Preface

The idea for this book was conceived in 2011 when I was a visiting scholar at L’École des hautes études in Paris and the text was completed in Stockholm during a six-month sabbatical in 2016. My aim has been to study Michelangelo’s art as site specific and to further explore the notion of siting that was first raised in Siting Federico Barocci and the Renaissance Aesthetic (2010). What that study lacked is an awareness of the soundscape as fundamental for site specificity, and indeed of siting as a method in its own right, useful not only for artists but for scholars too.

I wish to thank my host Giovanni Careri for inviting me to Paris, for his helpful advice and inspiration, and for reading an early draft of this text. My thanks go also to Riksbankens Jubileumsfond, which funded the work, and to the Wenner-Gren Foundations and Kungliga Vitterhetsakademien who helped finance the stay in Paris. Riksbankens Jubileumsfond, Kungliga Vitterhetsakademien, and Sven och Dagmar Saléns Stiftelse financed its publication by Nordic Academic Press, and I wish to thank them for making it possible for the book to appear as originally conceived. The editor Annika Olsson, copy-editor Charlotte Merton, and illustrator Petter Lönegård have done admirable work throughout the publication process. Stockholm University has been most supportive and I am grateful to all my colleagues there, especially Margaretha Rossholm Lagerlöf and Hans Hayden with whom I have had the opportunity to discuss the manuscript individually. I would also like to thank Tobias Pontara for discussing the manuscript with me from a musicologist’s perspective, and Graham Smith and Bernardine Barnes for their kind interest in my work.¹ Fondazione Famiglia Rausing made it possible for me to stay at the Swedish Institute in Rome, and I wish to thank the Rausing board and the unwaveringly friendly and supportive staff at the Institute.

Next door to the Swedish Institute in Rome is the Danish Academy. This is where the thinking behind the present study was presented for the first time, in 2010, at the meeting which also saw the founding of the Nordic Network for Renaissance Studies (NNRS). I owe a debt of thanks to the director, Marianne Pade, for inviting me, and I am also grateful to Unn Irene Aasdalen, Outi Merisalo, and Leonardo Cecchini, and to the lecturers and many students at the interdisciplinary summer course ‘Text, Memory, Monument’ at the Academy over the years. The NNRS held its first international conference in 2012, where the ideas about Michelangelo and via negativa were first presented. Aspects of the project were discussed at gatherings of Barockakademien, the Sixteenth Century Society & Conference, and the Renaissance Society of America, which welcomed me to Geneva (2009), Rome (2010), Wolfenbüttel (2013), New York (2014), Berlin (2015), and Oslo (2016). A study day on the Sistine Chapel in 2015, organized in the Vatican by Ulrich Pfisterer et al., was invaluable, as was a symposium on the chapel’s ceiling at INHA in Paris organized the same year by Abslem Azraibi, Bertrand Madeline, and Florian Métral, and the conference on the human body in Renaissance cultures of knowledge arranged by Unn Falkeid in Stockholm in 2016.

Earlier versions of the sections on the Sistine Chapel and the tomb of Pope Julius II were published in Konsthistorisk tidskrift (2001 and 2011) and Det åskådliga och det bottenlösa (2010).

All translations are my own unless otherwise stated; where I have used published translations with parallel texts, such as the Loeb Classical Library and I Tatti Library, I have not given the original text in the notes. I have used James E. Saslow’s edition of Michelangelo’s poems, although with some modifications to the English translations.

My profoundest gratitude is to Maria and Anina, who were with me that memorable autumn in Paris. This book is dedicated to the memory of my mother, who introduced me to art, music, and life.