Siting Michelangelo

Notes

Preface

1 Bernardine Barnes, Michelangelo and the Viewer in his Time (London, in press).

1. The Wennerberg experience

2 Gunnar Wennerberg, ‘Allegris Miserere’, Romerska minnen (Stockholm 1881b), 128–36; Uppsala University Library, Uppsala (UUL), X 309 c:1, Gunnar Wennerberg Biographica, Resedagbok, fols. 117–18.

3 Wennerberg 1881b, 129: ‘mörk och hemsk.’

4 UUL, X 309 c:1, Wennerberg Resedagbok, fol. 117.

6 Wennerberg 1881b, 132: ‘Och det syntes som om dessa massor | Rörde sig i dunklet upp och neder; | O, då greps jag af osäglig ångest | Och jag vände bort min blick från synen.’

8 Gunnar Wennerberg, Försök till en paralellism mellan de religiösa kulturernas och den bildande konstens utveckling (Uppsala 1846).

9 UUL, X 309 c:1, Wennerberg Resedagbok.

10 Sven G. Svensson, Gunnar Wennerberg: En biografi(Stockholm 1986), 141–2, 432 n. 13; Mariano Vasi, Itinerario istruttivo di Roma antica e moderna, 2 vols (Rome 1819); Franz Kugler, Handbuch der Geschichte der Malerei, 2 vols (Berlin 1837); Dan Karlholm, Handböckernas konsthistoria: Om skapandet av ‘allmän konsthistoria’ i Tyskland under 1800–talet (Stehag 1996).

11 Svensson 1986, 178–88.

12 Wennerberg 1881b, 135: ‘sin egen sannings friska kärna.’ ‘Grannt, men väsenstomt, ett ytligt skenlif.’

14 Richard Boursy, ‘The Mystique of the Sistine Chapel Choir in the Romantic Era’, Journal of Musicology 11:3 (1993), 277–329; Bengt Lewan, Drömmen om Italien: Italien i svenska resenärers skildringar från Atterbom till Snoilsky (Stockholm 1966), 210.

15 Pierre Cailler, Ingres: Racontë par lui-même et par ses amis: Pensées et écrits du peintre (Geneva 1947), 118–19, Ingres to M. Forestier, Holy Week, 1807, English translation Boursy 1993, 319: ‘Figurez-vous une voix céleste, tout seule et qui fait mal comme l’harmonica tant elle file et passe insensiblement d’un ton à l’autre. Enfin, à la chute du jour, l’office de plain-chant fini, le pape descend de son siège; il se prosterne, un grand silence prépare et annonce le commencement céleste de ces voix qui commencent le Miserere: tout, dans ce moment, est d’accord avec cette musique, le jour baisse, aucune lumière ne laisse à peine entrevoir ce terrible tableau du Jugement dernier, dont l’effet prodigieux imprime une sorte de terreur dans l’âme. Enfin, enfin je ne sais plus que vous dire, je suis tout ému en vous le racontant, si cela peut se raconter, car il faut le voir et l’entendre pour le croire.’

16 Madame de Staël, Corinne or Italy, tr. Sylvia Raphael (Oxford 1998 [1807]), 173–82.

17 Stendhal, Histoire de la painture en Italie (Paris 1854 [1817]), 351, written in Italy between 1812 and 1816.

18 Stendhal 1817, 353–4.

19 UUL, X 309 c:1, Wennerberg Resedagbok, fol. 117: ‘Hedda får fråga mig’.

2. Practices and theories of siting

20 Pioneering work was carried out by Gilbert Creighton and Kathleen Weil-Garris Brandt in the 1970s and 1980s and by William E. Wallace in the 1990s, among others.

21 Alexander Nagel, Medieval Modern: Art Out of Time (London 2012), 84–96.

22 Joost Keizer, ‘Site-Specificity’, in Michelangelo in the New Millennium: Conversations about Artistic Practices, Patronage and Christianity (Boston 2016), 25–46.

23 Nagel 2012, 25–6; Keizer 2016, 25.

24 Donald Crimp, ‘Redefining Site Specificity’, in On the Museum’s Ruins (Cambridge 1993), 150–86.

25 Clara Weyergraf-Serra & Martha Buskirk (eds.), The Destruction of Tilted Arc (Cambridge 1991).

26 Richard Serra, ‘Statement in support of Tilted Arc’, in Weyergraf-Serra & Buskirk 1991, 67; Kevin Melchionne, ‘Rethinking Site-Specificity: Some Critical and Philosophical Problems’, Art Criticism 12:2 (1998), 36–49 argues against Crimp and Serra on rather formalistic grounds, trying to define site specificity more analytically.

27 Lucy R. Lippard, Eva Hesse (New York 1976), 172–3.

28 Michael Fried, ‘Art and Objecthood’, Art Forum 5:10 (1967), 2–23; for a discussion of Fried, see Nagel 2012, 92–3.

29 Noted in 1980 by Suleiman in her introduction to Susan R. Suleiman & Inge Crosman (eds.), The Reader in the Text: Essays on Audience and Interpretation (New York 1980), 3 and then in the art historical discourse of the early 1990s by Wolfgang Kemp, Der Betrachter ist im Bild: Kunstwissenschaft und Rezeptionsästhetik (Berlin 1992), 7.

30 The distinction is made for example by anthropologist Warren L. d’Azevedo, ‘A Structural Approach to Esthetics: Toward a Definition of Art in Anthropology’, American Anthropologist 60 (1958), 702–714; the anthropologist Alfred Gell, Art and Agency: An Anthropological Theory (Oxford 1998), 12–27 & passim added material and subject matter to the instances that may inform art objects with a degree of apparent agency.

31 John Cage, ‘Experimental Music’, in Silence (Middletown, CT 1961 [1955]), 8.

32 Barry Blesser & Linda-Ruth Salter, Spaces Speak, Are You Listening? Experiencing Aural Architecture (Cambridge, MA 2007), 35–7.

33 The groundbreaking work was carried out by R. Murray Schafer, The Tuning of the World (Toronto 1977); for the definition of soundscape as ‘the relation of man and sonic environments of every kind’, see Barry Truax, ‘Soundscape Studies: An Introduction to the World Soundscape Project’, Numus West 5 (1974), 36–9; for a later discussion see Blesser & Salter 2007, 15–18; for a fine overview of soundscape studies, see Michael Bull & Les Back (eds.), The Auditory Culture Reader (Oxford 2003); for contemporary music, see David Toop, Ocean of Sound: Aether Talk, Ambient Sound and Imaginary Worlds (London 2001 [1995]), 252–4.

34 David Toop, Sinister Resonance: The Mediumship of the Listener (London 2010), viii.

35 Steven Connor, Dumbstruck: A Cultural History of Ventriloquism (Oxford 2000), 35–43; see also id., ‘The Help of Your Hands: Reports on Clapping’, in Bull & Back 2003, 67–76.

36 As famously claimed by Wassily Kandinsky, On the Spiritual in Art, tr. Hilla Rebay (New York 1946 [1912]).

37 Rosalind Krauss, ‘Sculpture in the Expanded Field’, in Donald Preziosi (ed.), The Art of Art History (Oxford 1998 [1979]), 281–98; for a key discussion of this essay, see Nagel 2012, 95 & passim.

38 Krauss 1979, 286.

39 This point of view is rightly disputed by Keizer 2016, 26–7.

40 Krauss 1979, 287.

41 Miwon Kwon, One Place after Another: Site-Specific Art and Local Identity (Cambridge, MA 2004 [1997]).

42 Nick Kaye, Site-Specific Art: Performance, Place and Documentation (London 2000), 3.

43 Alain Badiou, ‘Logic of the Site’, diacritics 23:3–4 (2003), 141–50.

44 Mieke Bal, Louise Bourgeois’ Spider: The Architecture of Art-Writing (Chicago 2001), xii.

45 Jane Rendell, Site-Writing: The Architecture of Art Criticism (New York 2010), 1.

46 Stressed recently by Nagel 2012 and Keizer 2016, for example; see also David Summers, Real Spaces: World Art History and the Rise of Western Modernism (London 2003).

47 Giovanni Careri, ‘Time of History and Time Out of History: The Sistine Chapel as “Theoretical Object”’, Art History 30:3 (2007), 326–48.

48 For an overview, see Tim Cresswell, Place: A Short Introduction (Oxford 2004); see also Kaye 2000, who makes no particular differentiation between site and place, although it remains a valuable study based on Michel de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life, tr. Steven Rendell (Berkeley & Los Angeles 1984).

49 Jacques Derrida & Peter Eisenman, Chora L Works (New York 1997).

50 Timaeus 52b3–5 in Plato, Timaeus, Critias, Cleitophon, Menexenus, & Episteles, tr. R. G. Bury (Loeb Classical Library 234; Cambridge, MA 2005 [1929]).

51 Sven-Eric Liedman, ‘Om form och materia hos Aristoteles’, Lychnos 1999, 9–23.

52 Martin Heidegger, Being and Time, tr. Joan Stambaugh (New York 1996 [1926]), 126–31.

53 Martin Heidegger, ‘The Origin of the Work of Art’, in Poetry, Language, Thought, tr. Albert Hofstadter (New York 1971 [1950]), 42–3; id., ‘Der Ursprung des Kunstwerkes’, in Holzwege (Frankfurt am Main 1960 [1950]), 30: ‘Aufstellung meint hier nicht mehr das bloße Anbringen … In-sich-aufragend eröffnet das Werk eine Welt und hält diese im waltenden Verbleib.’

54 Julia Kristeva, ‘Word, Dialogue and Novel’, in The Kristeva Reader (New York 1986), 36, first published as ‘Le mot, le dialogue et le roman’, in Sēmeiōtikē: Recherches pour une sémanalyse (Paris 1969), 144, and in translation as Desire in Language: A Semiotic Approach to Literature and Art (New York 1980 [1969]): ‘pas un point (un sense fixe), mais un croisement de surfaces textuelle.’ In her La révolution de langage poétique (Paris 1974), published in translation as Revolution in Poetic Language, tr. Margaret Waller (New York 1984 [1974]), 60 Kristeva’s perspective was more outspokenly psycho-linguistic. Freud took a step forward and Bakhtin one back as Kristeva abandoned the concept of intertextuality and replaced it with transposition, since the former ‘has often been understood in the banal sense of “study of sources”’, while the latter ‘specifies that the passage from one signifying system to another demands a new articulation of the thetic—of enunciative and denotative positionality.’

55 Kristeva 1986 [1969], 58.

56 Julia Kristeva, ‘The Subject in Process’, in Patrick French & Roland-François Lack (eds.), The Tel Quel Reader (New York 1998), 174, first published as ‘Le sujet en procès’, Polylogue (Paris 1977), 57: ‘La chora est le lieu d’un chaos.’

57 Jacque Derrida, ‘Khora’, in Poikilia: Études offertes à Jean-Pierre Vernant (Paris 1987), in translation as ‘Khora’, in On the Name, tr. Ian McLeod (Stanford 1995), 89–127 at 93.

58 The concepts are derived from Husserl’s noesis and noema. See, for example, Edmund Husserl, Ideas Pertaining to a Pure Phenomenology and to a Phenomenological Philosophy, tr. F. Kersten (The Hague 1983 [1913]), i. §§ 87–96, 211–35. Samuel B. Mallin, Merleau-Ponty’s Philosophy (New Haven 1979), 14–16 puts them to good use, pointing out that all situations are constituted by four elements, ‘a subject-side, which blends into subjectivity to which it belongs; and an object-side, which merges into the otherness of which it is a concretion’. For painting, see also Maurice Merleau-Ponty, ‘Eye and the Mind’, in Galen A. Johnson (ed.), The Merleau-Ponty Aesthetics Reader: Philosophy and Painting, tr. Michael B. Smith (Evanston, IL 1993 [1961]), 121–60 who, while he does not use these concepts, is clearly influenced by them; see also Samuel B. Mallin, Art Line Thought (Dordrecht 1998).

59 Art historians have recently taken a greater interest in the sensory aspects of art. For an overview of the early modern period, see Erine E. Benay & Lisa M. Rafanelli, ‘Touch Me, Touch Me Not: Senses, Faith and Performativity in Early Modernity’, Open Arts Journal 4 (2014–15), 1–7. Of special theoretical interest are also Beth Williamson, ‘Sensory Experience in Medieval Devotion: Sound and Vision, Invisibility and Silence’, Speculum 88:1 (2013), 1–43; and Axelei Lidov, ‘Creating Sacred Space: Hierotopy as a New Field of Cultural History’, in Laura Carnevale & Chiara Cremonesi (eds.), Spazi e percorsi sacri: I santuari, le vie, i corpi (Padua 2014), 61–89. A classic study in the field is Louise Vinge, The Five Senses: Studies in a Literary Tradition (Lund 1975).

60 Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Le visible et l’invisible (Paris 1964), published as The Visible and the Invisible, tr. Alphonse Lingis (Evanston, IL 1968).

61 Aspects of touch and tactility are always important in relation to sculpture, but when it comes to sitedness they are still subordinate to the bodily experience as a whole. See Geraldine A. Johnson, ’Touch, Tactility, and the Reception of Sculpture in Early Modern Italy’, in P. Smith & C. Wilde (eds.), A Companion to Art Theory (Oxford 2002), 61–74.

62 Famously outlined by Jean-Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness, tr. Hazel E. Barnes (London 2003 [1943]).

63 For the most recent research on Michelangelo, see Tamar Smithers, introduction in Michelangelo in the New Millennium: Conversations about Artistic Practices, Patronage and Christianity (Boston 2016), 1–24; and the excellent illustrated Taschen edition by Frank Zellner & Christof Thoenes, Michelangelo 1475–1564 (Cologne 2007) (also available in German and French).

64 For a thought-provoking defence of the essay form, see Theodor W. Adorno, ‘The Essay as Form’, in Notes to Literature, tr. Sherry Weber Nicholsen (New York 1991 [1958]), i. 3–23.

3. Early works

65 See, for example, Poétiques de la renaissance, ed. Parrin Galand-Hallyn & Fernand Hallyn (Geneva 2001), 415–38 & passim.

66 Cennino Cennini, The Book of the Art of Cennino Cennini: A Contemporary Practical Treatise on Quattrocento Painting (Charleston, SC 2009), passim.

67 Carmen C. Bambach, Drawing and Painting in the Italian Renaissance Workshop: Theory and Practice, 1300–1600 (Cambridge 1999), 81–6.

68 Jean Paul Richter, The Literary Works of Leonardo da Vinci: Compiled and Edited from the Original Manuscripts (Oxford 1970), i. 303: ‘Il pictore debbe prima suefare la mano col ritrarre disegni di mano di bõ maestro’; see also Bambach 1989, 82.

69 G. W. Pigman III, ‘Versions of Imitation in the Renaissance’, Renaissance Quarterly 23:1 (1980), 18; Jan-Dirk Müller et al. (eds.), Aemulatio: Kulturen des Wettstreits in Text und Bild (1450–1620) (Berlin 2011).

70 Cicero, Tusculanae Disputationes, IV:7–8 in Cicero, Tusculan Disputations, tr. J. E. King (Loeb Classical Library 141; Cambridge, MA 1927).

71 Quintilian, Institutio Oratoria, X:2.4 in Quintilian, The Institutio Oratoria of Quintilian, tr. H. E. Butler, iv (Loeb Classical Library 127; Cambridge, MA 1936).

72 Ibid. X:2.6.

73 Ibid. X:2.10.

74 Longinus, On the Sublime, XIII:3–4 in Longinus, ‘Longinus On the Sublime’, tr. W. H. Fyfe, rev. Donald Russell, in Aristotle Poetics, Longinus On the Sublime & Demetrius On Style (Loeb Classical Library 199; Cambridge, MA 2005), 143–307, my emphasis.

75 Pigman 1980, 8.

76 Coelius Calcagnini, ‘Super imitatione commentatio’, in Bernard Weinberg (ed.), Trattati di poetica e retorica del cinquecento (Bari 1972), i. 220; Pigman 1980, 17.

77 Carline Elam, ‘Lorenzo de’ Medici’s Sculpture Garden’, Mitteilungen des Kunsthistorisches Institut in Florenz 36:1–2 (1992), 41–84.

78 Giorgio Vasari, Lives of the Painters, Sculptors and Architects, tr. Gaston du C. de Vere (New York 1996 [1568]), ii. 647–9; Ascanio Condivi, ‘Life of Michelangelo Buonarroti’, in Michelangelo: Life, Letters, and Poetry, tr. George Bull (Oxford 1987 [1553]), 72–3; Benvenuti Cellini, The Autobiography of Benvenuto Cellini, tr. John Addington Symonds (New York 1910), i. xii.

79 Cellini 1910, i. xii; Benvenuto Cellini, La vita di Benvenuto Cellini, ed. Enrico Carrara (Turin 1953), 81: ‘aveva più aria di gran soldato che di scultore’.

80 Fabian Jonietz, ‘Die Scuole delle arti als Orte der aemulatio: Der Fall der Cappella Brancacci’, in Müller et al. 2011, 773; Paul Barolsky, Michelangelo’s Nose: A Myth and its Maker (Philadelphia 1997 [1990]).

81 Vasari 1996, ii. 647, my emphasis; Giorgio Vasari, La Vita di Michelangelo nelle redazioni del 1550 e del 1568, ed. Paola Barocchi (Milan 1962), i. 10, my emphasis: ‘Per il che andando eglino al giardino, vi trovarono che il Torrigiano, giovane de’ Torrigiani, lavorava di terra certe figure tonde, che da Bertoldo gli erano state date. Michelagnolo, vedendo questo, per emulazione alcune ne fece; dove Lorenzo, vedendo sì bello spirito, lo tenne sempre in molta aspettazione; et egli inanimito dopo alcuni giorni si misse a contrafare con un pezzo di marmo una testa che v’era d’un Fauno vecchio, antico e grinzo, che era guasta nel naso e nella bocca rideva. Dove a Michelagnolo, che non aveva mai più tocco marmo né scarpegli, successe il contrafarla così bene, che il Magnifico ne stupi.’

82 René Girard, The Scapegoat, tr. Yvonne Freccero (Baltimore 1986 [1982]).

83 Robert J. Clements, ‘Michelangelo and the Doctrine of Imitation’, Italica 23:2 (1946), 90–9.

84 Jean Jacques Boissard, Romanae Urbis Topographiae & Antiquitarum (Frankfurt 1597), i. 13–14; Ulisse Aldrovandi, Delle Statue Antiche, che per tutta Roma, in diversi luoghi & case si veggono (Rome 1556), 121.

85 Vasari 1996, ii. 646; besides sculptures, see also the drawings in the Musée du Louvre, Paris, 706r and Staatliche Graphische Sammlung, Munich, 2191r.

86 Lynn Catterson, ‘Michelangelo’s Laocoön’, Artibus et Historiae 26:52 (2005), 29–56.

87 Vasari 1996, ii. 743; Clements 1946, 97–8; generally, for Quintilian’s importance for Vasari, see Sharon Gregory, ‘Vasari on Imitation’, in David J. Cast (ed.), The Ashgate Research Companion to Giorgio Vasari (Farnham 2014), 223–43.

88 Angelo Poliziano, Angelo Poliziano’s Lamia: Text, Translation and Introductory Studies, ed. Christopher Celenza (Brill’s Studies in Intellectual History 189; Leiden 2010 [1492]), 194–5, 250–1.

89 The Ludovisi sarcophagus was not discovered until 1621, but similar Roman funerary remains were among ‘the most numerous objects of any substantial kind that stand for Renaissance Italians as the relics of Antiquity’ according to Leonard Barkan, Unearthing the Past: Archaeology and Aesthetics in the Making of Renaissance Culture (New Haven 1999), 60–1.

90 Eric Scigliano, Michelangelo’s Mountain: The Quest for Perfection in the Marble Quarries of Carrara (New York 2005), 44.

91 Luba Freedman, ‘Michelangelo’s Reflections on Bacchus’, Artibus et Historiae 24:47 (2003), 121–135.

92 Linda A. Koch, ‘Michelangelo’s Bacchus and the Art of Self-Formation’, Art History 29:3 (2006), 349; the possibility that Bacchus was specifically produced for the Galli garden was raised by Herbert von Einem, Michelangelo (Stuttgart 1959), 25.

93 Pliny the Elder, Natural History, XXXIV:69 in Pliny the Elder, The Elder Pliny’s Chapters on the History of Art, tr. K. Jex-Blake (Chicago 1968), 55. The translation of this passage is problematic, but it is usually understood as meaning that the work consisted of two or three statues set together (Pliny 1968, 55 n. 12).

94 Marsilio Ficino, Three Books on Life, tr. Carol V. Kaske & John R. Clark (Binghampton 1989), 103.

4. The Pietà in Rome

95 Alexander Nagel, Michelangelo and the Reform of Art (Cambridge 2000).

96 Published by Gaetano Milanesi, Le lettere di Michelangelo Buonarotti (Florence 1875), 610. In 1504 a wooden cross was also mentioned, see Kathleen Weil-Garris Brandt, ‘Michelangelo’s Pietà for the Cappella del Re di Francia’, in Il se rendit en Italie. Études offertes à André Chastel (Rome 1987), 106, Document IV.

97 See recently Joanna E. Ziegler, ‘Michelangelo and the Medieval Pietà: The Sculpture of Devotion or the Art of Sculpture?’, Gesta 34:1 (1995), 28–36.

98 William E. Wallace, ‘Michelangelo’s Rome Pietà: Altarpiece or Grave Memorial?’, in Steven Bule, Alan Phipps Darr & Fiorella Superbi Gioffredi (eds.), Verrocchio and Late Quattrocento Italian Sculpture (Florence 1992), 243–55.

99 Charles Seymour Jr., Sculpture in Italy 1400 to 1500 (Harmondsworth 1966), 216.

100 Vasari 1996, ii. 744; Vasari 1962, i. 129: ‘Se questa terra diventassi marmo, guai alle statue antiche.’

101 Carlo Sisi, ‘Il Compianto di Giacomo Cozzarelli: Note sulla commitenza e lo stile’, in Restauro di una terracotta del Quattrocento. Il Compianto di Giacomo Cozzarelli (Florence 1984), 91–113.

102 Despite the use of the word ‘chapel’ there was not necessarily a specific building for the sculpture, but it should mean that there was at least a separate altar. Brandt 1987, 77–119 tried to reconstruct the original positioning and its relation to spectators and visitors.

103 Wallace 1992, 243–55 argues for this view.

104 Deoclecio Redig de Campos, ‘La Pietà di Michelangelo e il suo restauro’, Bolletino dei Monumenti, Musei e Gallerie Pontificie 1:1 (1977), 33–5 assumes that the sculpture was positioned about 120 centimetres above the floor.

105 Brandt 1987, 90.

106 Vasari 1996, ii. 652; Vasari 1962, i. 19.

107 Aileen June Wang, ‘Michelangelo’s Signature’, Sixteenth Century Journal 35:2 (2004), 447.

108 Eileen Kane, The Church of San Silvestro in Capite in Rome (Rome 2005), 68.

109 Grazyna Jurkowlaniec, ‘A Miracle of Art and Therefore a Miraculous Image: A Neglected Aspect of the Reception of Michelangelo’s Vatican Pietà’, Artibus et Historiae 36:72 (2015), 175–98 discusses the statue’s status as cult object and work of art down the centuries in more detail.

5. The Sistine Chapel ceiling

110 Condivi 1987, 37; Ascanio Condivi, Vita di Michelagnolo Buonarroti, Pisa 1823 [1553]), 39–40, my emphasis: ‘Mentrechè dipingeva, più volte Papa Giulio volle andare a veder l’opera, salendo su per una scala a piuoli, a cui Michelagnolo porgeva la mano per farlo montare in sul ponte. E come quello, eb’era di natura veemente, e impaziente d'aspettare, poiché fu fatta la metà, cioè dalla porta fin a mezzo la volta, volle ch'egli la scoprisse, ancorché fosse imperfetta, e non avesse avuta l’ultima mano. L’opinione e l’aspettazione, che s’aveva di Michelagnolo, trasse tutta Roma a veder questa cosa, dove andò anco il Papa, primaché la polvere, che pel disfarsi del palco era levata, si posasse. Dopo quest’opera, Raffaello avendo vista la nuova e maravigliosa maniera, come quello, che in imitare era mirabile, cercò per via di Bramante dipignere il resto.’

111 Vasari 1996, ii. 675, my emphasis.

112 Vasari 1962, i. 52.

113 The most important study on the earlier history of the chapel is Leopold David Ettlinger, The Sistine Chapel Before Michelangelo (Oxford 1965); for a more recent discussion, see Ulrich Pfisterer, La Cappella Sistina, tr. Giovanna Targia (Rome 2014 [2013]).

114 Heinrich Wölfflin, ‘Die Sixtinische Decke Michelangelos’, Repertorium für Kunstwissenschaft 12 (1890), 264–72; Charles de Tolnay, Michelangelo, ii: The Sistine Ceiling (Princeton 1945), passim; see also his much-read Michelangelo: Sculptor, Painter, Architect (Princeton 1975), 24, 33–4; for the historiography, see Peter Gillgren, ‘The Michelangelo Crescendo: Communicating the Sistine Chapel Ceiling’, Konsthistorisk Tidskrift 61:4 (2001), 206–16.

115 Wölfflin 1890, 264: ‘das Ungeheure sich fassbarer zu machen.’

116 Heinrich Wölfflin, Classic Art: An Introduction to the Italian Renaissance, tr. Peter & Linda Murray (New York 1952 [1899]), 50; id., Die Klassische Kunst: Eine Einführung in die Italienische Renaissance (Munich 1899), 56–57: ‘Man beklagt sich mit Recht, dass die sixtinische Decke für den Betrachter eine Tortur sei. Den Kopf im Nacken, ist man gezwungen, eine Reihe von Geschichten abzuschreiten; überall regt sich’s mit Leibern, die gesehen werden wollen, man wird dahin und dorthin gezogen und hat schliesslich keine Wahl, als vor der Überfülle zu kapitulieren und auf den erschöpfenden Anblick zu verzichten.’

117 Wölfflin 1952, 52; Wölfflin 1899, 58: ‘Man sollte immer mit diesen quattrocentistischen Fresken die Betrachtung anfangen und erst, wenn man sich etwas in sie hineingesehen, den Blick emporrichten … Jedenfalls aber empfiehlt es sich, das ‘Jüngeste Gericht’ an der Altarwand beim ersten Eintritt in die Kapelle zu ignorieren, d. h. in den Rücken zu nehmen. Michelangelo hat mit diesem Werk seines Alters den Eindruck der Decke schwer geschädigt. Mit dem Kolossalbild ist in dem Raum alles aus der Proportion gebracht und ein Grössenmassstab gegeben, neben dem auch die Decke zusammenschrumpft.’

118 Wölfflin 1952, 66; Wölfflin 1899, 73: ‘man kann sich an Photographien genügend davon überzeugen.’ For Wölfflin and photography, see Geraldine A. Johnson, ‘“(Un)richtige Aufnahme”: Renaissance Sculpture and the Visual Historiography of Art History’, Art History 13 (2013), 12–51. The same volume of Art History has translations of some important texts by Wölfflin on the topic. See also Patrizia Di Bello, ‘Photography and Sculpture: A Light Touch’, in Art, History and the Senses: 1830 to the Present, eds. Patrizia Di Bello & Gabriel Koureas (Farnham 2010), 19–34.

119 Tolnay 1945, passim.

120 Esther Gordon Dotson, ‘An Augustinian Interpretation of Michelangelo’s Sistine Ceiling’, Art Bulletin 61 (1979), 223–56, 405–29.

121 For a useful collection of essays with a variety of iconological interpretations, see William E. Wallace (ed.), Michelangelo: Selected Scholarship in English, ii: The Sistine Chapel (New York 1995b).

122 Johannes Wilde, Michelangelo (Oxford 1978), 68; Anthony Hughes, ‘Michelangelo: Painting: Sistine Ceiling, 1508–1512’, in The Dictionary of Art, ed. Jane Turner (London 1996), xxi. 443–5.

123 Francesco Albertini, Opusculum de mirabilibus noue et veteris urbis Rome (Rome 1520), 49.

124 Fioravante Martinelli, Roma ricercata nel suo sito (Rome 1687 [1644]), 13.

125 T. A. Marder, Bernini’s Scala Regia and the Vatican Palace: Architecture, Sculpture, and Ritual (Cambridge 1997), 30–55.

126 Saslow, James E., The Poetry of Michelangelo: An Annotated Translation (New Haven 1991), 114–15: ‘Pur tocchi sotto e sopra el suo confino, | e ‘l giallo e ‘l nero e ‘l bianco non circundi.’

127 In Guido Cavalcanti the trope appears quite often, but in a more courtly and abstract form, as for example in the poem ‘Voi che per li occhi li passaste ‘l core’ [You who’ve pierced my eyes to my heart]’. Guido Cavalcanti, The Complete Poems, tr. Marc Cirigliani (New York 1992), 30–31; It is more concrete in Angelo Poliziano, The Stanze, tr. David Quint, Amherst 1979, 2–3.

128 Saslow 1991, 76: ‘Che cosa è questo, Amore, | c’al core entra per gli occhi, | per poco spazio dentro par che cresca?’

129 Saslow 1991, 118: ‘Amore è un concetto di belezza | immaginata o vista dentro al core.’

131 The most radical study on Michelangelo’s poetry is Glauco Cambon, Michelangelo’s Poetry: Fury of Form (Princeton 1985); more generally, see Christopher Ryan, The Poetry of Michelangelo: An Introduction (London 1998).

132 Marsilio Ficino, Platonic Theology, tr. Michael J. B. Allen (The I Tatti Library; Cambridge, MA 2005 [1482]), v. 66–7; Leon Battista Alberti used the image of a winged eye as his personal emblem, see Reneé Neu Watkins, ‘L. B. Alberti’s Emblem, the Winged Eye, and His Name, Leo’, Mitteilungen des kunsthistorischen Instituts in Florenz 9 (1960), 256–8; and Laurie Schneider, ‘Leon Battista Alberti: Some Biographical Implications of the Winged Eye’, Art Bulletin 72:2 (1990), 261–70.

133 Saslow 1991, 122: ‘se per gli occhi mortali all’alma corre.’

134 Saslow 1991, 465–66: ‘Passa per gli occhi al core in un momento | qualunque obbietto di beltà lor sia.’

135 For Christ’s ancestors and their importance here, see Giovanni Careri, La Torpeur des Ancëtres: Juifs et Chrétiens dans la Chapelle Sixtine (Paris 2014).

136 Genesis 1:26: ‘Faciamus hominem ad imaginem et similitudinem nostram.’

137 For the mirroring effect between God and Adam in medieval thought (though not in relation to Michelangelo), see Michael A. Sells, Mystical Language of Unsaying (Chicago 1994), 63–89; for the possible identities of the figures accompanying God at the Creation, see Leo Steinberg, ‘Who’s Who in Michelangelo’s Creation of Adam: A Chronology of the Picture’s Reluctant Self-Revelation’, Art Bulletin 72:4 (1992), 552–66.

138 Marsilio Ficino, Commentary on Plato’s Symposium, tr. Sears Reynolds Jayne (Columbia 1944), 159.

139 Ficino 1482, v. 103.

140 Vasari 1996, i. 14.

6. Portraits of the artist

141 For the drawings, see William E. Wallace, ‘Michelangelo’s Baby’, Master Drawings 44:3 (2006), 358–61. The sculptures representing Julius II or members of the Medici family probably bore little resemblance to the actual people.

142 Vasari 1996, ii. 667; Vasari 1962, i. 39; Rona Goffen, Renaissance Rivals: Michelangelo, Leonardo, Raphael, Titian (New Haven 2002), 222–6.

143 According to Giorgio Vasari four contemporary portraits were done from life, of which all survive. Two were paintings (Giuliano Bugiardini in 1522, Jacopino del Conte in 1535), one is the medal by Leone Leoni (1561), and finally there is the well-known bronze bust by Daniele da Volterra (c.1564–66), based on a death mask. There is also a small watercolour by Francisco de Holanda of Michelangelo at about sixty.

144 Vasari 1996, i. 717–18.

145 Diogenes Laertius, Lives, IX.6 in Diogenes Laertius, Lives of Eminent Philosophers, tr. R. D. Hicks, ii (Loeb Classical Library 185; Cambridge, MA 2005).

146 Arthur Field, The Origins of the Platonic Academy of Florence (Princeton 1988), 189; see also Paul Oskar Kristeller, Il pensiero filosofico (Florence 1953), 316–317. Hermann Hettner, Italienische Studien zur Geschichte der Renaissance (Braunschweig 1879), 198–206 first identified the figure as Heraclitus, using two brief passages in Ficino’s Theologia Platonica, 13.2.2 & 14.10.5, Ficino 1482, iv. 122–3, 306–307.

147 Heraclitus DK 22B1 in Heraclitus, The Art and Thought of Heraclitus: A New Arrangement and Translation of the Fragments with Literary and Philosophical Commentary, ed. Charles H. Kahn (Cambridge 2010), 28–9.

148 For a similar, more contemporary claim, see Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht, Production of Presence: What Meaning Cannot Convey (Stanford 2004).

150 Cf. below, 124–25.

151 Printed in Sigismondo Fanti, Triomfo di Fortuna (Venice 1527).

152 Pierluigi de Vecchi (ed.), The Sistine Chapel: A Glorious Restoration (New York 1994), 158.

153 Marcia B. Hall, Michelangelo: The Frescoes of the Sistine Chapel (New York 2002), 110.

154 Nicolas Beatrizet published a print in 1547; Bernardine Barnes, Michelangelo in Print: Reproductions as Response in the Sixteenth Century (Farnham 2010), 36–7.

7. The Medici Chapel

155 Pietro Ruschi, ‘La Sagrestia Nuova, metamorfosi di un spazio’, Michelangelo architetto a San Lorenzo (Florence 2007), 45–6.

156 For an unusually early study of the visitor’s perspective, see Creighton Gilbert, ‘Texts and Contexts of the Medici Chapel’, Art Quarterly 34 (1971), 391–410, who notes that Charles de Tolnay overemphasized the enclosure of the site, for there is no doubt that spectators were included in the seclusion.

157 William E. Wallace, Michelangelo at San Lorenzo: The Genius as Entrepreneur (Cambridge 1995a), 188–9.

158 Plotinus, Ennead I.6–7 & I.1–9, tr. Arthur Hilary Armstrong (Loeb Classical Library 440; Cambridge, MA 1989); Stephen R. L. Clark, ‘Going Naked into the Shrine: Herbert, Plotinus and the Constructive Metaphor’, in Platonism and the Origins of Modernity (Dordrecht 2008), 45–61.

159 Michael J. B. Allen, ‘Life as a Dead Platonist’, in Michael J. B. Allen, Valery Rees & Martin Davies (eds.), Marsilio Ficino: His Theology, His Philosophy, His Legacy (Leiden 2002), 168–9.

160 Wölfflin 1924; in English translation, Wölfflin 1952.

161 Ibid. xv.

162 Ibid. 208.

163 Ibid. 225; Wölfflin 1924, 222: ‘den gesteigerten Ansprüchen an die feierliche Erscheinung nicht anders genügen zu können, als eben mit ihrer Auswahl von Typen, Trachten und Architekturen, wie sie die Wirklichkeit nicht leicht zusammen bieten mochte.’

164 Wölfflin 1952, 225; Wölfflin 1924, 222: ‘Völlig irreführend aber wäre es, das Klassische mit der Imitation der Antike identifizieren zu wollen.’

165 Wölfflin 1952, 250; Wölfflin 1924, 249: ‘eine Michelangelo hat genügend dafür gesorgt, dass die Kunst nicht in die Sackgasse eines nachempfundenen antiken Klassizismus hineinkomme … der Intention nach stehen aber die Klassiker nicht wesentlich anders der Altertum gegenüber als die Quattrocentisten.’

166 Walter Friedlaender, ‘The Anticlassical Style’, in Mannerism and Anti-Mannerism in Italian Painting (New York 1957 [1925]), 4.

167 Ibid. 8.

168 Ibid. 12.

169 Ibid. 19–20.

170 Friedlaender’s concise study was followed by more contextualizing research, better illustrating the complexity of the relationship between style and stylistic differentiation in the Renaissance. One example is the influential Eugenio Battisti, L’antirinascimento (Milan 1962) whose focus is the minor arts, though, and says little about Michelangelo. However, in Eugenio Battisti, Michelangelo: Fortuna di un mito: Cinquecento anni di critica letteraria e artistica, ed. Giuseppa Saccaro del Buffa (Florence 2012), 181–93, a posthumously published lecture from 1965, he dwelt on Michelangelo’s so-called anticlassicism, attributing it mostly to the artist’s individualism and personality; see also Wylie Sypher, Four Stages of Renaissance Style: Transformations in Art and Literature 1400–1700 (New York 1955); and Hiram Haydn, The Counter-Renaissance (New York 1950).

171 Johann Joachim Winckelmann, Reflections on the Painting and Sculpture of the Greeks, tr. Henry Fuseli (London 1765 [1755]).

172 Ibid. 22; Johann Joachim Winckelmann, Gedanken über die Nachahmung der griechischen Werke in der Malerei und Bildhauerkunst (Dresden 1756 [1755]), 16: ‘Könte auch die Nachahmung der Natur dem Künstler alles geben, so würde gewiß die Richtigkeit im Contour durch sie nicht zu erhalten sein; diese muß von den Griechen allein erlernet werden. Der edelste Contour vereiniget oder umschreibet alle Theile der schönsten Natur und der idealischen Schönheiten in den Figuren der Griechen; oder er ist vielmehr der höchste Begrif in beiden … Viele unter den neueren Künstlern haben den griechischen Contour nachzuahmen gesuchet, und fast niemanden ist es gelungen.’

173 Ideas developed by Wölfflin in three articles in Zeitschrift für Bildende Kunst 7 (1896), 224–28; 8 (1897), 294–7; and 26 (1914), 237–44; see also Adolf von Hildebrandt, Das Problem der Form in der bildenden Kunst (Strasbourg 1893); and Raphael Rosenberg, ‘Le vedute della statua: Michelangelos Strategien zur Betrachterlenkung’, in Alessandro Nova & Anna Schreurs (eds.), Benvenuto Cellini: Kunst und Kunsttheorie im 16. Jahrhundert (Cologne 2003), 217–35.

174 Vasari 1996, i. 619; Giorgio Vasari, Le vite de’ più eccellenti pittori, scultori e architettettori nelle redazioni del 1550 e 1568, ed. Rosanna Bettarini & Paola Barocchi (Florence 1966), iv. 7: ‘cavar fuora di terra certe anticaglie citate da Plinio delle più famose: il Lacoonte, l’Ercole et il Torso grosso di Belvedere, così la Venere, la Cleopatra, lo Apollo, et infinite altre, le quali nella lor dolcezza e nelle lor asprezze … e furono cagione di levar via una certa maniera secca e cruda e tagliente.’

175 Vasari 1996, i. 620; Vasari-Barocchi 1976, iv. 7: ‘et ancora che la maggior parte fussino ben disegnate e senza errori, vi mancava pure uno spirito di prontezza, che non ci si viede mai.’

176 Unless otherwise indicated, what follows is based on the account of individual works and architecture in Hans Henrik Brummer, The Statue Court in the Vatican Belvedere (Stockholm 1970).

177 The seated woman may be identical with a sculpture now in the Vatican garden, the Fontana della Zitella; see Alessandra Uncini, ‘Una scultura del Belvedere ritrovata, la “Zitella”’, in Il cortile delle statue: Der Statuenhof del Belvedere im Vatikan (Mainz 1998), 339–44.

178 Lucius Grisebach, ‘Baugeschichtliche Notiz zum Statuenhof Julius II im vatikanischen Belvedere’, Zeitschrift für Kunstgeschichte 39 (1976), 220.

179 Sylvie Deswarte-Rosa, ‘Francisco de Holanda et le Cortile di Belvedere’, Il cortile delle statue. Der Statuenhof des Belvedere im Vatikan (Mainz 1998), 394–5, describes the literary scene, taking the Sculpture Court as a site for orti letterati.

180 Francis Haskell & Nicholas Penny, Taste and the Antique: The Lure of Classical Sculpture 1500–1900 (New Haven 1981), 186. Parts of Castiglione’s poem were translated by Alexander Pope, The Twickenham edition of the poems of Alexander Pope, vi: Minor Poems (London 1954), 66–9; for the sculpture and a recent translation of the poem, see Brian Curran, The Egyptian Renaissance: The Afterlife of Ancient Egypt in Early Modern Italy (Chicago 2007), 167–77.

181 Cellini 1910, i. xxiii.

182 Vasari 1996, ii. 535.

183 For a thorough account of ancient works that might have influenced Michelangelo, see Gerhard Kleiner, Die Begegnungen Michelangelos mit der Antike (Berlin 1950).

184 See Charles de Tolnay, Michelangelo, iii: The Medici Chapel (Princeton 1948); and, more recently, James Beck, Antonio Paolucci & Bruni Santi, Michelangelo: The Medici Chapel (London 1994).

185 Vasari 1996, ii. 680, my emphasis; Vasari 1962, i. 58–9: ‘Perché nella novità di sì belle cornici, capitegli e base, porte, tabernacoli e sepolture fece assai diverso da quello che di misura, ordine e regola facevano gli uomini secondo il comune uso e secondo Vitruvio e le antichità, per non volere a quello agiugnere.’

186 David R. Coffin, The Villa in the Life of Renaissance Rome (Princeton 1979), 195–201.

187 Panofsky 1939, 176; Rosenberg 2003, 222.

188 Francesco Bocchi, The Beauties of the City of Florence: A guidebook of 1591, tr. Thomas Frangenberg & Robert Williams (London 2006), 243; Francesco Bocchi, Le Belezze della città di Firenze (Florence 1677 [1591]), 526: ‘É bellissima questa figura, quando mostra sua veduta nell’entrare in questo luogo da man sinistra, e nella destra parimente; ma nel mezzo, ed in faccia oltra ogni stima è stupenda’; see also Rosenberg 2003, 225.

189 Vasari 1996, ii. 682–3. The epigrams also echo the late fifteenth-century fashion for poems dedicated to ‘sleeping nymphs’, often by poets connected with the learned societies which met in gardens where there was classical statuary. See Leonard Barkan, ‘The Beholder’s Tale: Ancient Sculpture, Renaissance Narratives’, Representations 44 (1993), 133–66 and references.

190 Saslow 1991, 232: ‘Tu mozzi e tronchi ogni stancho pensiero | che l’umid’ ombra e ogni quiet’ appalta.’

191 Edgar Wind, Pagan Mysteries in the Renaissance (New York 1968 [1958]), 165 ff.

192 Orpheus, The Mystical Hymns of Orpheus, tr. Thomas Taylor (London 1896), 10.

193 W. K. C. Guthrie, Orpheus and Greek Religion (Princeton 1993 [1952]), 84.

194 Vasari 1996, ii. 682–3.

195 Condivi 1987, 45–6.

196 Leonard Barkan, Michelangelo: A Life on Paper (Princeton 2011), 28–34.

197 Karen Hope Goodchild, ‘Bizarre Painters and Bohemian Poets: Poetic Imitation and Artistic Rivalry in Vasari’s Biography of Piero di Cosimo’, in David J. Cast (ed.), The Ashgate Research Companion to Giorgio Vasari (Farnham 2014), 141–2.

198 Karla Langedijk, ‘Baccio Bandinelli’s Orpheus: A Political Message’, Mitteilungen des Kunsthistorischen Institutes in Florenz 20:1 (1976), 33–52.

199 For the suggestion that the Bronzino portrait was executed in conjunction with the founding of Accademia Fiorentina in 1541, see Carl Brandon Strehlke, Pontormo, Bronzino and the Medici: Transformation of the Renaissance Portrait in Florence (Philadelphia 2014), 130–3; see also D. P. Walker, ‘Orpheus the Theologian and Renaissance Platonists’, Journal of the Warburg & Courtauld Institutes 16:1–2 (1953), 100–20; Vladimir Marchenkov, The Orpheus Myth and the Powers of Music (New York 2009), 61–84.

200 Paul Joannides, ‘A Newly Unveiled Drawing by Michelangelo and the Early Iconography of the Magnifici Tomb’, Master Drawings 29:3 (1991), 255–62; the drawing is well established within the Michelangelo canon, though the precise motif and the attribution have been debated ever since Anton Springer, Rafael und Michelangelo (Leipzig 1878), ii. 219; for the Hesperides as daughters of Nyx and Erebus, see Cicero, De Natura Deorum, 3.44 in Cicero, ‘De Natura Deorum’, De Natura Deorum & Academica, tr. H. Rackham (Loeb Classical Library 268; Cambridge, MA 1967), 328–9.

201 Hesiod, Theogony, 744 in Hesiod, ‘The Theogony’, The Homeric Hymns and Homerica, tr. Hugh G. Evelyn-White (Loeb Classical Library; London 1914); another important source is Damascius, Problems & Solutions Concerning First Principles, tr. Sara Ahbel-Rappe (Oxford 2010), 415–18.

202 For the difference between silent and mute, see Salomé Voegelin, Listening to Noise and Silence: Towards a Philosophy of Sound Art (New York 2011).

203 ‘non mi destar, deh, parla basso.’

204 Curran 2007, 174–5.

205 The documents were published in the early nineteenth century but have received little attention among art historians. Domenico Moreni, Delle tre sontuose cappelle Medicee sitate nell’imp. basilica di S. Lorenzo (Florence 1813), 152–6. For an attempt at an iconographical interpretation, see L. D. Ettlinger, ‘The Liturgical Function of Michelangelo’s Medici Chapel’, Mitteilungen des Kunsthistorischen Institutes in Florenz 22 (1978), 287–304.

206 Raphael Rosenberg, Beschreibungen und Nachzeichnungen der Skulpturen Michelangelos: Eine Geschichte der Kunstbetrachtung (Munich 2000), 135, who bases his conclusion on Giorgio Vasari’s correspondence.

207 Moreni 1813, 154–6.

208 An excerpt is published by Rosenberg 2000, 149; the full manuscript is in the British Library, Department of Manuscripts, Lansdowne MS 720: ‘Fault remerquer que en ceste chapelle y à tousjours & en tout temps soit de jour ou de nuict, deux prestres a genoux à prier Dieu pour les deffuncts qui ont la leur sepulchres eslevez, ce qui se change de deux en deux heures, sans auscune intermission sinon quand lon chante la grande messe ou vespres lors que tous prient ensamble.’

209 The drawing is reproduced by Rosenberg 2000, 137.

210 What follows is based on Karl-Heinz Göttert, Geschichte der Stimme (Munich 1998), 169–73.

211 Bocchi 2006, 254; Bocchi 1677, 539–40: ‘Perché all’altare di questa Sagrestia, che ha il titolo della Resurrezzione, egli volle, come si osserva inviolabilmente due sacerdoti ad ogni ora, in ogni tempo facessero orazione per quelle Anime de’ vivi, e de’ morti, che sono della Casa de’ Medici … e che la mattina poscia per due ore, si dicessero messe, almeno quattro.’

212 Joseph Braun, Der Christliche Altar in seiner geschichtlicher Entwicklung (Munich 1924), 407.

213 Nagel 2012, 84–90.

214 Zygmunt Wazbinski, L’accademia Medicea del disegno a Firenze nel cinquecento: Idea e istitutzione (Florence 1987), i. 75–110.

215 Barnes 2010, 153–7.

216 Rosenberg 2000, 254 gives a useful list of known drawings after Michelangelo’s sculptures. There is also an extensive catalogue in the same volume.

217 Lex Hermans, ‘Consorting with Stone: The Figure of the Speaking and Moving Statue in Early Modern Italian Writing’, in Sarah Blick & Laura D. Gelfand (eds.), Push me, pull you: Imaginative and Emotional Interaction in Late Medieval and Renaissance Art (Leiden 2011), ii. 117–46.

218 Anton Francesco Doni, I Marmi (Florence 1863 [1552]), ii. 21–6.

219 Raffaello Borghini, Il Riposo (Florence 1584), 163: ‘fra le vive & immortali’.

220 Samuel Rogers, Italy: A Poem (London 1859 [1830]), 108–109, my emphasis; Graham Smith, ‘Michelangelo’s Duke of Urbino, in Literature, Travel-Writing, and Photography of the Nineteenth Century’, in Strange Sisters: Literature and Aesthetics in the Nineteenth Century (Berne 2009), 155–75.

221 For an alternative critique of modernist scholars’ classicism, see Charles Dempsey, The Early Renaissance and Vernacular Culture (Cambridge, MA 2012), 9–66.

222 Gilbert 1971, 397–8.

8. The tomb of Pope Julius II

223 Condivi 1987, 52. The tragedia is the focus of the first modern study of the monument by Carlo Justi, Michelangelo: Beiträge zur Erklärung der Werke und des Menschen (Leipzig 1900), as well as the very influential Charles de Tolnay, Michelangelo, iv: The Tomb of Julius II (Princeton 1954). For a recent account of the tomb’s history, see Claudia Echinger-Maurach, Michelangelos Grabmal für Papst Julius II (Munich 2009); and for a survey of early scholarship, see ead., Studien zu Michelangelos Juliusgrabmal (Hildesheim 1991), 1–142.

224 Vasari 1996, ii. 689; cf. Condivi 1987, 52.

225 Vasari 1996, ii. 661; Gerd Blum, ‘Vasari on the Jews: Christian Canon, Conversion and the Moses of Michelangelo’, Art Bulletin 95:4 (2013), 557–77; Xavier Vert, ‘Force de conversion: Moïse à San Pietro in Vincoli’, in Luca Acquarelli (ed.), Au prisme du figural: Le sens des images entre forme et force (Rennes 2015), 43–68.

226 Louis Marin, To Destroy Painting, tr. Mette Hjort (Chicago 1995 [1977]), 149, first pub. as Détruire la Peinture (Paris 1977), 207 uses this distinction to differentiate between the art of Caravaggio and Poussin, but it is also applicable to Michelangelo and Raphael.

227 E. H. Gombrich, ‘Freud’s Aesthetics’, The Encounter 26:1 (1969), 30–4.

228 Mary Bergstein, Mirrors of Memory: Freud, Photography and the History of Art (Ithaca, NY 2010), 66; ead., ‘Freud’s Moses of Michelangelo: Vasari, Photography, and Art Historical Practice’, Art Bulletin 88:1 (2006), 163.

229 Bergstein 2010, 58–77.

230 Sara Danius, The Senses of Modernism: Technology, Perception, and Modernist Aesthetics (Ithaca, NY 2002 [1998]), 13–14.

231 Sigmund Freud, ‘The Moses of Michelangelo’, in The Penguin Freud Library, tr. James Strachey (Harmondsworth 1990 [1914]), xiv. 253, first published as ‘Der Moses des Michelangelo’, Imago: Zeitschrift für Anwendung der Psychoanalyse auf die Geistesschaften 3 (1914), 15, my emphasis: ‘Kunstwerke üben eine starke Wirkung auf mich aus, inbesondere Dichtungen und Werke der Plastik, seltener Malereien. Ich bin so veranlaßt worden, bei den entsprechenden Gelegenheiten lange vor ihnen zu verweilen, und wollte sie auf meine Weise erfassen, d. h. mir begreiflich machen, wodurch sie wirken. Wo ich das nicht kann, z. B. in der Musik, bin ich fast genußunfähig. Eine rationalistische oder vielleicht analytische Anlage sträubt sich in mir dagegen, dass ich ergriffen sein und dabei nicht wissen solle, warum ich es bin, und was mich ergreift.’ For Freud’s relationship to sound and listening, see Edith Lecourt, Freud et le sonne: Le tic-tac du désir (Paris 1992), 171–2.

232 Bergstein 2010, 60–7.

233 For the use of criminological methods in the human sciences, see Carlo Ginzburg, ‘Morelli, Freud and Sherlock Holmes: Clues and Scientific Method’, History Workshop Journal 9 (1980), 5–36.

234 Adolfo Venturi, Storia dell’arte Italiana (Milan 1911–1940); Mary Bergstein, ‘Art Enlightening the World’, in Maureen C. O’Brien & Mary Bergstein (eds.), Image and Enterprise: The Photographs of Adolphe Braun (London 1999), 121–39.

235 Michael Ann Holly, ‘Interventions: The Melancholy Art’, Art Bulletin 89:1 (2007), 7–17.

236 Freud 1990 [1924], 254; Freud 1924, 15: ‘Was uns so mächtig packt, kann nach meiner Auffassung doch nur die Absicht des Künstlers sein, insoferne es ihm gelungen ist, sie in dem Werke auszudrücken und von uns erfassen zu lassen.’

237 Freud 1990 [1924], 254–5.

238 Freud 1990 [1924], 263; Freud 1924, 22: ‘ich weiss mich an meine Enttäuschung zu erinnern, wenn ich bei früheren Besuchen in S. Pietro in Vincoli mich vor die Statue hinsetzte, in der Erwartung, ich werde nun sehen, wie sie auf dem aufgestellten Fuß emporschnellen, wie sie die Tafeln zu Boden schleudern und ihren Zorn entladen werde.’

239 Freud 1990 [1924], 273; Freud 1924, 31: ‘Was wir an ihm sehen, ist nicht die Einleitung zu einer gewaltsamen Aktion, sondern der Rest einer abgelaufenen Bewegung: Er wollte es in einem Anfall von Zorn, aufspringen, Rache nehmen, an die Tafeln vergessen, aber er hat die Versuchung überwunden, er wird jetzt so sitzen bleiben in gebändigter Wut, in mit Verachtung gemischtem Schmerz.’

240 Erwin Panofsky, Studies in Iconology: Humanistic Themes in the Art of the Renaissance (Oxford 1939), 193.

241 Hans Kauffmann, ‘Bewegungsformen an Michelangelostatuen’, Festschrift für Hanz Jantzen (Berlin 1951), 141–51.

242 Vasari 1996, ii. 689–90; Condivi 1987, 53–4.

243 Dante, Purgatory 27:94–106 in Dante Alighieri, The Divine Comedy, ii: Purgatorio, tr. John D. Sinclair (New York 1939), 340.

244 St Gregory, Epistles I:V in Gregory the Great, ‘Epistle V: To Theocista, Sister of the Emperor’, in Philip Schaff & Henry Wace (eds.), A Selected Library of the Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers (Series 2:12; Grand Rapids 1964), 75, my emphasis.

245 Panofsky 1939, 183–99.

246 Ibid. 192.

247 Ibid. 198–9.

248 David Summers, ‘Contrapposto: Style and Meaning in Renaissance Art’, Art Bulletin 59 (1977), 336–61; Charles Burroughs, ‘Michelangelo at the Campidoglio: Artistic Identity, Patronage, and Manufacture’, Artibus et Historiae 14:28 (1993), 85–111.

250 Tolnay 1954, 70.

251 Antonio Forcellino, Michelangelo: A Tormented Life (Cambridge 2011 [2005]), 218–23.

252 Vasari 1992, II, 690; Vasari 1962, i. 73: ‘a mandare le voci in chiesa’.

253 Burnett 1991, 68–9; D. P. Walker, ‘Ficino’s Spiritus and Music’, Annales musicologiques 1 (1953), 131–50, reprinted in P. M. Gouk (ed.), Music, Spirit and Language in the Renaissance (London 1985), 17–28.

254 E. H. Ramsden, The Letters of Michelangelo: Translated from the Original Tuscan (London 1963), i. 162 No. 173, to Giovan Francesco Fattucci in Rome, Florence 4 September 1525; Paola Mastrocola (ed.), Rime e lettere (Turin 1992), 452 No. 127, to Giovan Francesco Fattucci in Rome, Florence 24 October 1525; Ramsden 1963, i. 165 No. 174; Mastrocola 1992, 453 No. 128.

255 Giacamo Grimaldi, Descrizione della Basilica Antica di S. Pietro in Vaticano. Codice Barberini Latino 2733, ed. Reto Niggl (Vatican 1972), 156–7.

256 Arianna Antoniutti, ‘Pio II e sant’Andrea: La regione della devosione’, in Enea Silvio Piccolomini: Arte, Storia e Cultura nell’Europa di Piu II (Rome 2006), 329–44.

257 The plan is reproduced in Grimaldi 1972, 506–507. There was a similar arrangement for the tomb of Nicolas IV (ibid. 158–9).

258 Moshe Idel, ‘Prisca Theologia in Marsilio Ficino and in some Jewish Treatments’, in Michael J. B. Allen, Valery Rees & Martin Davies (eds.), Marsilio Ficino: His Theology, His Philosophy, His Legacy (Leiden 2002), 137–58.

259 Panofsky 1939, 193.

260 Philo of Alexandria, De Decaloge 47 in Philo of Alexandria, ‘On the Decalogue’, Philo (Loeb Classical Library 320; Cambridge, MA 1937), vii. 31.

261 David Chidester, Word and Light: Seeing, Hearing and Religious Experience (Urbana 1992), 41.

262 Gregory of Nyssa, The Life of Moses (New York 1978), 87–8.

263 Condivi 1987, 53; Condivi 1823, 59: ‘il quale se ne sta a sedere in atto di pensoso e savio’. Freud 1990, 272, of course, found Condivi’s description altogether unsatisfactory.

264 Julia Annas, ‘The Sage in Ancient Philosophy’, in F. Alesse et al. (eds.), Anthropine Sophia (Naples 2008), 11–27.

9. The nature of sculpture

265 For the paragone, the contemporaneous debate about the relative merits of painting and sculpture, see Mario Pepe, ‘II “Paragone” tra pittura e scultura nella letteratura artistica rinascimentale’, Cultura e scuola 8:30 (1969), 120–31; for sculpture in particular, see Thomas Frangenberg, ‘The Art of Talking about Sculpture: Vasari, Borghini and Bocchi’, Journal of the Warburg & Courtauld Institutes 58 (1995), 115–31; for Michelangelo, see Judith Dundas, ‘The Paragone and the Art of Michelangelo’, Sixteenth Century Journal 21:1 (1990), 87–92.

266 Petrarch, De Remediis Utriusque Fortunae: Remedies for Fortune Fair and Foul I:41, tr. Conrad Rawski (Bloomington 1991), 130; Petrarch, De Remediis Utriusque Fortunae (Rotterdam 1649), 132.

267 Alessandro Parronchi, ‘Sul “Della Statua” Albertiano’, Paragone: Rivista di arte figurativa e letteratura 10:117 (1959), 3–29.

268 The greatest attention was usually paid to human proportions; see Joan Gadol, Leon Battista Alberti: Universal Man of the Early Renaissance (Chicago 1969), 76–81.

269 Leon Battista Alberti, On Painting and On Sculpture: The Latin Texts of De Pictura and De Statua, ed. Cecil Grayson (London 1972), 120–1.

270 Anthony Blunt, Artistic Theory in Italy, 1450–1600 (Oxford 1940); more recently, Michael Cole, Cellini and the Principles of Sculpture (Cambridge 2002), 1–14, 15–16, 159–60 & passim.

271 Vasari 1996, i. 14; Vasari-Barocchi 1966, i. 82: ‘La scultura è una arte che levando il superfluo dalla materia suggetta, la riduce a quella forma di corpo che nella idea dello artefice è disegnata.’

272 Vasari 1996, i. 14; Vasari-Barocchi 1966, i. 11: ‘gli scultori, come dotati forse dalla natura e dall’esercizio dell’arte di miglior complessione, di più sangue e di più forze.’

273 Ibid. i. 15. Vasari-Barocchi 1966, i. 12: ‘la scultura vuole una certa migliore disposizione e d’animo e di corpo, che rado si truova congiunto insieme.’

274 Ibid. i. 15; Vasari-Barocchi 1966, i. 13: ‘l’estreme e gravi fatiche del maneggiar i marmi et i bronzi.’

275 Ibid. i. 15; Vasari-Barocchi 1966, i. 13–14: ‘non solamente la perfezione del giudizio ordinaria, come al pittore, ma assoluta e sùbiata, di maniera che ella conosca sin dentro a’ marmi l’intero apunto di quella figura ch’essi intendono di cavarne.’

276 Ibid. i. 20.

277 There were ornaments, of course, but they were always considered derivations from nature and rated accordingly.

278 Leonardo-Richter 1970, i. 55: ‘e sono molto più degne l’opere di natura chelle parole, che sono l’opera dell’ homo, perche tal proportione è da l’opere delli homini a’ quelle della natura, gua è quella, ch’è dal homo a dio.’

10. The cave of Vulcan

279 There is also a related painting on copper in the Uffizi, Florence.

280 The letter has been published by Ugo Scoti-Bertinelli, Giorgio Vasari scrittore (Pisa 1905), 95–6 n. 1.

281 Karl Frey, Der Literarische Nachlass Giorgio Vasaris (Munich 1930), ii. 887.

282 Scoti-Bertinelli 1905, 95–6: ‘Io vorrei dipignere il medesimo concetto, ma accommodato al proposito nostro, come habbiamo ragionato insieme, pigliando dalla descrittione d’Homero [et di Virgilio insieme] quel che fa a proposito nostro, non variando il resto, et prima in luogo di Thetide vorrei Pallade et l’ordine della pittura in questo modo.’

283 Scoti-Bertinelli 1905, 96: ‘una Academia di certi virtuosi ove tegna sue verga Minerva.’

284 Vasari 1962, i. 117: ‘dove, ancora che si vegga la grandezza di quello ingegno, si conosce che, quando e’ voleva cavar Minerva della testa di Giove, ci bisognava il martello di Vulcano.’

285 Saslow 1991, 157: Sol pur col foco il fabbro il ferro stende | al concetto suo caro e bel lavoro, | né senza foco alcuno artista l’oro | al sommo grado suo raffina e rende.

287 Saslow 1991, 302–3: Non ha l’ottimo artista alcun concetto | c’un marmo solo in sé non circonscriva. Its implications are much debated, see William E. Wallace, ‘Non ha l’ottimo artista alcun concetto’, in Clare Lapraik Guest (ed.), Rhetoric, Theatre and the Arts of Design: Essay Presented to Roy Eriksen (Oslo 2008), 19–29.

288 Ludwig Goldschneider, Michelangelo: Paintings, Sculpture, Architecture (London 1996), 34; Blaise de Vigenère, Philostratus (Paris 1597), 855: ‘Je puis dire avoir veu Michel l’ange bien que aagé de plus de 60 ans, & encore non des plus robustes, abattre plus d’escailles d’un trés dur marbre en un quart d’heure, que trois ieunes tailleurs de pierre n’eussant peu faire en trois ou quatre, chose presqu’incroyable qui ne le verroit: & y alloit d’une telle impétuosité & furie, que je pensois que tout l’ouvrage deust aller en pièces, abattant par terre d’un seul coup de gros morceaux de trois ou quatre doigts d’espoisseur, si ric à ric de sa marque que s’il eust pass outre tant soit peu plus qu’il ne falloit, il y avoit danger de perdre tout.’ Leo Steinberg, ‘Michelangelo’s Florentine Pietà: The Missing Leg’, Art Bulletin 50 (1968), 343–53 questions Vigenère’s account, especially in relation to the uncompleted works.

11. David

289 Condivi 1987, 23; Vasari 1996, ii. 653–4.

290 For the document and an English translation, see Charles Seymour Jr., Michelangelo’s David. A Search for Identity (Pittsburgh 1967), 135–7; for the wider documentation, see Giovanni Poggi, Il Duomo di Firenze (Berlin 1909).

291 Regarding the ‘single block tradition’, see William E. Wallace, ‘Michelangelo, Tiberio Calcagni, and the Florentine Pietà’, Artibus et Historiae 21:42 (2000), 81–99; and Irving Lavin, ‘Ex Uno Lapide: The Renaissance Sculpture’s Tour de Force’, in Il cortile delle statue: Der Statuenhof des Belvedere im Vatikan (Mainz 1998), 191–210.

292 Seymour 1967, 139–57, with an English translation.

293 Seymour 1967, 151.

294 The decision was probably made under the influence of the gonfalioneri Piero Soderini, who wanted it placed there; see Michael Hirst, ‘Michelangelo in Florence: “David” in 1503 and “Hercules” in 1506’, Burlington Magazine 142:1169 (2000), 487–92.

295 Kathleen Weil-Garris, ‘On Pedestals: Michelangelo’s David, Bandinelli’s Hercules and Cacus and the Sculpture of the Piazza della Signoria’, Römisches Jahrbuch für Kunstgeschichte 20 (1983), 377–416.

296 The classic account of this event is given by Seymour 1967, 2.

297 The motives may have been political, for the young men arrested belonged to the Medici camp; however, since they were also rather young, it may all have been just a case of thoughtless vandalism (Hirst 2000, esp. n. 30).

298 Condivi 1987, 23; Condivi 1823, 22, my emphasis: ‘Michelagnolo l’accettò: e sensa altri pezzi ne trasse la già detta statua, così appunto, che, come si può vedere nella sommità del capo e nel posamento, n’apparisce ancora la scorza vecchia del marmo. Il che similmente ha fatto in alcun’altre, come alla sepoltura di papa Giulio II, in quella statua che rappresenta la Vita contemplativa: il che è tratto da maestri, e che sien padroni dell’arte.’

299 Franz-Joachim Verspohl, Michelangelo Buonarroti und Niccolò Machiavelli: Der David, die Piazza, die Republik (Vienna 2001), 54.

12. Via negativa

300 Ramsden 1963, ii. 75 No. 280, to Benedetto Varchi in Florence, Rome March 1547; Mastrocola 1992, 540 No. 213, my emphasis: ‘Io intendo scultura quella che si fa per forza di levare; quella che si fa per via di porre è simile a la pictura.’

301 The classic studies are Panofsky 1939 and André Chastel, Marcel Ficin et l’Art (Geneva 1954); for a more recent discussion, see Barolsky 1997, 31–4; for David in this context, see Seymour 1967, 14–16. The possible reference to Pliny the Elder, Natural History, 36.4 and Cicero, De Divinatione, I.13.23 seems tenuous; see Cicero, On Divination, tr. W. A. Falconer (Loeb Classical Library 23; Cambridge, MA 1923); cf. Robert J. Clements, Michelangelo’s Theory of Art (New York 1961), 21–2: ‘Carneades used to have a story that once in the Chian quarries when a stone was split open there appeared the head of the infant god Pan; I grant that the figure may have borne some resemblance to the god, but assuredly the resemblance was not such that you could ascribe the work to a Scopas. For it is undeniably true that no perfect imitation of a thing was ever made by chance.’

302 Plato, Parmenides, 137c–142a in Plato, ‘Parmenides’, in Cratylus, Parmenides, Greater Hippias, Lesser Hippias, tr. H. N. Fowler (Loeb Classical Library 167, Cambridge, MA 1921), 193–331.

303 Plato, Phaedrus, 252D7 in Plato, ‘Phaedrus’, in Euthyphro, Apology, Crito, Phaedo, Phaedrus, tr. H. N. Fowler (Loeb Classical Library 36; Cambridge, MA 1914), my emphasis.

304 Plotinus, Ennead, I.6–8.

305 Plotinus, Ennead, I.6–9, my emphasis.

306 Pseudo-Dionysius the Areopagite, The Mystical Theology, 997 B in Pseudo-Dionysius the Areopagite, ‘The Mystical Theology’, in Pseudo-Dionysius: The Complete Works, tr. Colm Luibheid (New York 1987), 135.

307 Pseudo-Dionysius, The Mystical Theology, 1025 A–B in Pseudo-Dionysius 1987, 138, my emphasis.

308 Gregory P. Rocca, Speaking the Incomprehensible God: Thomas Aquinas on the Interplay of Positive and Negative Theology (Washington, DC 2004), 3–4.

309 Pseudo-Dionysius, The Celestial Hierarchies, 145 A in Pseudo-Dionysius, ‘The Celestial Hierarchy’, in Pseudo-Dionysius. The Complete Works, tr. Colm Luibheid (New York 1987), 152.

310 Paul Oskar Kristeller, Renaissance Thought and its Sources (New York 1979), 50–65; Michael J. B. Allen, ‘At Variance: Marsilio Ficino, Platonism and Heresy’, in Douglas Hedley & Sarah Hutton (eds.), Platonism at the Origins of Modernity. Studies on Platonism and Early Modern Philosophy (Dordrecht 2008), 31–44.

311 Allen 2008, 37–38. The assumption was already being disputed in the mid-fifteenth century (in vain, it seems) by the likes of Lorenzo Valla, and again later by Erasmus; see John Monfasani, ‘Pseudo-Dionysius the Areopagite in Mid-Quattrocento Rome’, in Language and Learning in Renaissance Italy (Aldershot 1994), 189–219.

312 Dermot Moran, ‘Nicholas of Cusa (1401–1464): Platonism at the Dawn of Modernity’, in Douglas Hedley & Sarah Hutton (eds.), Platonism at the Origins of Modernity (Dordrecht 2008), 17–19; Michael B. Allen, Synoptic Art: Marsilio Ficino and the History of Platonic Interpretation (Florence 1998), 188–9.

313 Nicolas Cusanus, Of Learned Ignorance (London 1954 [1440]), 61.

314 Marsilio Ficino, De mystica theolgia et De divinis nominibus (Florence 1496); for the text, see Pseudo-Dionysius the Areopagite, Über die Mystische Theologie und Briefe, tr. Adolf Martin Ritter (Stuttgart 1994), 43–6.

315 Marsilio Ficino, Opera Omnia (Basel 1596), 1013,3, quoted in Allen 1998, 68.

316 Vittoria Colonna, Sonnets for Michelangelo, tr. Abgail Brundin (Chicago 2005), § 70, 110–13: ‘Paulo, Dionisio, ed ogni alto intelletto | Si die’ prigione al vero alor ch’intese | La mirabil cagion di tanto effetto.’

317 Pseudo-Dionysius, The Celestial Hierarchies, 141 C; Pseudo-Dionysius 1987, 151.

318 Ardis B. Collins, The Secular is Sacred: Platonism and Thomism in Marsilio Ficino’s Platonic Theology (The Hague 1974), 113. Recently there has been greater attention paid to the importance of the theological discourse to Renaissance art theory, for example, Steven F. H. Stowell, The Spiritual Language of Art: Medieval Christian Themes in Writings on Art of the Italian Renaissance (Leiden 2015); and Charles H. Carman, Leon Battista Alberti and Nicholas Cusanus (Farnham 2014). Pseudo-Dionysius the Areopagite is not dealt with, though, and the focus is generally on the more abstract matters of perspective and painting.

319 S. J. Freedberg, Painting of the High Renaissance in Rome and Florence (Cambridge 1961), 11–13.

320 Michael Hirst, ‘Struggling, Self-Pitying and Short of Money’, Times Literary Supplement, 5 April 1996, 7. For a more structured analysis of the letters, see Deborah Parker, Michelangelo and the Art of Letter Writing (Cambridge 2010).

321 The worries he mentioned mostly include lack of money, lodgings, guests wanting to visit, guests not wanting to visit, intrigue, slander, lack of material to work with, difficulty travelling, problems with his health, missing his friends and a total lack of friends, lack of time, letters not arriving, letters from his father and others arriving too often, letters arriving too seldom, family squabbles, war, bad assistants, spoilt assistants, melancholy and depression, problems buying property, family marriages, and death.

322 Ramsden 1963, i. 74–5 No. 82, Michelangelo to Lodovico di Buonarrota Simoni in Florence, Rome October 1512; Mastrocola 1992, 375–6 No. 61: ‘Actendete a vivere; e se voi non potete avere degli onori della terra come gli altri cictadini, bastivi aver del pane e vivete ben con Cristo e poveramente, come fo io qua, che vivo meschinamente e non curo né della vita né dello onore, chioè del mondo, che vivo non grandissime fatiche e con mille sospecti. E già sono stato così circa di quindici anni, che mai ebbi un’ora di bene, ectuto ho facto per aiutarvi, né mai l’avete conosciuto né creduto. Iddo ci perdoni actucti.’

323 Ramsden 1963, i. 135 No. 145, to Bernardo Dovizi da Bibbiena in Rome, Florence May/June 1520; Mastrocola 1992, No. 109, 431: ‘nel servire e’ macti, che rare volte si potrebe trovare qualche dolceza, come nelle cipolle, per mutar cibo, fa colui che è infastidito da’ caponi.’

324 Ramsden 1963, i. 165 No. 176, to Gian Francesco in Rome, Florence December 1525; Mastrocola 1992, 456 No. 130: ‘e cacciandovi dentro le campande, e usciendo el suono per boca, parrabbe che decto colosso gridassi misericordia.’

325 Ramsden 1963, i. 160 No. 170, to Sebastiano del Piombo in Rome, Florence May 1525; Mastrocola 1992, 451 No. 126.

326 Poem 267, a 55-line capitolo (a text in terza rima). Saslow 1991, 451–5.

327 Herman Grimm, The Life of Michelangelo Buonarroti (London 1865 [1860–63]), i. 256 & passim; Ramsden 1963, xxiii–lv; the same tendency can be seen in the classic study by Margot & Rudolf Wittkower, Born under Saturn: The Character and Conduct of Artists (London 1963).

328 Pseudo-Dionysius, The Celestial Hierarchy, 137 B in Pseudo-Dionysius 1987, 148.

329 Pseudo-Dionysius, The Ecclesiastical Hierarchy, 476 A in Pseudo-Dionysius 1987, 226.

330 There is a vast literature on the topic, touched on by most scholars of the artist. For a survey of the arguments, see Teddy Brunius, ‘Michelangelo’s “non-finito”’, in Contributions to the History and Theory of Art (Uppsala 1967), 29–67; and Jürgen Schulz, ‘Michelangelo’s Unfinished Works’, Art Bulletin 57:3 (1975), 366–73. More recently, see, for example, Creighton Gilbert, ‘What is Expressed in Michelangelo’s Non-Finito?’, Artibus et Historiae 24:48 (2003), 57–64; and Michael Hoff, ‘Epiphanie im non-finito: Nichtvolleundung als Strategie der Frömmigkeit und Auslöser von Sinnzuschreibungen in der Kunst der Florentiner Renaissance’, in Friedrich von Weltzien & Amrei Volkmann (eds.), Modelle künstlerischer Produktion (Berlin 2003), 39–56.

331 Vasari 1996, ii. 681, 715–17; Vasari 1962, i. 61: ‘nella imperfezione della bozza la perfezzione dell’opera’; Condivi 1987, 45.

13. The late pietàs

332 Wallace 2000, 81–99.

333 Vasari 1996, ii. 697.

334 Jack Wasserman, Michelangelo’s Florence Pietà (Princeton 2003).

335 Wasserman 2003, 94–102.

336 Albert Grenier, ‘Une Pietà inconnue de Michel-Ange à Palestrina’, Gazette des beaux-arts 37 (1907), 177–94.

337 John T. Paoletti, ‘The Rondanini Pieta: Ambiguity Maintained through Palimpsest’, Artibus et Historiae 21:42 (2000), 53–80.

338 Nagel 2000, 202.

339 The unusual grammatical form with its origins in Poliziano and the examples of classical artists such as Apelles and Polyclitus were noted by Vladimir Jüren, ‘Fecit-Faciebat’, Revue de l’art 26 (1974), 106–109; it is discussed further by Lisa Pon, ‘Michelangelo’s First Signature’, Source: Notes in the History of Art 15:4 (1996), 16–21; and Wang 2004.

340 Vasari 1992, ii. 675; Vasari 1962, i. 52, my emphasis: ‘Oh veramente felice età nostra, oh beati artefici, che ben così vi dovete chiamare, da che nel tempo vostro avete potuto al fonte di tanta chiarezza rischiarare le tenebrose luci degli occhi e vedere fattovi piano tutto quel che era dificile da sì maraviglioso e singulare artefice! … Ringraziate di ciò dunque il cielo e sforzatevi d’imitare Michelagnolo in tutte le cose.’

341 Alessandro Rovetta (ed.), L’ultimo Michelangelo: Disegni e rime attorno alla Pietà Rondanini (Milan 2011).

342 Walter Benjamin, The Origin of German Tragic Drama, tr. John Osborne (London 1990 [1928]), 235; Walter Benjamin, Ursprung des deutschen Trauerspiels (Frankfurt am Main 1963 [1928]), 268: ‘Wenn andere herrlich wie am ersten Tag erstrahlen, hält diese Form das Bild des Schönen an dem letzten fest.’

14. Visible and non-visible bodies

343 Vasari 1996, i. 620; Vasari-Barocchi 1976, iv. 8: ‘con buona regola, migliore ordine, retta misura, disegno perfetto e grazia divina … dette veramente alle sue figure il moto et il fiato.’

344 Vasari 1996, i. 618; Vasari-Barocchi 1976, iv. 4–5, my emphasis: ‘come nel disegno, più vero che non era prima e più simile alla natura, e cosí l’unione de’ colori et i componimenti delle figure nelle storie, e molte altre cose de le quali abastanza s’è ragionato. Ma se bene i secondi agomentarono grandemente a queste arti tutte le cose dette di sopra, elle non erano però tanto perfette che elle finissino di aggiugnere all’intero della perfezzione, mancandoci ancora nella regola una licenzia, che, non essendo di regola, fosse ordinata nella regola e potesse stare senza fare confusione o guastare l’ordine; il quale aveva bisogno d’una invenzione di tutte le cose e d’una certa bellezza continuata in ogni minima cosa, che mostrasse tutto quellordine con più ornamento. Nelle misure mancava uno retto giudizio, che senza che le figure fussino misurate, avessero in quelle grandezze ch’elle eran fatte una grazia che eccedesse la misura. Nel disegno non v’erano gli estremi del fine suo, perché, se bene e’ facevano un braccio tondo et una gamba diritta, non era ricerca con muscoli con quella facilità graziosa e dolce che apparisce fra ‘l vedi e non vedi, come fanno la carne e le cose vive; ma elle erano crude e scorticate, e faceva difficultà a gli occhi e durezza nella maniera.’

345 Vasari 1996, i. 620; Vasari-Barocchi 1976, iv. 10–11, my emphasis: ‘Costui supera e vince non solamente tutti costoro, c’hanno quasi che vinto già la natura, ma quelli stessi famosissimi antichi che sì lodatamente fuor d’ogni dubbio la superarono, et unico si trionfa di quegli, di questi e di lei, non imaginandosi appena quella cosa alcuna sì strana e tanto difficile ch’egli con la virtù del divinissimo ingegno suo, mediante l’industria, il disegno, l’arte, il giudizio e la grazia, di gran lunga non la trapassi: e non solo nella pittura e ne’ colori, sotto il qual genere si comprendono tutte le forme e tutti i corpi retti e non retti, palpabili et impalpabili, visibili e non visibili, ma nelle’strema rotondità ancora de’ corpi, e con la punta del suo scarpello.’

346 Cf. above, 102–3 as well as Summers 1977 and Burroughs 1993.

347 ‘Credo in unum Deum, Patrem omnipotentem, factorem coeli et terrae, visibilium omnium et invisibilium’; ‘Credo in un solo Dio, Padre onnipotente, Creatore del cielo e della terra, di tutte le cose visibili ed invisibili.’

348 Cf. above, 58–60 and Vasari 1996, i. 14.

349 Cf. above, 135.

350 John Shearman, Only Connect: Art and the Spectator in the Italian Renaissance (Princeton 1992), 227–61 refers to the phenomenon as ‘the slow fuse’.

15. The Last Judgement

351 For the early reception, see Bernardine Barnes, Michelangelo’s Last Judgment: The Renaissance Response (Berkeley & Los Angeles 1998). For Heinrich Wölfflin it represented the end of classic Renaissance style, for others the introduction of modernist expressiveness into art (Wölfflin 1952, 197–204); for the latter point of view, see Gregor Paulsson, Konstens världshistoria, iii: Nyare tiden (Stockholm 1952), 183; ‘No work has had greater influence on contemporaneity and afterworld. After this, one could not return to a world borne by harmony.’

352 Vasari 1996, ii. 693 noted the fact that the Madonna is covering herself up to prevent herself from hearing and seeing.

353 Vasari 1996 ii. 691; Vasari 1962, i. 74: ‘e volse che pendessi dalla somità di sopra un mezzo braccio, perché né polvere né altra bruttura [si] potessi fermare sopra’.

354 Hall 2002, 231–2.

355 Charles de Tolnay, Michelangelo, v: The Final Period (Princeton 1960), 28. Loren W. Partridge, Michelangelo: The Last Judgment: A Glorious Restoration (New York 1997), 33–35; Marcia B. Hall, Michelangelo’s Last Judgment (Cambridge 2005), 15–16.

356 Tolnay 1960, 30–2.

357 Ibid. 47.

358 Ibid. 49–50.

359 Ibid. 43.

360 Leo Steinberg, ‘The Last Judgment as Merciful Heresy’, Art in America 63 (1975), 48–63; id., ‘A Corner of the Last Judgment’, Daedalus 109 (1980), 207–73; building on Steinberg’s work, Valerie Shrimplin-Evangelidis, ‘Sun Symbolism and Cosmology in Michelangelo’s Last Judgment’, Sixteenth Century Journal 21 (1990), 607–644; ead., ‘Hell in Michelangelo’s Last Judgment’, Artibus et Historiae 15:29 (1994), 83–107. The iconographical tradition offers many alternative interpretations that are beyond the scope of the present essay. Most recently, James A. Connor, The Last Judgment: Michelangelo and the Death of the Renaissance (New York 2009) has drawn greatly on these scholars; see also Peter Gillgren, ‘Siting Michelangelo’s Last Judgment in a Multimedia Context: Art, Music and Ceremony in the Sistine Chapel’, Konsthistorisk tidskrift 80:2 (2012), 65–89.

361 Pseudo-Dionysius, The Divine Names, 720 A in Pseudo-Dionysius 1987, 86.

362 Giovanni Careri, ‘Performativity in Michelangelo’s Last Judgment’, in Peter Gillgren & Mårten Snickare (eds.), Performativity and Performance in Baroque Rome (Farnham 2012), 201–216.

363 Pseudo-Dionysius, The Divine Names, 728 D in Pseudo-Dionysius 1987, 92 .

364 Condivi 1987, 68; for Michelangelo and Dante, see Karl Broniski, Rätsel Michelangelos: Michelangelo und Dante (Munich 1908).

365 Dante Alighieri, The Divine Comedy, i: Inferno, tr. John D. Sinclair (Oxford 1961), 47–9.

366 Vasari 1996, ii. 692. A similar story is given, seemingly independently, by Lodovico Domenichi, Facetie, motti et burle di diversi signori et persone private (Venice 1609 [1562]), 277–8.

367 The Swedish original is given in the appendix.

368 In another poem, ‘Sopranen i Ara Coeli’, in Romerska minnen (Stockholm 1881a), 41–7 Wennerberg describes the beautiful voice of a castrato singer he heard in the church of Santa Maria in Ara coeli al Campidoglio.

369 J. G. Davies, Holy Week: A Short History (London 1963), 46–7.

370 Herbert Thurston, ‘Tenebræ’, The Catholic Encyclopedia (New York 1912), xiii. 819–20.

371 Johannis Burckhardi [Johann Burchard], Liber Notarum. Ab anno MCCCCLXXXIII usque ad annum MDVI (Vatican 1906), 9–10.

372 Gianbattista Gattoci, Diaria caeremonialia, ii: De itineribus romanorum pontificium a Sixto IV ad Benedictam XIV (Rome 1753), 184–5.

373 Gösta M. Bergman, Lightning in the Theatre (Stockholm 1977), 28–88.

374 Leone di Sommi, ‘The Dialogues of Leone di Somi’, in The Development of the Theatre: A Study of Theatrical Art from the Beginnings to the Present Day (London 1958), 274; id., Quattro dialoghi in materia di rappresentazioni sceniche (Milan 1968), 64: ‘un profondissimo orrore nel petto degli spettatori.’

375 Patrick Macey, ‘Savonarola and the Sixteenth-Century Motet’, Journal of the American Musicological Society 36:3 (1983), 425.

376 Girolamo Savonarola, Edizione nazionale delle opere di Girolamo Savonarola: Operette spirituali, ed. Mario Ferrara, ii (Rome 1976 [1498]), 195–234, 337–94; English translation quoted from Macey 1983, 425.

377 Julius Amann, Allegris Miserere und die Aufführungspraxis in der Sixtina nach Reiseberichten und Musikhandschriften (Regensburg 1935); Ben Byram-Wigfield, Miserere Mei, Deus: Gregorio Allegri: A Quest for the Holy Grail? ([London] 2002 [1996]); Rafael Köhler, Die Cappella Sistina unter dem Medici-Päpsten 1513–1534: Musikpflege und Repertoire am päpstlichen Hof (Kiel 2001).

378 Byram-Wigfield 2002, 2–9.

379 Ibid. 11–12; Boursy 1993, 280–281. An early source for this story is Charles Burney, The Present State of Music in France and Italy (London 1959 [1773]), 232–4.

380 Andrea Adami da Bolsena, Osservazioni per ben regolare il coro de i cantori della Cappella pontificia—tanto nelle funzioni ordinarie, che stradornarie (Venice 1711), 34–8.

381 B. Schimmelpfennig, ‘Die Funktion der Cappella Sistina im Zeremoniell der Renaissancepäpste’, Collectanae II: Studien zur Geschichte der päpstlichen Kapelle (Vatican 1994), 132; Köhler 2001, 175.

383 The Miserere compositions are collected in two important manuscripts at the Vatican, usually cited as No. 205 & 206, see Josephus M. Llorens (ed.), Cappellae Sixtinae Codices (Studi e testi 202; Vatican 1960), 218–22.

384 Adami 1711, 37; Magda Marx-Weber, ‘Die Tradition der Miserere-Vertonungen in der Cappella Pontifica’, in Collectanae II: Studien zur Geschichte der päpstlichen Kapelle (Vatican 1994), 265.

385 Murray C. Bradshaw, The Falsobordone: A Study in Renaissance and Baroque Music (Stuttgart 1978), 43; Paris de Grassis, Il Diario di Leono X (Rome 1884), fol. 166v: ‘Tenebrae, 1518. In fine offici mihi non placavit, quod cantores cantassent psalmum miserere mei falsum bordonum, et Papa sic voluit.’

386 Marx-Weber 1994, 267.

387 Costanzo Festa: Opera Omnia. Motetti, ed. Albertus Seay (Corpus Mensurabilis Musicae 25; Rome 1979), iii. xviii, 92–100. The attribution is generally accepted, but disputed by Bradshaw 1978, 71 n. 5.

388 The best overview, if somewhat dated, is Hans Musch, Costanzo Festa als Madrigalkomponist (Baden-Baden 1977), 13–25.

389 François Rabelais, Œvres complètes (Paris 1973 [1532]), 577.

390 The importance of Festa’s Miserere for Palestrina, and indeed all of the Sistine tradition, had already been noted by the Chapel Master and composer Giuseppe Baini, Memorie storico-critiche della vita e delle opere di Giovanni Pierluigi da Palestrina (Rome 1828), ii. 195–7 n. 578.

391 Anthony M. Cummings, ‘Toward an Interpretation of the Sixteenth-Century Motet’, Journal of the American Musicology Society 34 (1984), 48; Herman Walter Frey, Die Gesänge der Sixtinischen Kapelle an den Sonntagen und hohen Kirchenfesten des Jahres 1616 (Vatican 1964), 206.

392 Baini 1828, 215.

393 Burney 1773, 246.

394 Patrick Brydone, A Tour through Sicily and Malta (Paris 1780), 230.

395 See Ignazio Macchiarella, Il falsobordone fra tradizione orale e tradizione scritta (Lucca 1994), passim.

396 For the correspondence of ‘Michelagniolo und die Komponisten seiner Madrigale: Bartolomeo Tromboncino, Jean Conseil, Costanzo Festa, Jakob Arcadelt’, see Herman Walter Frey, Acta Musicologica 24 (1952), 157–60; Gaetano Milanesi, Les Correspondants de Michel-Ange, i: Sebastiano del Piombo, tr. A. Le Pileur (Paris 1890), 108.

397 Ramsden 1963, i. 185 No. 194, to Sebastiano del Piombo in Rome, Florence August 1533; Mastrocola 1992, 472 No. 145.

398 Richard J. Agee, ‘Costanzo Festa’s Gradus ad Parnassum’, Early Music History 15 (1996), 18.

399 Pina Ragioneri, Michelangelo: The Man and the Myth (New York 2008), 52–6.

400 Donato Giannotti, Dialogi di Donato Gianotti, de’ giorni che dante consumò nel cercare l’Inferno e ‘l Purgatorio, ed. Deoclecio Redig de Campos (Florence 1939 [1546]), 37–8.

16. Sistine Chapel installations

401 John W. O’Malley, Praise and Blame in Renaissance Rome: Rhetoric, Doctrine, and Reform in the Sacred Orators of the Papal Court, c.1450–1521 (Durham, NC 1979), 21.

402 Ibid. 40 & 53.

403 According to Paris de Grassis there were 8 Vespers, 5 Matins and 27 Masses celebrated in one liturgical year (Cerimonarium opusculum, Bibl. Vat. Cod. 5634); see Roberto Salvini (ed.), La Cappella Sistina in Vaticano (Milan 1965), i. 263. The most important published sources are Agostino Patrizi, Ritus eclesiastici (Venice 1516) and Adami 1711, who give similar numbers; for a useful compilation of these and other sources, see Gaetano Moroni, Le cappelle ponteficie (Venice 1841).

404 Adami 1711, 111.

405 On the extraliturgical character of the motet, see Cummings 1984, 58.

406 Patrizi 1516, fol. ciii, v; Burckhardi 1907, 141; Shearman 1972, 4–5, n. 23.

407 Ettlinger 1965, 24–6.

408 John White & John Shearman, ‘Raphael’s Tapestries and Their Cartoons’, Art Bulletin 40:3 (1958), 216; Ettlinger 1965, 23 suggests that it would have been 5.5 metres high, which is correctly disputed by Shearman 1972, 216 since this would throw the frescoes on both sides out of proportion.

409 First published by Paliard, ‘La Couronnement de la Vierge d’après un carton de Raphael: Tapisserie retrouvée au Vatican’, Gazette des Beaux-Arts 2:1 (1872), 82–8; and Eugène Müntz, ‘Les tapisseries de Raphael au Vatican d’apres des documents nouveaux’, La Chronique des arts et la curiosité (1876), 262.

410 Stendhal, ‘Promenades dans Rome’, Voyages en Italie (Paris 1973 [1830]), 1110; for Stendhal’s visits, see Boursy 1993, 298–301.

411 Salvini 1965, 266–7. This interesting piece of information is given by Agostino Taja, Descrizzione del Palazzo Apostolico vaticano (Rome 1750). Neither drawings nor tapestries are known to survive, unfortunately.

412 Michael Hirst, Michelangelo and His Drawings (New Haven 1988), 52; Hugh Chapman, Michelangelo Drawings: Closer to the Master (London 2005), 233.

413 John Shearman, Raphael’s Cartoons in the Collection of Her Majesty the Queen and the Tapestries for the Sistine Chapel (London 1972); see also Roger Jones & Nicholas Penny, Raphael (New Haven 1987), 21–44, 133–5; Shearman’s results have been questioned by several scholars, but recently defended by Michael Rohlmann, ‘Raffaels “Bilderzeremoniell” im Vatikanpalast: Grenzüberschreitungen in der Sixtinischen Kapelle und den Stanzen’, in Tristan Weddigen, Sible de Blaauw & Bram Kempers (eds.), Functions and Decorations: Art and Ritual at the Vatican Palace in the Middle Ages and the Renaissance (Vatican 2003), 95–113; see also Pfisterer 2014, 87–92. The most recent contribution is Lisa Pon, ‘Raphael’s Acts of the Apostles Tapestries for Leo X: Sight, Sound, and Space in the Sistine Chapel’, Art Bulletin 97:4 (2015), 388–408, who also emphasizes the tapestries as acoustic regulators.

414 On the ‘tone of certitude’ in certain art historical traditions, see George Didi-Huberman, Devant l’image: Question posée aux fins d’une histoire de l’art (Paris 1990), published as Confronting Images: Questioning the Ends of a Certain History of Art, tr. John Goodman (Penn State, 2005); for John Shearman and his functionalist ideas of art history, see Ian Verstegen, ‘John White’s and John Shearman’s Viennese Art Historical Method’, Journal of Art Historiography 1 (2009), 1–16.

415 White & Shearman 1958, 41.

416 Shearman 1972, 5–6. Documentation on the use of the Vatican tapestries show that they were often used outside the chapel, for occasions such as tournaments, triumphs, and marriages, see David Farabulini, L’arte degli arazzi e la nuova Galleria dei Gobelins al Vaticano (Rome 1884), 51–64.

417 The sizes of the tapestries are given by Shearman 1972, 209–212 in the catalogue notes.

418 The arrangement had already been suggested by Paliard 1873, 83–4, but is not commented on by Shearman or others.

419 It should be noted, though, that the tapestries were stolen in the Sack of Rome in 1527. Most of them were returned immediately, but the last ones did not turn up until 1554 (White & Shearman 1958, 141).

420 The document is published by Detlef Heikamp, ‘‘Die Arazzeria Medicea im 16. Jahrhundert: Neue Studien’, in Münchner Jahrbuch der Bildenden Kunst (1969), 74.

421 Splendour of the Popes: Treasures from the Sistine Chapel and the Vatican Museums and Library (Baltimore 1989), 25–40; Wennerberg 1881b, 130; F. Mancinelli, The Vatican Collections: The Papacy and Art (New York 1983), 72–9.

422 Gattico 1753, 184–5.

423 St Stephen’s martyrdom has much the same characteristics, if Shearman’s reconstruction is preferred.

17. Coda

424 For the chapel, see Christoph L. Frommel, ‘Antonio da Sangallos Cappella Paolina: Ein Beitrag zur Baugeschichte des Vatikanischen Palastes’, Zeitschrift für Kunstgeschichte 28 (1964), 1–42; and Margaret Kuntz, ‘Designed for Ceremony: The Cappella Paolina at the Vatican Palace’, Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians 62:2 (2003), 228–55.

425 Leo Steinberg, Michelangelo’s Last Paintings: The Conversion of St Paul and the Crucifixion of St Peter in the Cappella Paolina, Vatican Palace (New York 1975) has been successfully followed up by later scholars, reinforcing the importance of the intense relationship between frescoes and viewers in a narrow chapel that was hard to light. Especially impressive is William E. Wallace, ‘Narrative and Religious Expression in Michelangelo’s Pauline Chapel’, Artibus et Historiae 10:19 (1989), 107–21.

426 An example is the important study of the Cerasi Chapel and the Caravaggio paintings by Leo Steinberg, ‘Observations on the Cerasi Chapel’, Art Bulletin 41 (1959), 183–190.

427 Steinberg 1975, 38; see Wölfflin 1952, 201 who interestingly is more alert to Steinberg on the theme of the voice as a unifying principle of the painting, while at the same time deploring Michelangelo’s departure from the classic style (cf. above, 71–2).

428 The concepts of real and aesthetic space were introduced by Steinberg 1959, 183–90.

429 Steinberg 1975, 38–9.

430 Ibid. 36.

431 The Greek phōnē can mean both voice and sound. The Vulgate, for example, has voice: ‘sed surge et ingredere civitatem et dicetur tibi quid te oporteat facere viri autem illi qui comitabantur cum eo stabant stupefacti audientes quidem vocem neminem autem videntes’ (Acts 9:7).

432 Steinberg 1975, 48.

433 Jacobus de Voragine, The Golden Legend: Readings on the Saints, tr. William Granger Ryan (Princeton 1993), i. 345–6.

434 Kuntz 2003, 231–233.

435 Ibid. 232.

436 Richard Sherr, ‘The Singers of the Papal Chapel and Liturgical Ceremonies in the Early Sixteenth Century: Some Documentary Evidence’, in Paul A. Ramsey (ed.), Rome and the Renaissance: The City and the Myth (Binghamton 1982), 250–1.

437 Jeffrey Dean, ‘Listening to Sacred Polyphony c.1500’, Early Music 25:4 (1997), 611–36.

438 Blesser & Salter 2007, 100.

439 Dean 1997, 628.

440 Cf. above, 104.

441 For a recent discussion of the complex building history, see Henry A. Millon, ‘Michelangelo to Marchionni, 1546–1784’, in William Tronzo (ed.), St Peter’s in the Vatican (Cambridge 2005), 93–110.

442 The classic study is Irving Lavin, Bernini and the Crossing of Saint Peter’s (New York 1968).

443 Vincent Joseph Scully, Modern Architecture and Other Essays (Princeton 2003), 201.

444 For the Campidoglio, see Tilmann Buddensieg, ‘Zum Statuenprogramm im Kapitolsplan Paulus III’, Zeitschrift für Kunstgeschichte 32:3/4 (1969), 177–228; and Donatella Paradisi, Il Campidoglio: Storie, personaggi e monumenti del mitico colle di Roma (Rome 2004).

445 James Ackerman, The Architecture of Michelangelo (Chicago 1970), 142.

446 E. Rodocanachi, Le Capitole Romain: Antique et Moderne (Paris 1904), 89–91, 179.

447 Andrea Busiri-Vici, Il carnovale romano all’epoca bella (Rome 1896), 16; for the importance of church bells for regulating life in the premodern era, see Alain Corbin, Village Bells: Sound and Meaning in the Nineteenth-Century French Countryside (New York 1998).

448 James Ackerman 1970, 161; id., ‘Marcus Aurelius on the Capitoline Hill’, Renaissance News 10:2 (1957), 69–75.

449 Buddensieg 1969, 181; Haskell & Penny 1981, 255–7.

450 Cellini 1910, i. cxx.