apply each of their five senses to their earlier contemplations (or more literally, to “pass the five senses of the imagination through the first and second contemplation”).
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This so-called Application of the Senses meant imagining the sights, smells, sounds, textures, and even tastes of the scene in front of them. This is a radical departure not only in practice from other forms of meditation but also in what it values. Jesuit meditation no longer privileges the empathic as a means of gaining greater understanding but insists instead that “an exalted form of prayer requires concentration on an imagined sensory object.” This sensory immersion in the contemplation is, moreover, “the climax of the Ignatian day.” As Endean argues, Still less has the Application anything whatever to do with “mystical” experiences or transportation into the beyond. Rather, the movement is one from reflection on the scene to reflection of the scene, one of deepening imaginative involvement. Instead of simply thinking about past events, retreatants are challenged to react to the events of Christ’s life, and to imagine how their own lives might become responses to those events.
In other words, Jesuit prayer was profoundly rooted in a sensory experience that provided valuable insights for a worshipper without any recourse to spiritual ascent. The imaginative, haptic experience could be an end in and of itself. Importantly, this sensory experience was entirely self-directed in the imagination of the meditator. The Jesuit director did not provide anything beyond the barest essentials of the subject of meditation. It was up to the retreatant to create the rest. This form of interior, imaginative, and sensory prayer was fundamental to the early Jesuit ministry in the sixteenth century. The earliest followers of St. Ignatius in Rome recommended so-called mental prayer to the uneducated laymen and women to whom they preached. In so doing, they believed that they might be able to stem or repair a “collapse” in prayer that had occurred in the Catholic Church in their time. Rather than being a part of a larger, holistic, and liturgically based practice reserved for those following a monastic life, meditation was, for the Jesuits, something that every Christian should engage in on their own in order to facilitate “a more intensified interiority.” It is frankly impossible that Michelangelo would not have known about this central aspect of Jesuit devotion in , when he agreed to design their home church. But knowing about the practice and being an adherent of it are two very different things. Nevertheless, there are some compelling circumstantial reasons to believe that Michelangelo was actively practicing meditation. In September , Michelangelo left Rome, headed for the shrine of the Virgin’s House in Loreto. His timing was not incidental, as it was feared that Rome would soon be under attack by the Duke of Alba and Spanish forces. Though he characterized the trip to his nephew, Lionardo, as a pleasant escape
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from Rome during a lull in work at St. Peter’s, Michelangelo was clearly leaving the city under some duress. His choice of destination was perhaps not unexpected, as Contarini and Colonna had particular connections to the site. Moreover, the Jesuits had devoted themselves to this shrine, and St. Ignatius himself took a special interest in it, sending a group of brothers to be confessors there in . They also were responsible for giving the Spiritual Exercises there. Michelangelo never made it to Loreto, however, stopping instead for some five weeks in Spoleto and sheltering in the Franciscan hermitage of Monteluco, a place “favored by Saints Francis and Anthony, and recently by Pope Paul III.” If he did not undertake some course of religious study or meditation during this time, it would have been surprising. In sheltering with Franciscan hermits, Michelangelo would have been given a simple cell for seclusion, sacred woods in which to roam, and a surrounding community that was devoted to meditation. Further, the meditational practices of the Franciscans living in Monteluco would have been familiar because they formed the basis of both Colonna’s and the Jesuits’ devotional practices. Writing to Vasari after his trip, Michelangelo noted that “less than half of me has returned to Rome, because peace is not really to be found save in the woods.” The sense of peace he left behind in Monteluco speaks volumes to the importance of those five weeks in his life. Although it is impossible to say for certain whether or not Michelangelo completed the Spiritual Exercises during this time or at any point in his life, it is almost inconceivable that he did not engage with meditation on some level. What is clear is that his trip began with a religious destination in mind and ended with some kind of spiritual activity and fulfilment. Another detail is suggestive of Michelangelo’s engagement with Jesuit meditation and the Spiritual Exercises. Among Michelangelo’s late drawings is Christ Appearing to His Mother, an image that shows the “transfigured Christ appearing to his mother on Easter morning” (Figure ). The subject is rare in Italian art, and the most immediate iconographic precedent Michelangelo may have known was from Albrecht Durer’s woodcut of the scene. The drawing in question, however, is dated to –. There is seemingly no clear explanation why Michelangelo would take up such an obscure subject some forty-five years after Durer’s print, unless one consults the Spiritual Exercises. At the beginning of the fourth week, retreatants are encouraged to meditate on this event, one that Ignatius notes is not included in the Bible. The most immediate method of inspiration for Michelangelo’s imagining of the extra-biblical narrative would have been his connection to the Jesuits. It is difficult to imagine Michelangelo taking direction from a Jesuit advisor and following a prescribed course of Jesuit study as outlined in the Spiritual Exercises. Nevertheless, his exposure, both directly and indirectly, to the theological ideas contained in the Spiritual Exercises seems beyond doubt, as
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. Michelangelo Buonarroti / Christ Appearing to His Mother / c. / Oxford: Ashmolean Museum / HIP / Art Resource, NY
does the artist’s long-standing interest in meditation as a devotional practice. Likewise, the embodied and sensory nature of Jesuit meditation accords closely with the artist’s shifting relationship to the body in his final years. It is worth considering, therefore, how this exposure might have influenced the phenomenological investigations in his final works. . JESUIT MEDITATION AND TH E SEVEN GREAT CRUCIFI XION DRAWINGS
The specific sensory qualities of Jesuit meditation provide a lens through which we might examine Michelangelo’s radical change in drawing technique in the last years of this life. The so-called great series of seven late Crucifixion
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compositions (Courtauld D..PG., Ashmolean ., Windsor and , British Museum ,. and ,., and Louvre ) (Figures –) share attributes not found in Michelangelo’s earlier designs. They are stunningly original in process and execution – something that has been hitherto little remarked upon in scholarship. Many of the singular characteristics in the artist’s process can be explained if we consider that Michelangelo’s meditations may have influenced them. Although variously dated in a range from the mid-s to , the series of seven black chalk drawings has almost always been understood in scholarship as a cohesive set representing the most intimate thoughts of the artist during the last years of his life. Charles de Tolnay calls them “mystic visions of the divine,” whereas Frederick Hartt characterizes them as the “inmost witness to the process of human salvation.” Michael Hirst and Hugo Chapman both liken the drawings to the artist’s poetry in that they are “confessional meditations.” Carmen Bambach, in her catalog on Michelangelo’s drawings, echoes these thoughts, claiming that each of the sheets “has the quiet, intimate character of a search for spiritual transcendence.” Though the Crucifixion drawings have long been connected to prayer and Michelangelo’s late spirituality, these analyses have rarely grappled with the increasingly sensory nature of the drawings. Indeed, as the quotations above indicate, most art historians have understood these images to function in a traditional manner in terms of their applicability to meditation. The aesthetic or the sensual could only be a place to begin – some sort of emotional or spiritual ascension beyond the scene depicted must have been anticipated, sought, or even facilitated by the images Michelangelo created. In other words, such interpretations are possible only if we connect them to the most traditional forms of meditation available to the artist. If we associate these images with the newly emergent ideas from Jesuit meditation, we can begin to understand how these drawings are closely related to his ability to profit from an embodied experience of meditation. Michelangelo uses specific techniques in these drawings to communicate a fundamentally changed conception of the body. British Museum ,. (Tolnay r) (Figure ) demonstrates many of the most salient and radical drawing techniques found across the series, including repetition, a layering of subsequent compositional ideas, and the highly unorthodox use of lead white applied with a brush. It depicts Christ dead on the cross with two mourning figures beside him. Christ’s head is bowed, and the unidentified mourning figures stand close to the cross, one looking up at the savior, the other lovingly pressing their cheek into his thigh. Though these figures are clearly meant to be Mary and John the Evangelist in other drawings in the series, such identifications are not possible in the British Museum sheet. There is no attempt to place the Crucifixion in a landscape or
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. Michelangelo Buonarroti / Crucifixion (D..PG.) / c. / London: Courtauld Institute of Art / © The Courtauld / Bridgeman Images
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. Michelangelo Buonarroti / Crucifixion (Ashmolean .) / c. / Oxford: Ashmolean Museum / HIP / Art Resource, NY
other setting, such as the mount of Golgotha. A simple line drawn with a straight edge that runs parallel to the bottom edge of the sheet indicates that the cross rests on the ground. The cross in this composition is fairly conventional, as the arms meet the central vertical at right angles, though there are instances in the series where the cross is Y-shaped. In the case of Windsor (Figure ), both types of crosses are explored as options. The drawings are generally of the same rectangular size, but some sheets have clearly been cut down over the centuries. In addition, with only a few exceptions, there is nothing on the verso of the sheets. The relevant material exists only on one side of the paper, and the other side is not used for other
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. Michelangelo Buonarroti / Crucifixion (Windsor ) / c. / Windsor: Windsor Castle / Royal Collection Trust / © Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II https://doi.org/10.1017/9781009314350.005 Published online by Cambridge University Press
MICHELANGELO’S ART OF DEVOTION
. Michelangelo Buonarroti / Crucifixion (Windsor ) / c. / Windsor: Windsor Castle / Royal Collection Trust / © Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II
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. Michelangelo Buonarroti / Crucifixion (British Museum ,.) / c. / London: British Museum / © The Trustees of the British Museum / Art Resource, NY
drawings or other projects. The overall impression of the figures is that they are hazy, indistinct, and lacking definite outlines. Though the basic, overarching composition is simple – even restrictive – what happens within those boundaries is often open to interpretation. Christ’s head in British Museum
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. Michelangelo Buonarroti / Crucifixion (British Museum ,.) / c. / London: British Museum / © The Trustees of the British Museum / Art Resource, NY
,. (Figure ), for example, although clearly pitched forward onto his chest, is difficult to decipher. A viewer cannot be sure of the precise angle of foreshortening and therefore is unsure where and how the head inclines down. Such ambiguous passages are common throughout the drawings.
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. Michelangelo Buonarroti / Crucifixion (Louvre ) / c. / Paris: Musée du Louvre / Erich Lessing / Art Resource, NY
Part of the reason for this confusion in the precise position of the figures in this series is that Michelangelo rarely draws a line only once. Even the cross, the foundation of the composition, is often drawn and redrawn – in the case of British Museum ,. (Figure ), the top is rendered no fewer than
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four times. Each time, the artist painstakingly lined up a straight edge, repeated, and shifted lines he had already created. Across the series, the effect of this is that the cross appears as both a two-dimensional object – a flat, iconic representation of a cruciform shape – and a three-dimensional set of wooden beams. It hovers back and forth between the two representational modes depending on where one looks and how a viewer relates the cross to the figures. This repetition of lines continues and expands in the outlines of the figures. Windsor (Figure ), for example, depicts a stretched, attenuated Christ with a narrow torso slung off to the right of the cross. The impression that Christ’s torso is so narrow is created by allowing only the innermost contour lines to be the final ones. Closer inspection shows that Michelangelo has echoed, redrawn, or reemphasized the contours of Christ’s torso dozens of times. What reads at a distance as a cast shadow of the body against the cross is, upon closer examination, the artist drawing, redrawing, shifting, echoing, and manipulating contour lines so that the body may be anywhere from emaciated to bulky and muscled, depending on which set of outlines we choose to privilege. Most of these lines do not substantially shift the position of Christ’s torso on the cross. Others, however, fundamentally alter the way the body moves in space. For example, the right leg of Christ on the Windsor (Figure ) has at least two distinctive phases – one where it is almost in profile and the other where it is rotated more frontally to the picture plane. Importantly, this shift does not happen in two successive figures on the same paper, nor is the rest of the body of Christ drawn more than once to accommodate various movements of the limb. Instead, these compositional changes are explored one on top of the other so that the figure might be uncharitably understood to have three legs instead of two. This was not a typical way for Michelangelo to work through various compositions in his drawings. For example, a sheet of drawings in the Ashmolean is roughly contemporary to the Crucifixions and features five different iterations of one or two figures holding the body of Christ after being taken down from the cross (Figure ). These are often closely connected to the Rondanini Pietà. In this sheet, however, Michelangelo has worked across the length of the long, low rectangle to rotate the figure groups, add and subtract figures, and make other changes to the basic composition. The handling of these sketches is rough and clearly announces that they are intermediate stages of something more finished. Though there are some changes internal to each figure group and these changes are sometimes superimposed, Michelangelo always eventually abandons that particular iteration before it becomes illegible, starting over again with his next idea. It is not the subsequent ideas on the same sheet that are so unusual in the Crucifixion series;
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. Michelangelo Buonarroti / Studies for a Pietà (Ashmolean WA.) / c. / Oxford: Ashmolean Museum / HIP / Art Resource, NY
it is the fact that these changes are stacked on top of each other in layers that both clarify and obscure the various movements of the figures in the basic composition. In this series of Crucifixion drawings, Michelangelo easily conceives and then reconceives the composition dozens of times. Drawing the same spare composition once and then editing on top of the initial drawing, he uses each sheet to represent several iterations of the theme (it is impossible to know how many) before he abandons that sheet and moves on to the next one. That Michelangelo returns again and again to the same basic – even minimal – composition and then edits that composition over and over is also characteristic of the nature of Jesuit meditation. The Spiritual Exercises are insistently repetitive. Divided into meditations by the hours, this repetition reaches a particular peak in the third week of the Exercises, when contemplating the events of the Passion. In this week, the two meditations in the morning are focused on the events of the Passion, and the same events are repeated as the subject of the two afternoon meditations, which are, in turn, the subject of the Application of the Senses at the end of the day. In all, over the course of the week, a worshipper following the Exercises could expect to meditate on the events of the Passion no fewer than thirty-five times. Endean notes that repetition is a clumsy translation for a concept that should really be more like “re-seekings” in the sense that the retreatant was repeatedly petitioning God for varying reactions to each biblical story or meditation. These reactions could (and even should) be contradictory. That the drawings reach uneven states of execution and “completion” before the artist decides to move on to another sheet also seems to mark the passage of time. Each sheet may represent the meditative work of a day or a week or a month. After meditating and editing in several separate sessions during the discrete time period, the artist would then start another set of meditations and another sheet of drawings. In this sense, we should also probably understand these images to have been created as a relatively
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concentrated series, perhaps over just a few weeks. They, like a Jesuit retreat itself, represent a condensed moment of concentration on the subject. It would be tempting to associate them with Michelangelo’s presumed spiritual retreat in Monteluco, but we lack documentary evidence to support this. Moreover, Michelangelo’s drawings respond to the notion of petitioning God multiple times. Each sheet represents a diversity of thought and reaction to the scene, reactions that are sometimes in conflict. Nevertheless, the fact that the artist returns repeatedly to the same idea seems to suggest that Michelangelo was continually re-seeking God for understanding about the Crucifixion. Moreover, the simple – even primitive – motif that Michelangelo adopts and then obsessively edits in these meditations corresponds to the sparseness of the text of the Spiritual Exercises itself. Those leading Jesuit meditations were simply guides. They instructed those on retreat to meditate on a minimally described scene and then let the meditator’s own imagination and relationship with God determine what form that meditation would take. We can see both the initial restraint and the direction each meditation took when looking at Michelangelo’s sheets. They begin in largely the same way but change, shift, and move depending upon the artist’s imagination. Even the added figures change in this scheme, varying from a recognizable form of the Virgin into a man who looks like Michelangelo, then to more anonymous figures as the series progresses. We might even understand the restrictive iconography to be a form of artistic penance – something that was judiciously advocated by Ignatius. For an artist who has been criticized for figural excess in his religious works, circumscribing his iconography in this way may also have been a method of addressing the invectives of his critics. He could invest just as much effort and importance into these spare and simple figures as he could into the hundreds of whirling, tumbling, and twisting figures on the Sistine altar wall. Michelangelo often differentiates between the repetitive, compositional layers in these drawings through the use of what is variously referred to as white heightening, lead white, or gouache. Whatever the substance, it is most likely applied with a brush and provides a kind of semitransparent barrier between the various transformations of his figures. The two most extreme examples of this can be found in Louvre r (Figure ) and British Museum ,. (Figure ). In the Louvre sheet, both Christ and Mary have been covered nearly head to foot in the heightening, allowing Michelangelo to dramatically shift Christ’s arms from side to side, for example, while still maintaining their original position in the composition and the consciousness of the viewer. Likewise, Mary in the British Museum sheet steps forward in a gray haze of layered black chalk and lead white, moving her right hand from an open and pleading position in one stage to a location across her other arm and her chest in another stage. It is difficult to tell which one was first in Michelangelo’s iterations of the figure, but, again, both are simultaneously
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erased and preserved by the gouache. Although Michelangelo employs lead white in some earlier drawings to denote the lightest highlight in a given figure or passage, his usage of it is fairly rare. The artist more often uses the tone of the paper for his lightest passages. Using the gouache as a kind of incomplete erasure technique or primitive Wite-Out is one of the most unique and radical attributes of this Crucifixion series. This combination of elements and the way they have been described here might lead a reader to think the drawings are a kind of confused and random assemblage that is difficult to read or that feels like a set of highly unfinished drafts. They do not feel like compositional sketches for a more finished product and could not have effectively functioned in that manner, anyway. Certain passages are too unfinished and illegible to allow for their translation into another medium such as paint or stone. Nevertheless, the drawings have a kind of finish belied by their ambiguities. In fact, viewers tend to react to them in the same way we do to Michelangelo’s presentation drawings in the sense that they feel like ends in and of themselves. The fact that so few of the sheets have any other marks on them – even on the backs – indicates that they have been set apart, brought to some sense of completion, and then left intact as they are before the artist begins another sheet in the series. As has been suggested earlier, each may represent a discrete period of meditations, be it several days or a week. The unprecedented characteristics that separate this series from most of Michelangelo’s graphic production simultaneously indicate that the artist’s process and final products are deeply connected to the sensory and embodied meditation experiences promoted by the Jesuits. The repetition of lines, for example, often imbues the figures with a kind of shimmering, vibrating movement. It records the little adjustments bodies make, even when they are trying to be still. Larger movements are also recorded and preserved, as though we are watching figures not only moving through space but also time. Arms swing, legs stride, and moments unfold as we study Michelangelo’s drawings. But the movement of the individual figures, as much as it may record an imagined meditation, still operates only on the level of the visual. Furthermore, it does not correspond to the embodied experience of the viewer. When we consider the layering of different lines and motions one on top of the other, however, a new understanding of the drawings emerges, particularly in the body of Christ and the cross. The redrawing of the cross in British Museum ,. (Figure ), for example, makes it appear as though the top part of the cross is rotating around a central axis. Seen in one light, it is flat to the picture plane, but by taking the other lines into account, we can see the dimensionality of the beams. The entire structure has either rotated, or the viewer (and meditator) has shifted their own position relative to
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MICHELANGELO’S ART OF DEVOTION
the fixed cross. This notion that the multiple lines record the viewer’s movement may also account for the echoing lines around Christ’s body. As the outline grows larger, the viewer might be drawing closer to the body of the savior. Michelangelo seemingly records the movement of the viewer or meditator, offering a record of that embodied experience on the page. Together with a sense that the figures and the viewers are moving, the repeated lines and the addition of the lead white highlight the dimension of the bodies depicted and give them an added texture. The layering of the lines and white heightening builds up the physical surface of the sheet and, by extension, the bodies depicted. Though we are more used to thinking about Michelangelo as carving and removing excess material in his sculpting process, the use of lead white more neatly aligns with additive sculpting processes. The tactility of this building and layering encourages understanding through touch, an act that is represented by the physical traces of the hand of the artist left by his echoing marks around the body. We have the sense that Michelangelo is committing the shape of the body to his memory and using his black chalk pencil to touch, over and over, the redemptive flesh of the savior. He may even have run his fingers over the roughened surface of the paper’s lead white accretions, committing that texture to memory, using it as a proxy for the presence of the bodies of the figures he depicted. The ancillary figures, who are not always identifiable, play a vitally important role in communicating something of an embodied meditative experience to viewers. They provide a sense of movement, but they also encourage viewers to imitate their examples, not only in their emotional responses but also in their physical actions. These figures – from Mary, to St. John, to those with no clear identity – gaze up, cry out, hug themselves, hold their heads, walk, and swing their arms, and, in one remarkable moment, a figure presses their face to the thigh of Christ. The actions are often rendered using Michelangelo’s layering techniques, so each movement is recorded and presented in each stage for viewers to watch as it unfolds in time and space. Many of these actions prompt viewers to compare them to their own haptic experiences – we feel encouraged to identify with the emotions and their attendant physical manifestations. We can also mimic, literally or imaginatively, the simple gestures of the figures. They are not monuments to difficulty, but instead they simply and effectively communicate heartfelt emotion and quotidian bodily experience. For Michelangelo, however, it is clear that the figures at the foot of the cross are meant, in some ways, to facilitate his sensory entry into the meditation before him. Ashmolean . (Figure ), for example, includes a figure on the right side of the cross – one remarkably like the artist himself – who walks around from the back of the cross and peers up at the savior. It is important to note that the cross also shifts with this moving figure, particularly the bottom
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part of the vertical beam. Drawn at least twice, the cross again looks like both a flat rendering of a cross and a three-dimensional beam, hovering back and forth between the two representational modes. The figure also appears to be prepared to touch the body of Christ, an action that will be emphatically completed in British Museum ,. (Figure ). The figure who presses their cheek into the thigh of Christ or kisses his flesh allows the viewer (or the meditator) to imagine performing the same action. Because the Application of the Senses encourages meditators to imagine not only sights, sounds, and textures but also tastes and smells, figures such as the one on the right in the British Museum sheet would have been a way for Michelangelo to imagine some of the more difficult senses to render in two dimensions. The figure in the British Museum sheet seems to invite us to wonder what Christ’s flesh might taste like as it hung on the cross. This, of course, might prompt an appeal to eucharistic theology, but the Spiritual Exercises does not demand this kind of abstraction. Indeed, as important as the body of Christ is for the meditating and drawing Michelangelo, I would argue that the other figures are more important, precisely because they animate and imitate the embodied experiences of the artist’s prayer. Although most art historians who have studied these drawings have focused on the body of Christ and argued for its primacy in the series, I think this emphasis is misplaced. Of course, the body on the cross is the pretext for the series and the focus of Michelangelo’s meditations – even his drawing efforts. Nevertheless, the body of Christ does not fundamentally change throughout the series of sheets. It is not clear to me that Michelangelo needed seven separate images of Christ on the cross alone to understand the savior’s role in the artist’s meditations. Instead, it is the figures at the bottom of the cross who change the most over the series of sheets, who provide variety and animation. It is these figures who demonstrate how to mourn, how to circumnavigate the cross, how to touch the flesh of the savior, how to react in time and space. In other words, they provide the bulk of the meditative and sensory experience. The drawings only make sense as a series of different iterations when the accompanying figures are introduced. Though most often understood as culminating with Courtauld D..PG. (Figure ), which shows only Christ on the cross, Alessandro Rovetta’s revision of the chronology indicates that this is the beginning, not the end, of the suite of drawings. This means that this concept – of overlapping drawing and meditating, of benefiting from the sensory, embodied experience – only really found grounding and purpose when Michelangelo added the mourning figures to the central figure of the crucified Christ. Moreover, when Michelangelo did translate these figures into a finished panel – one that was painted by Venusti – he imported the Christ from the Crucifixion he drew for Colonna (see Figure ) and the mourning figures from the late Crucifixion
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sheets. Seemingly, it is in these figures and not the multiple iterations of Christ on the cross that Michelangelo found the most spiritual profit. Ultimately, it is their actions, together with his echoing lines, repetition, and application of white highlighting, that allow him to fully inhabit the scene in an embodied, sensory way. In this sense, an exposure to Jesuit meditation had led Michelangelo to a completely different relationship to the redemptive flesh of Christ and the aesthetic body in general. The rendering of the body of Christ was no longer a satisfactory end in and of itself but had to be experienced in a multisensory and even haptic fashion. It was these experiences – walking around the cross, conversing with the mourning figures, touching and tasting the flesh of Christ – that provided the spiritual profit. Furthermore, contemplation of the body of Christ was no longer only a pretext for meditating on more abstract ideas. The sensory-based experience of Jesuit meditation facilitated a means of getting closer to God without considering the beautifully rendered body of Christ as a mere pretext for ascension to a mystic or Neoplatonic idea. All of this suggests that Michelangelo was not simply rendering Christian iconography but was instead using his devotion as inspiration for his artistic practice. This working method has echoes in Vasari’s Life of Fra Angelico, the ideal Christian artist in the author’s series of biographies. Vasari describes Angelico praying before picking up a paintbrush and allowing the divine to so completely inhabit his imagination that he did not edit his paintings when they were finished, claiming that they were exactly as God wanted them. In using Jesuit meditation techniques to emulate a model of religious art exemplified by Angelico, Michelangelo also seems to be seriously engaged with contemporary critiques of his art. If the Last Judgment was the consummate example of the artist privileging art over religion, then using meditation to fuel his drawings was an example of his subordinating creative control to devotion. . SENSORY EXPERIENCE AND ARCHITECTURE
Michelangelo’s interest in relating haptic experience in his drawings was not unique to the Crucifixion series, and the inspiration for the artist’s exploration of these ideas did not come solely from his engagement with the Jesuits. Michelangelo’s architectural drawings from the Laurentian Library onward demonstrate the artist’s increasing desire to communicate an embodied understanding of our interactions with buildings, even in two dimensions. Nowhere is this more apparent than in Michelangelo’s designs for the Porta Pia. Together with his architectural projects, the artist’s knowledge of Jesuit meditation precipitated his changing relationship with the body in his final years and his ability to render that experience in two dimensions. Moreover, it provided
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Michelangelo with the graphic language to render his embodied experience on a flat sheet. As early as his designs for the Laurentian Library, Michelangelo came to rely on washes to communicate the unprecedented sculptural quality of the architecture he was envisioning. Perhaps because he had to impress upon Pope Clement VII the mass and body of the features he was designing through drawings, Michelangelo used washes to effectively capture how light and shade would interact with the various architectural elements. In Casa Buonarroti A, for example, the darkening of the massive, bracketing columns by the wash allows the comparatively diminutive square molding around the door to protrude forward and grab the light (Figure ). The completed door, though significantly altered from Michelangelo’s pen-and-wash design, retains the aggressive physicality indicated by the drawing (Figure ). It extends forcefully into our space and is created from several different layers of architecture, each receding further from the viewer and closer to the level of the wall. The Pope could understand, through Michelangelo’s technique, the various and massive layers of architectural ornament Michelangelo wanted to include around the library’s interior entrance. Thanks to the washes, the drawing captures something of the sculptural quality of the door Michelangelo envisioned for the space. A reliance on these washes would become a hallmark of Michelangelo’s late architectural drawings, appearing in designs for the fortifications of Florence, the Farnese Palace, St. Peter’s, San Giovanni dei Fiorentini, and the Porta Pia. As Brothers notes, these interventions, particularly when considering the floor plan for San Giovanni dei Fiorentini (Casa Buonarroti a) and the Crucifixion drawings, allowed the artist to consider multiple design ideas, one on top of the other, without discarding or losing previous ideas (Figure ). Though this certainly seems to be the case with floor plans, Michelangelo’s use of washes in elevations began as a way of rendering embodied experience on a two-dimensional sheet – of mimicking the experience of standing in front of the architecture in person and seeing light and shade interact with the forms even before they were built. It is worth exploring, especially in his late works, how his use of washes – specifically white highlighting – allows him to continue such explorations even as they strain the legibility of the forms in question. The most extreme examples of Michelangelo’s use of whitewashes come from the drawings associated with the Farnese Palace and the Porta Pia. The Farnese drawings consider the pediments and other architectural elements that frame the windows of the palace. In Ashmolean ., for example, Michelangelo has articulated a round pediment as well as lion heads, swags, flat pilasters, and even the suggestion of egg-and-dart or dentil molding on the flat horizontal of the pediment directly above the window (Figure ).
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. Michelangelo Buonarroti / Study for the Laurentian Library (Casa Buonarroti a) / c. / Florence: Casa Buonarroti / Alinari Archives, Florence / Bridgeman Images
Ever reliant on his straightedge, Michelangelo draws and redraws the outlines of the various elements – window, frame, molding – until it is difficult to tell where he intended the final outlines of each element to be. As with the Crucifixion drawings, attempting to make sense of these lines renders aspects
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. Michelangelo Buonarroti / Elevation toward the hallway (Laurentian Library) / c. / Florence: Laurentian Library / Photo © Andrea Jemolo / Bridgeman Images
of the window flat and dimensional at the same time, as though they are constantly shifting between both modes. Similarly, at some point the artist clearly envisioned scrolls either behind or in place of the flatter, squarer molding that takes precedence around the windows. These were then covered with a whitewash, but incompletely, so that their shadows remain. Depending on how one looks at the composition, they either assert themselves within the ensemble or recede away from it and, in this sense, function in much the same way that washes did in the drawings for the Laurentian Library. They emphasize the massive and volumetric qualities of Michelangelo’s architecture. Importantly, they also seem to have been drawn from a different perspective than the rest of the composition – a position slightly off to the viewers’ right – even though the pediment and swags are rendered as though the viewer is standing directly in front of the picture plane. As viewers move between the different layers of Michelangelo’s composition, they also shift the angle of their gaze, implying their own movement in relationship to the architectural elements themselves. Those regarding these designs are encouraged to consider not only their static interaction with the window as they stand in front of it but also how they move through space. The echoed straightedge lines likewise mimic a person’s movement forward and backward away from the window.
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. Michelangelo Buonarroti / Plan for San Giovanni dei Fiorentini (Casa Buonarroti a) / c. / Florence: Casa Buonarroti / © Alinari Archives / (Raffaello Bencini) / Art Resource, NY
The shifting size of the window, as well as its unstable outer dimensions, contributes to our own sense of movement in relationship to the window. Like the Crucifixion drawings, these images imply a movement through time as well as space. That the layers are left at least partially legible creates a record of Michelangelo’s own exploration of the project through time. We are encouraged to sift through these layers, understanding how the artist worked through the design over the course of several different periods. The drawing functions as an invitation to explore the artist’s design process as it unfolds rather than as series of successive, interrelated, but ultimately separate ideas. Furthermore, the use of these washes creates an actual texture and a dimension
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. Michelangelo Buonarroti / Design for a window at the Palazzo Farnese (Ashmolean .) / – / Oxford: Ashmolean Museum / HIP / Art Resource, NY
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to the drawings – one that is not simply representational. It provides a way for the artist to begin to explore the forms in a kind of relief – an intermediary step between two-dimensional drawings, any architectural models, and the constructed building. By the time Michelangelo began his large designs for the Porta Pia, these tendencies in his drawings – particularly his architectural work – had become an integral part of the design process. In Casa Buonarroti a for example, we again see the artist using washes to delineate shadows, indicating that the sun strikes the edifice from the viewer’s left (Figure ). The opposite pilaster, clearly behind the column in front, is drawn in deep shadow that utilizes an ink wash. But the washes, particularly the lead white, could equally be used to erase and redraw sections of his designs as he shifted the size, position, and even shape of the pediment crowning the door. Sifting through the layers, we see both triangular and round pediments, carved molding, rusticated cut blocks, and all manner of elements considered, discarded, and redrawn in the strata of white highlighting, black chalk, pen, and washes. Again, our impression as viewers is of moving both forward and backward in space and time, following the artist’s various conceptual ideas as they are established, erased, and overdrawn on the page. The overall effect is sensory and haptic, not visual and static. The sense of movement is exceptionally strong in the Porta Pia drawings. In addition, our consideration of how Michelangelo’s drawings allow us to understand a kind of embodied experience with the structure is important because it is so often understood as a static element in the Roman landscape. Ackerman conceives of the city gate as part of the elaborate urban stage Pope Pius IV was creating on the Via Pia. Likening the gate to the static scenography of theater, Ackerman further understands Michelangelo’s designs as being interested in perception rather than precision. He explains, “Overall impressions are more important than the objective forms of the members that produce them. While certain basic patterns and rhythms consistently appear in the studies, the specific architectural motifs that make them possible remain in flux.” In other words, as the backdrop to the drama of the street, Michelangelo’s drawings render an indistinct, stationary monolith. The basic arrangement of forms in space is all that those on street level are aware of, and we experience both the edifice and the drawing as vague presences rather than as precise architectural creations. This interpretation, however, does not consider the very nature of such a gate – to be passed through. Both the Farnese Palace and the Porta Pia were edifices that were made to be experienced in motion by bodies at street level – walking, on horseback, or in a vehicle – and Michelangelo’s drawings show a sensitivity to rendering this phenomenon. The rusticated stone that surrounds the open portal itself, in its constructed and drawn form, is cut so that diagonal rays emanate from the center. Like
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. Michelangelo Buonarroti / Study for the Porta Pia (Casa Buonarroti a) / c. / Florence: Casa Buonarroti / Heritage Image Partnership Ltd / Alamy Stock Photo
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orthogonal lines, the cut stones draw the viewer to and ultimately through the structure, experiencing the various layers of architecture as we go along. The varied dimensions of the architecture – layered columns, pilasters, pediments, and roundels – are each emphasized in their turn as we virtually transgress the door. The coat of arms looms above us and disappears in a ghostly fashion at the top of the sheet. The smaller, triangular pediment underneath the layers of wash and chalk echoes the interior face of the gate that one meets after passing through the grand portal that Michelangelo has designed to face the city. Reading the various architectural elements in this way excavates those layers by mimicking the act of going through the portal itself or seeing both the inner and outer layers of the gate simultaneously from the street. The layers render an experience of the dimensionality of the gate, which is a liminal, intermediary space of passage between the city and the area outside its walls. Because of the function of a doorway or a city gate, our sense of moving through Michelangelo’s drawn layers is especially potent. Even from the very moment of their creation, his designs, particularly for the Porta Pia, take this embodied motion into account and express it through the novel and radical usage of white highlighting and washes. It is the highlighting that allows elements to be both present and erased, the focus of our gaze and then forgotten, as we experience the sheet and the architecture in time and space. Such concerns were not new for the artist; Brothers notes that the Laurentian Library, “both in terms of movement through the space and its visceral effect on the body, poses a challenge to descriptive modes rooted exclusively in vision. It is the challenge of the haptic and somatic over the merely optical.” In many ways, Michelangelo’s late architectural drawings, together with his Crucifixion drawings, take up the challenge of rendering the haptic in two dimensions. In considering the interaction of a person to his architecture and seeking new techniques to render that relationship, Michelangelo also rethinks the timehonored metaphor of architecture as human body. Although it was clear that he knew and even used the analogy of the human body in comparison to a column, for example, these drawings give us little to no indication of how we might apply it to the Porta Pia. Likewise, the constant shifting of scales, ornaments, outlines, and concepts makes it difficult to think of the gate and the body as similarly beautiful wholes created from proportional parts. Instead, the artist is more concerned with human and bodily interaction with the architecture as a visitor moves through time and space. Neither the body nor the architecture is a static aesthetic site for the exploration of philosophical ideas, but it shapes and frames our experience and spatial understanding of the world. In addition, his process reveals the artist’s inner visions and imagination as they are conceived and edited almost in real time. The white highlighting prompts a tactile response to the page, and the successive layering of elements under the lead white encourages us to think of architectural forms in space. In
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many ways, this is also a kind of sensory meditation, but, rather than imagining the Crucifixion of Christ, Michelangelo creates elaborate pieces of Rome’s street furniture – palace facades and gates – with which people interact. In so doing, he produces architectural drawings that have minimal defined purpose except as elaborate records of his own design process. Though large enough and unencumbered by other designs on the front or the back, Casa Buonarroti a (Figure ) cannot be used as a presentation drawing, nor is it possible to glean a single, comprehensive, or constructible edifice from the sheet. We can only understand the process and our various sensory and embodied relationships to the potential gate as Michelangelo designs it. It is unclear if Michelangelo intended thematic parallels between his Crucifixions and his architectural drawings beyond their shared exploration of sensory experience. If he did, such ideas would probably not have been immediately apparent to those commissioning his architecture. It is not certain whether many people saw the Crucifixion drawings while the artist was alive. Nor was there much written contemporaneously about either set of drawings. However, it might be worth considering that a gate is a passageway – a place of movement and transformation from one state to another. In this sense, Christ might be understood as a doorway to heaven, accommodating, through his death, the passage of souls from their earthly existence to their heavenly one. In a similar vein, Pope Pius’s door would have announced both arrival and departure from the holy city of Rome, or the new Jerusalem – a Christian haven paralleling the heavenly Jerusalem. Such a passageway would therefore merit contemplation and graphic exploration similar to those afforded the holy body of Christ on the cross and his followers’ mourning. Though never before connected in this manner, Michelangelo’s capitolo, Crucifixion drawings, and architectural designs are united in their attempt to define a new relationship between the artist and the body in his work. All three are experimental and attempt to use the body in a way that avoids making the ultimate sin of placing artifice over religion. In many ways, it was Jesuit meditation’s interest in haptic, sensory meditation that freed him from thinking about the body as a means of conveying difficultà or other similarly high-minded and philosophical ideas. This series of experiments further answers Michelangelo’s critics, albeit privately, proving that the artist could meld art and religion, artifice and devotion. The artist’s soul was not yet redeemed by these experiments, but neither was it irrevocably lost. A combination of meditation and drawing allowed the artist to seek a new way forward in his religious works. . THE RONDANINI PIETÀ
Eventually, this combination of religion and art, as well as the search for a visual language in which to express the artist’s embodied meditational
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experiences, made the leap from paper to stone. In the Rondanini Pietà, Michelangelo’s experimentation in the service of art and religion comes to a climax and an end (Figure ). This work, too, is closely connected to the sensory and repetitive nature of Jesuit meditation. Rather than trying to render
. Michelangelo Buonarroti / Rondanini Pietà / – / Milan: Castello Sforzesco / Azoor Photo / Alamy Stock Photo
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the effect of an embodied meditative experience in two dimensions, the artist enacted and traced that experience on a three-dimensional block of stone. In the Rondanini Pietà, Mary stands on a small platform behind her son, her body stretched into an attenuated arc, curving up and over the slumping and elongated body of Christ. Her mantle echoes and extends the graceful curl created by her body as it falls with improbable regularity on Christ’s right side, enveloping him in her protective embrace. Christ’s body slumps in front of Mary’s, his legs folding and bending to the right in their downward movement. His shoulders twist in the opposite direction of his legs, giving the impression that his body is a kind of soft helix. Christ cannot stand unsupported because the bottoms of his feet do not meet the ground, and the rest of his body lacks the necessary rigidity to hold itself upright. It is not clear just how Christ remains in his current vertical position. Mary’s arms do not seem to be in a position that would allow the body to remain erect, as one comes to rest over Jesus’s collarbone, and the other is not clearly articulated. Some of the only stable support for Christ is provided by the meeting and fusing of the torsos of the two figures. The closeness of the figures, explored in the echoed postures of their bodies and the merging of their torsos, is underscored by their shared gaze; both Mary and her son look down and to the left. To call the Rondanini Pietà unfinished is an understatement. Unlike the whitewashed Crucifixions and architectural drawings, the sculpture makes no pretensions to completion. In its current state, the work is a cacophony of rough chiseling, extraneous limbs, and incongruous human proportions. Much of the surface of the work is pockmarked and stippled with the incisions of both claw and point chisel. Michelangelo’s careful sanding and finishing remains on some parts of the sculpture, notably Christ’s long, thin thighs. Much of the sculpture – particularly from the back – feels only partially roughed out. There are large passages of vague shapes coarsely blocked out with a point chisel, waiting to be carved into something more concrete. On the sculpture’s right side, there floats an unattached limb that is larger and more muscular than the body of Christ represented in the “final” phase of the carving. Likewise, the Virgin’s mantle contains half a face that is positioned up and to the sculpture’s left of the more finished face of Mary. Christ’s body is slim and long, nowhere more so than in his legs. The muscles of his torso have been obliterated by the chisel. For all of her arcing over the body of Christ, Michelangelo’s Mary has rather short and thick proportions. The Rondanini Pietà’s lack of finish, although bewildering, is also elegiac and highly evocative. Michelangelo again takes up the theme of Christ’s sacrifice during the Passion and, as with the Florentine Pietà, envisions the sacrifice as shared. The sculpture, however, is pared down to the bare essentials, and Christ’s followers are summarily eliminated. Only a figure generally identified as Mary stands with her son, holding his dead body upright and providing an echo of his body with
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her own. Mary is the intercessor and priest, offering a way to salvation through the death of her son. Many scholars have been keen to see the Rondanini Pietà as a final, peaceful statement that seemingly stands for a tranquil ending to the artist’s life, particularly as he was working on the sculpture group just a few days before his death. Like the Crucifixion drawings, scholars have tended to see the Rondanini as transcendent. This is due, in no small part, to the emaciation of the bodies in the work itself. Somehow, their lack of physical substance, so inconsistent with Michelangelo’s traditional figure style, means that they are further from any tangible connection to this world and closer to the spiritual realm. Moreover, these analyses seem neatly to sidestep the shift in Michelangelo’s artistic process. Even Vasari seems confused by the artist’s shift in process at the end of his life. Vasari couches both the Florentine Pietà and Rondanini Pietà as objects that Michelangelo kept around to “pass the time.” When flaws in either the composition or the stone proved to be too much, Michelangelo, in a nowfamous episode, damaged the Florentine Pietà sometime in the mid-s and cast it off on an assistant to finish. He then needed to find something else to work on “every day.” This, presumably, was the Rondanini Pietà, a work Vasari describes as being already roughed out when Michelangelo began carving on another, smaller variation of the Pietà. It may be that what Vasari had seen of the work led him to believe that Michelangelo had only succeeded in roughing out the basic composition, and it awaited further finishing. Such a reading, however, is curious considering Michelangelo’s daily work on the block until a few days before his death. Surely, in all his years of work, the artist would have succeeded in completing more of the sculpture than he did. Furthermore, Vasari’s dismissal of the work as a kind of hobby rather than a serious artistic investigation belies the obvious effort seen in the piece. But what is telling is the fact that the artist worked on the object every day, almost as a kind of ritual practice, perhaps even like daily prayers. Considering the wide range of architectural projects Michelangelo was also involved in, setting aside time every day to work on the Rondanini Pietà in the midst of his busy schedule signifies the sculpture’s importance to the artist, despite Vasari’s apparent dismissal of it. John Paoletti provides one of the most promising avenues of investigation, calling the work a “palimpsest.” By using this term, Paoletti is most interested in the identity of the figure behind Christ as palimpsest and the iconographic implications of the various potential identities of that figure, but his point that the work as a whole shows itself in various stages of editing is well taken. Indeed, the work represents a translation to sculpture of the drawing practice that the artist honed in his series of Crucifixion drawings and in his architectural drawings. Like his drawings, this last sculpture appeals,
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in both its creation and final appearance, to the haptic. It attempts to translate the embodied experiences that so fascinated the artist in his final period into his carving practice. Inspired by new forms of meditation, Michelangelo once again attempts to combine devotion and artistic process, this time using the far less forgiving medium of stone. The transition between the two media seems to follow naturally, particularly if we consider the sensory and embodied experience prescribed by Jesuit meditation. If, according to the Spiritual Exercises, one was supposed to carry the sensory profit of one’s meditations into one’s life, then swapping represented embodied meditation in two dimensions for an embodied sculptural practice makes sense. In drawings, Michelangelo searched for techniques that would allow him to express the concepts of movement and the senses using representation and the alteration of the surface of the sheet. Conversely, sculpting, especially carving a marble block, is a profoundly physical experience. Michelangelo could not only create his vision before him physically but also physically interact with the object he created. Moreover, any traces of that physical experience – moving around the block, carving and polishing the stone, shifting and changing the composition – were etched into the medium itself, providing a record of his sensory experience. We see Michelangelo’s physical response to his meditations in the variety of marks on the sculpture itself, from the incisive marks of the point chisel to delineate form to the highly polished legs of the savior. Moving from least to most finished, a viewer can trace the evolution of the artist’s ideas over a period of time and in real space. Even in describing the work, one is forced to use words such as “current” and “past” to distinguish between the various versions of the sculpture still present. The legs probably represent a facet of the design that remained more or less intact as Michelangelo worked – they may even be connected to the version of the sculpture group that included the floating arm on the sculpture’s right side. That detached limb, however, belongs to a past version of the work that the artist discarded in favor of the current iteration – the one now on display in the Castello Sforzesco. These traceable marks are rarely violent; instead, they are commensurate with the kind of daily practice described by Vasari. Working on one area, then another, then clearly moving back over areas he had already brought to some kind of completion, Michelangelo’s progression on the sculpture seems unhurried, even methodical. He works in degrees, moving from area to area on the sculpture group, articulating a shape, refining a volume, polishing and then, seemingly, starting the whole process over again. Curiously, this sense of methodical, plodding progress is at odds with the open-ended nature of the composition. Michelangelo is clearly working on the sculpture, but the ultimate destination of that work is not apparent. Nevertheless, we can follow the
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progress of the artist as he makes various decisions about the forms, finish, and composition as they happened in time and space. This means that previous iterations of his ideas – including the turning of Mary’s head and the reduction of the size of Christ’s arm and body – are frequently left in place. As Michelangelo’s meditations shifted, so did the conception of the figures, and he took pains to respond to these changes. The result is that the sculpture seems constantly in a state of flux, but the figures themselves do not. Unlike the drawings, leaving Christ’s floating limb or Mary’s partial face intact does not happen on the same plane. Instead, we see them as distinct iterations of a similar composition rather than multiple stages of the same movement. They are discrete layers in three-dimensional space, not all occurring in the same space and on the same plane. Perhaps because of this, there is a certain lack of violence to the amputation of Christ’s arm. Although we understand, intellectually, that it used to be a part of another version of the body of Christ, it seems to have nothing to do with the current body held by Mary despite being connected to them by a small, remaining support. We associate the physical marks on the sculpture with Michelangelo’s process in time and space. The arm, therefore, simply indicates a shift in narrative or compositional structure during the artist’s carving and responding to his embodied meditations. In addition, Michelangelo’s process ensures that the Rondanini Pietà consistently appeals to the sensual in a number of ways. Of course, the physical marks of Michelangelo’s various implements and the relative finish of the various passages prompt viewers to engage with the sculpture’s tactility. We imagine the various textures as we take in the physical hand of the artist attested to by those marks. But Michelangelo has also carved the group so that we have to simultaneously consider concepts such as weight and mass. Michelangelo’s other works are generally finished to a point where the carving has allowed the figures to seemingly transcend the material of their creation. In Vasari’s words, Michelangelo has made flesh of formless stone. In the Rondanini Pietà, however, the stone is emphasized as we take in its various textures and see the blocky forms at the back of the work that comprise Mary’s body. These contrast with the rather insubstantial body of Christ. Christ’s body seemingly slumps down toward the earth and simultaneously rises in its twisted form like a flame. Incapable of being held by Mary in its current position, it both insists on its own weight and mass and defies it at the same time. In all, the Rondanini Pietà represents the desire of the artist to know and understand the subject – Mary holding her son after the Crucifixion – in a profound and haptic manner. The visible process attests to the artist considering the subject, and by extension the marble sculpture, over and over and over again. Instead of several iterations of the theme spread across seven sheets of paper, the intense concentration of the artist is focused on one ever-dwindling
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block of marble. In this sense, Michelangelo’s working and reworking of the stone is much like the echoing, repetitive lines in his drawings. Those lines show the artist seeking to touch, to understand the holy bodies before him in a lived, embodied way. We might even think of the textures and carving as alluding to the pictured narrative. The long, parallel, claw-chisel marks on Christ’s torso, for example, seem to mimic the scourging he endured prior to being crucified. What might it mean for Michelangelo to imagine enacting that kind of damage on the skin of the savior? Would he have tasted the blood, felt the force of the whip, heard it slap against Christ’s skin in his meditations? As a whole, the work is a profound testament to the artist’s combination of sensory meditation and artistic process. The sculpture further encourages the viewer to follow the same embodied and meditative experience as the artist. The sculpture is, in many ways, one of the most interactive since his Pietà in St. Peter’s. It requires physical effort and engagement in order to be understood. From considering the individual marks of the chisel, to attempting to understand the interlocking pose of the figures, to reconciling the floating arm of a previous composition, viewers must walk around the work, move both toward it and away from it, and more generally consider it from different perspectives in order to understand it. This is not the case with sculptures such as the David, or even the Moses. They are made for more static viewing. The Rondanini Pietà, however, can only be appreciated and understood when seen from multiple angles. Michelangelo’s physical effort in creating the work is mirrored by the viewer’s physical effort in understanding it. We are encouraged to go on a physical journey similar to that of the artist. The Rondanini Pietà’s most recent installations in the Castello Sforzesco have taken this kind of interactive, physical engagement with the work as their point of departure. Until , it was located at the end of a long gallery but separated from the rest of the space by a semicircular floating wall. Viewers therefore had to approach and then move around the wall, encountering the sculpture from the side rather than from the front. Together with the curving wall, this angle of approach encouraged visitors to move from the side, around the front, and then around the back of the work in a circle. Even more striking is the post- installation. Set off by itself in a building identified as a former hospital, those wishing to see the Rondanini Pietà approach the work almost directly from the back. We confront Mary’s roughened, curving frame and must, again, circumnavigate the sculpture in order to take it in (Figure ). We do not simply look at the sculpture; we are forced to interact with it, to encounter it in space, in order to understand it. Our interactions with the carving, even in the present day, mimic Michelangelo’s own meditations on the theme and the artistic process that created the sculpture.
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. Michelangelo Buonarroti / The back of the Rondanini Pietà in the Ospedale Spagnolo of Castello Sforzesco / – / Milan: Castello Sforzesco / Piero Cruciatti / Alamy Stock Photo
The process I have described might be understood as sketching in stone. Michelangelo’s process was embodied and haptic but also experimental and directionless. Open to substantial edits and revisions as he sculpted, he altered and changed the work to suit his various meditative experiences. On a sheet of paper, such edits have very different consequences than they do in stone. Rather than building up a physical surface, Michelangelo removed so much material that he carved himself into a corner. Christ’s shoulders have shrunk to practically nothing, and Mary’s hand on Christ’s chest cannot be further articulated with the stone remaining to the artist. The remnants of previous compositions do not translate as they do in the drawings. Instead of seeing movement in the dangling, detached arm of Christ, we neither connect it to the rest of the figure nor accept it as another bit of material waiting to be carved away and eliminated. The sense of movement must depend on our interaction with the object’s physicality, not on the effects of Michelangelo’s process. Nevertheless, the amount of work poured into the marble attests to Michelangelo’s yearning to bring the fruits of his embodied meditations into the physical realm, to know the sacrifice of Christ in sculpture as intimately as he understood it in prayer. The Rondanini Pietà represents a final, concerted investment in both artistic experimentation and the combination of devotion and artistic process. It seems strange that the climax of Michelangelo’s late experimentation should, in its final form, feel so inchoate. The artist who seemed to have such
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stunning clarity of vision in his youth appears, in his old age, to be marching methodically toward aesthetic oblivion, hampered by a trembling hand, weak eyesight, and a paralyzing fear of death. It is perhaps for this reason that scholars want to see the Rondanini Pietà – like the Crucifixion drawings – as transcendent. We need to feel some redemption on the part of the artist. Scholars want to see the artist’s final sculpture as striving to and even succeeding in depicting the ineffable, the heavenly, rather than as whittled away or rendered illegible by its own process. I think what Tolnay and others respond to in this sense is the fact that both the sculpture and the drawings, almost despite their appearance, prompt us to connect deeply with the subjects depicted. Different from the artist’s youthful conceptions of religious themes, these drawings and this block of marble encourage viewers to do their own searching, to meditate on the work, to slow down and consider the subject matter again. Calling souls to contemplate the final sacrifice of Christ, they are a fitting end to a period defined by Michelangelo’s attempt to fit into a new religious and artistic age. These last works demonstrate the artist’s efforts to reconcile art and devotion – ideas that had become rivals, according to the artist and his critics. Clearly inspired by the artist’s devotions, these images attempt to bring the sacrifice of Christ to life in a highly experimental and haptic way. They bear witness to an artist praying and using his worship to inspire not simply iconography but also his drawing and sculpting processes. These processes and the works they produced are a testament to the embodied nature of the artist’s worship. They bring together art and religion as interrelated acts and entangled threads, not competing forces. The sculptures and drawings were created as private works to help save the artist’s own soul, but they evince the potential to help the faithful as well. NOTES
As noted by Ryan, Poetry of Michelangelo, . Saslow, Poetry of Michelangelo, –. “in un sacco di cuoio ossa e capresti.” Ibid., –. This is noted by Ryan, Poetry of Michelangelo, –, and by Saslow, Poetry of Michelangelo, . Robert Clements’s article is useful for exploring the personal friendship and poetic connections between Michelangelo and Berni. Robert J. Clements, “Berni and Michelangelo’s Bernesque Verse,” Italica , no. (September ): –. Ryan, Poetry of Michelangelo, , notes that the poem is “a reminder . . . of the physical context from which Michelangelo viewed the world (his home and his own body)” but does not develop this thread beyond this observation. Clements notes that Michelangelo’s own tendency in his Bernesque verse was toward “clinical or latrine humor”; that is, humor that is focused on the body and physical experience. In this, he compares Michelangelo’s poem to “Aretino’s capitolo on the quartan fever, Mauro’s on beans and Priapus, Dolce’s on spittle, and Bini’s on venereal disease.” Clements, “Berni and Michelangelo,” .
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Saslow, Poetry of Michelangelo, . “I’ sto rinchiuso come la midolla / da la sua scorza, . . . / come spirto legato in un’ampolla.” Ibid., . “e la mia scura tomba è picciol volo, / dov’é Aragn’ e mill’opre e lavoranti, / e fan di lor filando fuasiuolo.” Ibid., . “allentasse.” Ibid, . “Chi mi vedess’ a la festa de’ Magi / sarebbe buono; e più, se la mia casa / vedessi qua fra sì ricchi palagi.” Although Michelangelo never names the Befana, Saslow confirms this allusion in a note on page . Likewise, Ryan connects lines – to the “part of the Ugly Old Woman (la Befana) at Epiphanytide.” Ryan, Poetry of Michelangelo, . Saslow, Poetry of Michelangelo, . Ibid., . “La faccia mia ha forma di spavento.” As Kleinbub points out, “Michelangelo attempted to express more through his bodies than earlier artists did, pushing the presentation of his primary means of expression in ways that it had not been pushed before him.” Kleinbub, Michelangelo’s Inner Anatomies, . Hall, “Resurrection,” –, and Summers, Michelangelo and the Language of Art, –. Saslow, Poetry of Michelangelo, . “di penne l’alma ho ben tarpata e rasa.” Clements in particular notes this “blunt rejection” of Neoplatonism in the face of Berni’s reading of Plato in “everything Michelangelo wrote or painted.” Clements, “Berni and Michelangelo,” . Cammy Brothers, Michelangelo, Drawing, and the Invention of Architecture (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, ), –, and William E. Wallace, “Narrative and Religious Expression in Michelangelo’s Pauline Chapel,” Artibus et Historiae , no. (): –. Tolnay, Michelangelo, :. Tolnay claims that although Vittoria Colonna “associated with the Jesuits and Capuchins at the end of her life,” Michelangelo remained a resolute reformist until his death. Tolnay does not footnote this claim, and so it is difficult to determine what he understood as Colonna’s involvement with the Jesuits. John O’Malley, The First Jesuits (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, ), . The artist composed a moving and uncharacteristically optimistic sonnet for Beccadelli after Ludovico had been exiled to the Dalmatian coast in . Saslow, Poetry of Michelangelo, . She took members of the Company of Jesus into her home in Ferrara in , rescuing them from “the shrew at the hospice where they were staying, who insisted on inspecting them stark naked for vermin before they got into bed at night.” O’Malley, First Jesuits, . Echoing Tolnay, James Hall goes so far as to claim that the late drawings are in fact a repudiation of the kinds of meditation advocated by St. Ignatius and others. Hall, Michelangelo and the Reinvention of the Human Body, . Wallace, Michelangelo, –. O’Malley, First Jesuits, . Paul V. Murphy, “Jesuit Rome and Italy,” in The Cambridge Companion to the Jesuits, ed. Thomas Worcester (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, ), . O’Malley, First Jesuits, . Ibid., . Pio Pecchiai, Il Gesù di Roma: descritto ed illustrato (Rome: Società Graphica Romana, ), . See also James Ackerman, L’architettura di Michelangelo (Turin: G. Einaudi, ), –. Pecchiai, Il Gesù di Roma, . Wallace, Michelangelo, –. This opinion is seconded by O’Malley and expanded to include Jesuit and Franciscan preaching practices. Ewert H. Cousins, “Franciscan Roots of Ignatian Meditation,” in
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Ignatian Spirituality in a Secular Age, ed. George P. Schner (Ontario: Wilfrid Laurier University Press, ), . O’Malley, First Jesuits, – and . O’Malley, First Jesuits, . Indeed, as written, the Exercises “were not even intended to be read directly by the repentant pilgrim.” Frédéric Conrod, Loyola’s Greater Narrative: The Architecture of the “Spiritual Exercises” in Golden Age and Enlightenment Literature (New York: Peter Lang, ), . “Spiritual Exercises is not a book to be read; Ignatius was quite explicit that the person making the Exercises should not have the full text to hand.” Philip Endean, “The Spiritual Exercises,” in Worcester, Cambridge Companion, . Ibid., . Saint Ignatius of Loyola, The Spiritual Exercises of St. Ignatius, trans. George E. Ganss (Chicago: Loyola University Press, ), –. Ibid., . O’Malley, First Jesuits, – and –. Endean, “Spiritual Exercises,” in Worcester, Cambridge Companion, –. Ibid., . Ibid., . Endean notes that Ignatius had come under investigation for his own practices in relationship to the heretical alumbrados early in the order’s history in Spain. Ibid., . We might also think of Ugo Pantiera da Prato, who describes meditation as a kind of drawing exercise, but one that, again, stops at the level of the aesthetic or visual. Summers, Michelangelo and the Language of Art, . Colonna, Pianto, in Haskins, Who Is Mary?, . Ibid., . David Rosand, Drawing Acts: Studies in Graphic Expression and Representation (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, ), . Medieval examples would include the Pseudo-Bonaventure’s Meditations on the Life of Christ. Bonaventure’s text instructs those meditating to think about a debate and then supplies the script of the debate for them. Philip Endean, “The Ignatian Prayer of the Senses,” Heythrop Journal , no. (): . Ibid., . There is something deeply Aristotelian about this. It seems to mimic the notion of the sensus communis where all the senses meet and which functions as the seat of the imagination. Ignatian meditation is made possible by this understanding of anatomy, and it would have made sense to an artist steeped in Aristotle’s notion of judgment, as was Michelangelo. For more on Michelangelo and Aristotle, see Summers, Michelangelo and the Language of Art, –, –, –. Not a term used by Ignatius. Endean, “Spiritual Exercises,” in Worcester, Cambridge Companion, . Endean, “Ignatian Prayer,” . Ibid., . Ibid., . O’Malley, First Jesuits, –. Ibid., –. Ibid., . Ibid., –. Wallace, Michelangelo, –. Ibid., . Murphy, “Jesuit Rome and Italy,” . Wallace, Michelangelo, . Barocchi and Ristori, Carteggio, :. Michelangelo, and E. H. Ramsden, The Letters of Michelangelo: Translated from the Original Tuscan (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, ), .
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Heinrich Pfeiffer, “On the Meaning of a Late Michelangelo Drawing,” Art Bulletin , no. (June ): . Seconded by Chapman, Michelangelo Drawings, –. Pfeiffer, “Late Michelangelo Drawing,” . Saint Ignatius of Loyola, The Spiritual Exercises of St. Ignatius of Loyola, trans. Father Elder Mullan (New York: Cosimo Classics, ), . Frederick Hartt, Michelangelo Drawings (New York: Harry N. Abrams, ), . The exception to this is Cammy Brothers, who traces this shift in technique from Michelangelo’s early days in Florence and his encounters with Leonardo’s drawings through his late architectural drawings for the Porta Pia and San Giovanni dei Fiorentini. Brothers, Michelangelo, Drawing. For a complete and succinct historiography on the dating of these drawings, see Alessandro Rovetta, L’ultimo Michelangelo: disegni e rime attorno alla Pietà Rondanini (Milan: Silvana Editoriale, ), –. Other scholars have tried to connect these drawings with an abandoned or lost wooden crucifix project late in the artist’s life. Such a project would have been “a more feasible project for a very old man than one in marble.” For more, see Paul Joannides, The Drawings of Michelangelo and His Followers in the Ashmolean Museum (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, ), –. Tolnay, Michelangelo, :, and Hartt, Michelangelo Drawings, . Michael Hirst, Michelangelo and His Drawings (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, ), , and Chapman, Michelangelo Drawings, –. Carmen Bambach et al., Michelangelo: Divine Draftsman and Designer (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, ), . An exception to this trend would be James Hall, who claimed that the late Crucifixion drawings “are equally a repudiation of the meditative techniques advocated by mystical writers” because they make us “contemplate our own ability to see.” In this sense, Hall moves closer to understanding the sensory importance of these drawings but negates their obvious religious content. Hall, Michelangelo and the Reinvention of the Human Body, . Some faint images appear on the verso of Ashmolean . and Windsor Castle . British Museum ,. has another Crucifixion on the back. Cammy Brothers describes this method of working as early as Michelangelo’s time in Florence in the early sixteenth century. Her discussion of Michelangelo’s engagement with Leonardo’s drawing method is particularly relevant here. Brothers, Michelangelo, Drawing, and . Ignatius of Loyola, Spiritual Exercises of St. Ignatius of Loyola, –. In this section, the days are reduced to instructions that tell the retreatant to go back over the events of the Passion for the mornings and afternoons, as well as the Application of the Senses. Endean, “Spiritual Exercises,” in Worcester, Cambridge Companion, . Wallace has noted that these sheets have often “been asked to stand in for the artist’s ‘late work’ and style – a dozen drawings spread across a decade or more.” However, he writes that “it is difficult to imagine dating these few sheets over a long span of time.” Wallace, God’s Architect, –. We might also think about Joannides’s suggestion that the composition of these works harkens back to a kind of simpler, even primitive, religious faith – something that was profoundly desired in the Counter-Reformation. Paul Joannides, “‘Primitivism’ in the Late Drawings of Michelangelo: The Master’s Construction of an Old-Age Style,” in Michelangelo’s Drawings: Studies in the History of Art (Washington, DC: National Gallery of Art, ), –. As Endean notes, “Ignatius was far too respectful of the retreatant’s individuality to suggest that the content of his own reactions should be normative.” Endean, “Spiritual Exercises,” . Ignatius of Loyola, Spiritual Exercises of St. Ignatius of Loyola, –.
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The Met Museum catalog combines the terms, calling it “white gouache.” Bambach et al., Michelangelo: Divine Draftsman, . Bambach attributes the “lack of clarity” in these sheets to “several accidents with the medium.” Although she notes the use of lead white, she does not remark on its originality. Ibid., . Joannides, Drawings of Michelangelo, –. Rosand has even characterized Michelangelo’s work on the Crucifixion drawings as “carving relief surfaces out of the paper,” indicating that the drawings, with their tactile surfaces and obsessive modeling, foreshadow Michelangelo’s combination of meditation and sculpture. Rosand, Drawing Acts, –. “The graphic complexity of the surface, its essential tactility, suggests a reluctance to let go, to lose touch with that body.” Ibid., . Additionally, “. . . the materiality of the surface itself, its insistent tactility, betrays the physical presence of the draftsman, the marks of a hand in search of form, a process of groping, caressing, of coaxing form from out of the depths of the paper.” Ibid., . See Chapter and Michelangelo’s identification with Nicodemus as a figure that allows him to enter meditations. Rosand, Drawing Acts, , for example. Rovetta, L’ultimo Michelangelo, –. Vasari, Lives, . Vasari, “Fra Giovanni da Fiesole,” . Brothers, Michelangelo Drawing, and . Ibid., . Ibid., . See also Golo Maurer on the Porta Pia drawings. Golo Maurer, “Porta Pia,” in Michelangelo: architetto a Roma, ed. Mauro Mussolin (Milan: Silvana Editoriale, ), –. This might be particularly apt for the Farnese drawings because of how Sangallo designed the facade as a kind of “curtain wall” on which he hung architectural elements such as the moldings, windows, and doors. James Ackerman, The Architecture of Michelangelo (New York: Viking Press, ), . A reconstruction of these strata can be found in Pietro Ruschi, “Anamnesi come progetto: i disegni di Michelangelo per Porta Pia,” in Michelangelo e il linguaggio dei disegni di architettura, ed. Golo Maurer and Alessandro Nova (Venice: Marsilio, ). Golo Maurer, “Porta Pia,” in Mussolin, Michelangelo, . Maurer further claims that the function of the drawings was to preserve the old ideas while considering the new ones at the same time and on the same page. It allowed him to confront and trace different effects on the same page. Ackerman, Architecture of Michelangelo, . Ibid., . Brothers, Michelangelo Drawing, . See the artist’s letter to Cardinal Rodolfo Pio da Carpi or Cammy Brothers’s discussion of Francesco da Giorgio. Barocchi and Ristori, Carteggio, :. Brothers, Michelangelo Drawing, –. It has been an especially thorny problem to connect Michelangelo’s drawings to what was built, particularly as a significant portion of the gate was erected after the artist’s death. Maurer, “Porta Pia,” in Mussolin, Michelangelo, –. What that Rome actually looked like immediately upon entering can be found in Ibid., . A fragment now in the Borghese Gallery has been associated with this floating limb. For a nice overview of the fortunes of that fragment, see Paoletti, “Rondanini Pietà,” – n. Wallace, Michelangelo, . Tolnay believes that the Rondanini “conveys a glimpse of an ultimate peace after the life-struggle.” Tolnay, Michelangelo, :.
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Hartt claims that the work “suggests less a Pietà than a Resurrection, the ultimate Christian victory.” It further ensures salvation and “the promise of the hereafter.” Hartt, Michelangelo’s Three Pietàs, . Hibbard, however, has noted the apparent lack of direction in the working and reworking of Michelangelo’s final sculpture, together with the work’s subsequent appearance, seemingly so antithetical to the artist’s commitment to classical art. He is perhaps most damning in his criticism, describing Michelangelo’s final sculpture as “Gothic . . . formless . . . and unbearably pathetic.” Howard Hibbard, Michelangelo: Painter, Sculptor, Architect (New York: Vendome Press, ), . “fu necessario trovar qualcosa poi di marmo perché e’ potessi ogni giorno passar tempo scarpellando . . .” Vasari, “Michelagnolo Buonarroti,” . Ibid., . “e fu messo un altro pezzo di marmo, dove era stato già abbozzato un’altra Pietà, varia da quella, molto minore.” Ibid., . Wallace’s discussion of the sculpture ends with a meditation on Michelangelo’s work at St. Peter’s and the hour-long walk he took nearly daily to get there. Wallace, God’s Architect, –. Paoletti, “Rondanini Pietà,” –. I would contrast this with closely related works: the partially carved Captives now in the Accademia. In these sculptures, Michelangelo seemingly carves from only one side of the block at a time, rarely or never altering his conception of the figure as he attempts to “release” it from the marble. Vasari, Lives, . Vasari, “Michelagnolo Buonarroti,” . This is particularly striking because Christ’s body carries no other evidence of his Crucifixion, such as the traditional wounds in the hands and the feet. Emily A. Fenichel, “Michelangelo’s Pietà as Tomb Monument: Patronage, Liturgy, and Mourning,” Renaissance Quarterly , no. (): –. See, for example, Bambach et al., Divine Draftsman, , and Philip L. Sohm, The Artist Grows Old: The Aging of Art and Artists in Italy, – (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, ), .
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CONCLUSION
P
assing through the unassuming portal of Santa Maria degli Angeli, visitors soon enter a cavernous space. In many ways, the grand scale and ornate decoration of the interior that greets them is difficult to reconcile with the plain brick exterior. Worshippers and tourists alike often stop, gape, and then wander the space aimlessly. In contrast to nearly every other church in Rome, where the altar presents itself immediately opposite the entrance, the altar of Santa Maria degli Angeli is not so obvious. Overwhelmed by Luigi Vanvitelli’s encrustations of colored marble and the spectacular baroque chapels visible from the entrance, many people walk back and forth several times before realizing that they have to make a hard turn in order to find the main altar (Figure ). Capping this enormous, confusing space is an expanse of gray, undulating Roman vaulting. Unlike the walls below, the ceiling is undecorated, reflecting only the sunlight from the clerestory and the sound of footsteps of those walking below. It is an unusual worship space. Its entrance offers no hints at the vast, luxurious space inside; the interior refuses to present the path to the altar with any clarity; and it provides no vision of the heavenly beyond in its ceiling either through the celestial perfection of a round dome or a sublime decoration in painting or stucco. Adapting the ruins of the Baths of Diocletian into Santa Maria degli Angeli, Pope Pius’s vision of a grand temple on the Via Pia, was one of the last projects Michelangelo accepted in his long life. He was in his eighties when he agreed to the Pope’s request for designs. Despite Michelangelo’s confirmed
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MICHELANGELO’S ART OF DEVOTION
. Michelangelo Buonarroti and Luigi Vanvitelli / Interior, transept, Basilica of Santa Maria degli Angeli / – / Rome: Basilica of Santa Maria degli Angeli / B o’kane / Alamy Stock Photo
involvement, no graphic work associated with the project survives from the artist’s hand or from his circle. Much of what we know of Buonarroti’s project is conjecture. Work according to his design was completed three years after his death, meaning the artist was not around to supervise most of it, and it was altered in subsequent centuries. Retrofitting one of the largest bathing complexes in the Roman world into a Christian church seems to conform neatly to Counter-Reformation sentiment. Diocletian’s monumental bathing complex – a symbol of the notorious Christian-persecuting emperor and of Roman sensual excess – would be conquered and transformed by Christianity. The church to be housed inside would be the ultimate architectural symbol of the triumph of the embattled Catholic Church over the pagan Roman past and, by extension, its current Protestant challengers. Pius was also participating in the traditional activity of early modern Popes – placing his own stamp on Rome and trying to restore the city to its former glory. In this case, the church anchored one end of the Via Pia, and the Porta Pia anchored the other – bringing grandeur to a largely overlooked and sparsely populated section of Rome. Whether Michelangelo saw his interventions at the site in such grand terms is not clear. By this point he had worked to secure the everlasting glory of many popes through art and architecture, with varying success. The CounterReformation church, moreover, was still wrangling over theological minutiae at the Council of Trent. Michelangelo’s own forays into reformation through
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CONCLUSION
the spirituali had been fraught and ultimately unsuccessful. Moreover, as some have pointed out, Michelangelo’s designs hardly trumpet the triumph of modern Christianity over the pagan past. In fact, his interventions in the baths were, from the first, seemingly more motivated by “preservationist” tendencies. Michelangelo’s first task after assuming the commission was the preservation of the plain vaulting over the main space of the building. He ordered the roof retiled so that the original ceiling would be protected from the elements and used in the design of the church. In addition, his transformation of the space has been described as “minimalist.” Michelangelo retained the vaulting and most of the wall structures in the old building, preferring to fit his vision to them rather than altering the existing fabric of the plan to suit his ideas. In the end, what Michelangelo produced is a design that doesn’t so much conquer or subdue the ancient past as respect the efforts of ancient builders. He added a few walls to close off more complex areas of the space but left the plan of the building largely intact, aside from including some articulation to the clerestory. This is probably not surprising. Michelangelo had just spent the past few decades building the vaulting and the dome of St. Peter’s on the scale of some of the largest Roman buildings. The idea of pulling down the similar efforts of some ancient builder may have been more than he could stomach; he had also made considerable efforts to preserve parts of Old St. Peter’s that Bramante had been content to throw away. But this does not mean that Michelangelo’s designs for Santa Maria degli Angeli were not also symbolic. In many ways, they can be seen as a continuation, even a culmination, of many of the ideas that characterized the final twenty-three years of his life. For example, rather than designing a grand facade or portal, Michelangelo had worshippers enter through a simple door surrounded by ancient brick. Instead of presenting visitors with a clear, straight path through the nave to the altar, the artist welcomes them in a kind of modified transept that intersects the nave not near the choir but on the opposite end from the altar. That transept, which is larger than the nave itself, is surmounted by an expanse of Roman groin vaulting. Visitors must navigate the cavernous interior and, ultimately, make a deliberate turn toward the nave and the altar. This path is not at all clear when one enters, however, and most visitors spend many minutes wandering around the transept before they ever think to turn their attention to the main worship space of the church. Although architectural historians have discussed the fact that this design works in concert with the existing building fabric, there has been little discussion about what Michelangelo’s design means for a worshipper seeking to commune with God. Despite the parti-colored marble installed on the walls in the eighteenth century, what dominates our experience of the transept is the Roman vaulting. Many tourists can do nothing but stare into the expanse and meander beneath
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MICHELANGELO’S ART OF DEVOTION
it, dwarfed by the sheer scale of the building the vaulting both highlights and covers. It is not clear that Michelangelo meant for the vaulting to remain as undecorated as it is in its present form. Nevertheless, many architectural historians have claimed that the artist’s original intention was to leave the vaulting as we see it today – unadorned. In one of the largest bathing spaces ever constructed by the Romans, the supremely Catholic and aged Michelangelo seemingly denies his viewers any glimpse of the Almighty in that ceiling. We have no decoration to ease our way. Only the void stares back. It might be understood instead to continue to trumpet the pagan past rather than the Christian present. This is only the case, however, if we fail to consider the other late works of the artist. The humble portal, together with the circuitous path to the altar and the expanse of bare vaulting, points to a symbolic architectural program that accords with the ideas of pilgrimage, penance, meditation, and a rejection of artifice – the central ideas that consumed Michelangelo’s late life and career. Michelangelo’s design requires visitors, much like pilgrims, to seek and follow an unclear path to the altar (and to God). Similarly, the unadorned ceiling conjures up a kind of blindness – like Michelangelo’s pilgrim in his portrait medal or his portrait in Trinità dei Monti, they cannot see the heavenly beyond. Visitors are further encouraged, even commanded, by the strangeness of the configuration of the floor plan, to stop, stare, and meditate on the expanse of space. By drawing the eye upward to the plain ceiling, Michelangelo helps visitors find mental and aesthetic space to contemplate holy truths, even as they are rooted in the profoundly haptic experience of navigating the extensive interior of the church. By leaving the simplicity of the vault and even the plan of the baths intact, Michelangelo likewise signals a further rejection of artifice and excess. His solutions are neat, elegant, and simple, and they preserve the original grandeur of the space. Even here, we can feel the artist experimenting with new ways of thinking about religious art. In short, what Michelangelo created is a space that inspires the kind of religious searching he exhibited in his portrait medal and his collaborations. It further urges visitors to slow down, contemplate the heavens, and meditate on their own bodily experience within the church in the same way as the artist’s final drawings and sculptures. Moreover, it does so in a public space, but in a manner that allows for personal religious exploration. Like most of his late work, the solutions Michelangelo uses in Santa Maria degli Angeli are also experimental. He rejects the decoration, the organization, and the clarity of contemporary churches, preferring instead to concentrate his energies on combining faith and art in an effort to lead souls to God, albeit circuitously. The building thus represents the culmination of a process begun shortly after , when Michelangelo first encountered criticism of the Last Judgment. It is a fitting end to a series of public and private experiments and interventions into
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CONCLUSION
the religious art of the sixteenth century before the close of the Council of Trent. It proves just how much Michelangelo had continued to learn, grow, and change in his final twenty-three years. Neither as great nor as sinful as his supporters or detractors would have it, Michelangelo’s final building is a monument to the experimental, humbled artist in his final days. NOTES Despite the effect of the design on visitors, Ackerman claims that “Michelangelo’s solution” was so obvious that “any competent architect might have hit upon it.” He goes on to explain that this orientation of the church would have better suited the needs of the monks living there. Ackerman, Architecture of Michelangelo, –. Alessandro Brodini, “Santa Maria degli Angeli,” in Mussolin, Michelangelo, . What we know of Michelangelo’s interventions prior to any redesigns comes from prints of the interior. Ibid., . It was also the pet project of a Carthusian monk, Antonio del Duca. Ibid., . David Karmon, “Michelangelo’s ‘Minimalism’ in the Design of Santa Maria degli Angeli,” Annali di Architettura (): –. His first footnote provides a comprehensive overview of scholarship on the church. Ibid., . Ibid., –. Wallace, God’s Architect, and . Ackerman points out that this structure is more accurately described as “a single central space with attached vestibules on three sides, a major chapel on the fourth, and without anything that might be called a nave.” Ackerman, Architecture of Michelangelo, . This conforms to the path one would take through the building as an ancient Roman bather. Karmon notes that this is “compatible with the original structure, rather than in conflict.” Karmon, “Michelangelo’s ‘Minimalism,’” . He died before the project could be completed; other architects were tasked with much of the interior decoration; and, as Elam has pointed out, Pope Pius was clearly anticipating a “grand, decorated temple” to anchor his civic projects in Rome. Nevertheless, she acknowledges that “it’s always been assumed that Michelangelo wanted to retain this very bare interior.” Caroline Elam, “Michelangelo: His Late Roman Architecture,” AA Files, no. (Winter –): . “Only the plain stuccoed vaults of the main hall remain to recall the original attempt to form a church with the minimum of change to the ancient remains.” Ackerman, Architecture of Michelangelo, .
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INDEX
Aquinas, Thomas, Summa Theologica, Aretino, Pietro, , , , , –, –, –, , Fourth Book of Letters, artifice, , , , –, , , , , , –, , , Baglione, Giovanni, Beccadelli, Ludovico, Berni, Francesco, calcagni, Tiberio, cangiante, , Capuchin Order, –, Capuchin Constitutions, – Cavalieri, Tommaso de’, , Cesi, Cardinal, Clement VII, Pope, , Colonna, Vittoria, , , , , –, , , , , –, –, , , –, , meditation and, –, , – Orazione sopra l’Ave Maria, Pianto sopra il passione di Cristo, , –, , , –, –, – Sonnet , Sonnet , Sonnet , Sonnet , Sonnet , Sonnets for Michelangelo, , , , – colore, , , –, Condivi, Ascanio, , , , biography of Michelangelo, Epiphania (painting), , Contarini, Gasparo, , Council of Trent, , , , Counter-Reformation, –, , , , , , , , , , Dante Alighieri, Divine Comedy, , , , , Decorum, –, –, difficultà, , , , , ,
disegno, , , , , –, , Dolce, Ludovico, , , , –, –, Aretino, – Fra Angelico, –, , –, Franciscan Order, , –, –, Gilio, Giovanni Andrea, , , , , –, , Dialogue on the Error of Painters, Gonzaga, Cardinal Ercole, , , , – Hollanda, Francisco de, Dialogues, On Antique Painting, Jesuit Order, , , , –, , founding of, meditation and, –, –, , , preaching, , Leoni, Leone, –, , Michelangelo’s Portrait Medal, –, , Loreto, , – Mantova, Benedetto da, Beneficio di Cristo, , Mary Magdalene, , , Mary, Blessed Virgin in the Annunciation, –, Co-Redemptrix, , as Intercessor, –, , Mother of God, , , as prophetic, , Queen of Heaven, , , , , Second Eve, in spiritualist theology, Michelangelo collaboration and, –, , , –, –, –, , –, copies after his works, –, , , , , , , –, , , , –, –, , , , meditation and, , , , , –, , –, –, , –, prints after his works, , , , , , , ,
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INDEX
Michelangelo (cont.) relationship with Vittoria Colonna, , , , , , , , –, , , –, , , , , Michelangelo, architecture Farnese Palace, , Il Gesù, – Laurentian Library, , , , Porta Pia, , , Santa Maria degli Angeli, – St. Peter’s Basilica, , , , , , Michelangelo, drawings Battle of Cascina cartoon, Cesi Annunciation cartonetto (Pierpont Morgan), – Christ Appearing to His Mother, Crucifixion (Ashmolean .), , Crucifixion (British Museum ,.), , – Crucifixion (British Museum ,.), –, , Crucifixion (Courtauld D..PG.), , Crucifixion (Louvre ), , Crucifixion (Windsor ), , – Crucifixion (Windsor ), Crucifixion for Vittoria Colonna, , , design for a Window at the Palazzo Farnese (Ashmolean .), Epiphania cartoon, – Lateran Annunciation cartonetto (Uffizi), Pietà for Vittoria Colonna, , –, –, – plan for San Giovanni dei Fiorentini (Casa Buonarroti a), Seven Great Crucifixion Drawings, studies for a Pietà (Ashmolean WA.), – studies for the David (Louvre ), – studies for the Deposition, study for the Laurentian Library (Casa Buonarroti a), study for the Porta Pia (Casa Buonarroti a), , Michelangelo, paintings Last Judgment, –, –, –, , –, , , , –, , , , , , , , , , Pauline Chapel frescoes, , , , , , – Michelangelo, poetry , – Sonnet , Sonnet , Sonnet , , sonnets, incomplete, Vat. Lat. , Michelangelo, sculpture Florentine Pietà, , , –, – Moses,
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Pietà, St. Peter’s, , Rachel, Rondanini Pietà, , , , , , – Ochino, Bernardino, –, –, –, Prediche, , – onestà, – Paul III, Pope, , Penance, –, , , , , , Pilgrimage, –, , , Piombo, Sebastiano del, , Pius IV, Pope, , , – Pole, Cardinal Reginald, Poor Clares, – Prato, Ugo Pantiera da, Psalms, Psalm , –, – Raphael, , , , Chigi Chapel frescoes, Stanza della Segnatura, – Stanza dell’Incendio, Riccio, Luigi del, , Saint Bernard, , Saint Bonaventure (Pseudo-Bonaventure), –, Meditations on the Life of Christ, –, Saint Clare, Saint Francis, –, Saint Ignatius Loyola, –, Spiritual Exercises, , , –, , –, , Salviati, Francesco, Annunciation, – Santa Maria della Pace, Rome, , , , , Santo Spirito, Florence, – Savonarola, Girolamo, – Sernini, Nino, –, spirituali, –, , , , –, , –, , , , and the Inquisition, –, sola fide, , –, Spoleto, , Strozzi, Giovan Battista il vecchio, Tibaldi, Pellegrino, , , Adoration of the Shepherds, Valdés, Juan de, Vasari, Giorgio, , –, –, , , , , , – Life of Fra Angelico, –, –, Life of Michelangelo, , – Venusti, Marcello, , , –, , , , , Annunciation, Corsini Gallery, , , , ,
INDEX
Annunciation, Lowe Art Museum, Annunciation, Rijksmusem, Annunciation, St. John the Lateran, , , , , – Cesi Annunciation, , –, –, Crucifixion after Michelangelo, , Madonna del Silenzio, Pietà after Michelangelo, and vago/vaghezza, –
Volterra, Daniele da, , , –, –, Assumption of the Virgin, , , – della Rovere Chapel, Trinità dei Monti, , –, , , , Deposition, Massacre of the Innocents, , Orsini Chapel, Trinità dei Monti, , , Presentation of the Virgin in the Temple, –, –,
https://doi.org/10.1017/9781009314350.008 Published online by Cambridge University Press
https://doi.org/10.1017/9781009314350.008 Published online by Cambridge University Press