Michelangelo’s Sculpture: Selected Essays 9780226482606

Citation preview

Mi c h e l a n g e lo’s S c u l p t u r e

Essays by L e o Ste i nbe rg Edited by Sheila Schwartz

Michelangelo’s Sculpture s ele c t e d e s s a y s

Leo Steinberg edited by Sheila Schwartz

T he U niv e rsit y of C hicago Pr e s s   |  Chicago and London

The University of Chicago Press, Chicago 60637 The University of Chicago Press, Ltd., London © 2018 by Sheila Schwartz All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission, except in the case of brief quotations in critical articles and reviews. For more information, contact the University of Chicago Press, 1427 E. 60th St., Chicago, IL 60637. Published 2018 Printed in China 27 26 25 24 23 22 21 20 19 18   1 2 3 4 5 ISBN-­13: 978-­0-­226-­48257-­6 (cloth) ISBN-­13: 978-­0-­226-­48260-­6 (e-­book) DOI: https://doi.org/10.7208/chicago/9780226482606.001.0001 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names : Steinberg, Leo, 1920–2011, author. | Schwartz, Sheila, editor. | Steinberg, Leo, 1920–2011. Essays. Selections. 2018. Title : Michelangelo’s sculpture : selected essays / Leo Steinberg ; edited by Sheila Schwartz. De s c rip tion : Chicago ; London : The University of Chicago Press, 2018. | Series: Essays by Leo Steinberg | Includes bibliographical references and index. Iden tifiers : LCCN 2017039555 | ISBN 9780226482576 (cloth : alk. paper) | ISBN 9780226482606 (e-book) Subj ects : LCSH: Michelangelo Buonarroti, 1475–1564—Criticism and interpretation. | Sculpture, Renaissance—Italy. | Sculpture— Italy—16th century. | Sculpture—Italy—15th century. Cl as s ification : LCC NB623.B9 S74 2018 | DDC 709.2—dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2017039555 This paper meets the requirements of ANSI/NISO Z39.48-­1992 (Permanence of Paper).

Con t e n ts

Preface and Acknowledgments, Sheila Schwartz  vii Introduction, Richard Neer  xi

1. The Metaphors of Love and Birth in Michelangelo’s Pietàs 1 2. The Roman Pietà: Michelangelo at Twenty-­Three  58 3. The Medici Madonna and Related Works  90 4. Body and Symbol in the Medici Madonna 96 5. The Florentine Pietà: The Missing Leg Twenty Years After  129 6. The Michelangelo Next Door  167 7. Shrinking Michelangelo  170 8. Michelangelo and the Doctors  179 9. What Would You Ask Michelangelo?  184 Notes  185 Leo Steinberg: Chronology  209 Leo Steinberg: Publications (1947–­2010)  213 Photography Credits  219 Index  221

Preface a nd Ac kn ow led gm e n ts

L

eo Steinberg greeted the turn of the millennium with a new venture in mind: the republication of about a dozen of his most important Old Master essays in a single volume, a companion to Other Criteria, his 1972 compendium on modern art. But, as he passed eighty, the burden of age began to weigh upon him and he opened files on unpublished matter, eager to work up what had not yet been scripted and engage in fresh writing tasks. In the two years before his death in 2011, however, another, larger project evolved: the posthumous publication of essays in all fields written during his sixty-­year career, along with some unpublished lectures.1 His hope was that I would bring off what he had neither the time nor the inclination to do. The present volume is the first in a planned series that will extend into modern and contemporary art. Next will be a volume on Michelangelo’s painting. I leave to Richard Neer an explication de texte, addressing instead the biographical origins of Steinberg’s art-­ historical method. Steinberg had a well-­earned reputation as a writer of fine prose, which won him both praise and blame from fellow art historians. He often recalled Walter Friedlaender’s judgment at a faculty conference during his graduate studies at the Institute of Fine Arts: “I don’t trust Leo Steinberg, he writes too well.”2 Anyone concerned with style could not be concerned with scholarship; if it doesn’t sound like art history, it isn’t. Steinberg’s dedication to English style was that of a foreigner who had to learn what native speakers took for

granted. English was his fourth language, preceded by Russian, Hebrew, and German. He arrived in London from Berlin in May 1933, not quite thirteen years old, fluent in German, able to mimic half a dozen dialects, but without a word of English. He quickly came to resent English as the “instrument of my impotence” and “humiliation.”3 At age seventeen, however, he decided that English would be his language and began to school himself in its literature—­Shakespeare, Milton, Thomas Browne, Jonathan Swift, Laurence Sterne, Dickens. English, he soon realized, was as noble a language as German. He memorized Shakespeare sonnets, pages from Paradise Lost, and long prose passages from other favorite authors, “reciting them to myself in order to internalize the rhythms of English prose and verse.”4 A friend gave him a copy of Joyce’s Ulysses, which became his cicerone to English. “I had the naive notion that any word or turn of phrase in Ulysses that was unfamiliar to me was unfamiliar because I was a bloody foreigner, and of course any native English speaker would know words like ‘tholsel’ or ‘inkle.’ I would look every one of them up.”5 Late in life, he still knew pages of Ulysses by heart. This internalized vocabulary—­and syntax, styles, and structures—­of great English literature became a vast linguistic resource. And writing, he taught me in the more than four decades we worked together, was thinking. Ideas and narrative structures evolve and are refined—­or forsaken—­in the search for the most precise and expressive locution. Put into the service of art history, his prose illuminated the subject, revealing what a more pedestrian style would keep hidden.

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Richard Shiff put it well: “Leo’s writing has the freshness of speech, even though he fussed over choice of word, syntax, and meter, just as a painter might fuss over nuances of color and the rhythms of strokes, without detriment to the overall picture. His models included Shakespeare and Joyce, writers who took delight in sound without losing the deeper reaches of sense. . . . Such sonorous writing risks striking its reader as self-­ indulgent, too finely orchestrated, leaving the impression that the rhetoric is the message. . . . [But] his descriptive terms and analytical concepts bore an organic relationship to whichever art objects he brought under investigation. He set eye and mind to the immediate task, as opposed to administering a fixed vocabulary, a fashionable method, or a hierarchy of values.”6

engraved copies of the Roman Pietà: he saw these alterations not as incompetence, but as negative criticism, visual corrections of perceived flaws that serve to reveal the intentionality of the original. Comprehending an artwork extended beyond two-­ dimensional replication. Steinberg often said that he didn’t trust art historians who’d never drawn and never danced.9 He didn’t mean those who’d never waltzed, but rather those who never tried to translate looking into physical equivalencies, to animate static art with gestural simulations. He taught his students that mere looking was never enough. They had to hold the figure’s pose “till the strains of it become an inward intuition.” “At stake is the identity of an action, its feel and import. It has to be danced to be known.”10

The roots of Steinberg’s art history lie equally in his training as an artist. He enrolled in the Slade School of Fine Art, London, age sixteen. At graduation four years later, a skilled draftsman with prizes in hand for drawing and sculpture, he  “had the good sense to know” that a career as a professional artist was not for him.7 But he continued to draw from the model and sculpt portraits of friends. In 1948, looking for a way to support himself in New York, he got a job teaching life drawing at Parsons School of Design, adding art history lectures to his course load in 1951. He taught at Parsons through the 1950s, drawing along with the students, even while studying art history at the Institute of Fine Arts, writing contemporary exhibition reviews for Arts Magazine, and becoming renowned for his lectures at the 92nd Street Y and the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Long after he was an established art historian, he would now and then join artist friends for drawing sessions with a live model.8 Steinberg brought his artist’s eye to the study of art history. To understand a painted composition, sculpted figure, or building, to follow the creator’s thought, he drew it, in whole and in part, over and again. He respected every inch of a work as the product of an artist’s decision. Nothing, even if unsuccessful, was accidental or casual. Thus too the alterations made to great works of art by copyists—­in this volume, sculpted and

Drawing, writing, dancing painted and sculpted figures—­all this built the foundation for Steinberg’s art history. We see it in the indefatigable conjunction of form and content. Nearly everything Steinberg wrote includes passages of old-­fashioned formal analysis.“The very distinction of form and symbol, insofar as it suggests different things, appears as an imposition, a projection from habits of language.”11 Looking long and hard, reaching into his verbal storehouse, he describes what is seen—­and drawn and danced. But in Steinberg’s work, such description becomes the basis for interpretative erudition. However learned his footnotes or discussions of difficult theological and critical issues, these textual reinforcements always followed visual analysis. He went to the museum before he went to the library. The primacy of the visual is a credo of Steinberg’s thinking about art. He titled the series of six Norton Lectures he delivered at Harvard in 1995–­96 “The Mute Image and the Meddling Text,” pleading against what he elsewhere called the “tyranny of the written word.” His writings are punctuated with such statements as “let thinking take off from what comes in at the eye.” Or “the primary problem is simply our educated reluctance to take seeing seriously; for it is easier to read and rely on one’s reading than to keep vision alerted and trust appearances. Reading discursive prose we feel confident that the vehicles of signification are guaranteed, that

pr efac e a n d ac k n ow led gme nts meaning is promoted . . . by dint of words. . . . In parsing a painting one stoops to inferior orders of certainty, and it is understandable that folks who seek surety while looking at art reach for collateral reading.”12 Finally, at the end of The Sexuality of Christ in Renaissance Art and in Modern Oblivion, he explains one of the reasons why he risked hypothetical interpretations: “to remind the literate among us that there are moments, even in a wordy culture like ours, when images start from no preformed program to become primary texts. Treated as illustrations of what is already scripted, they withhold their secrets.”

Peppering the critical objections to Steinberg’s art history is the accusation of overinterpretation, of claiming more than the artist could have intended. Let Steinberg again speak for himself: “A word needs to be said about the limits and license of interpretation. I am aware of the position that frowns on excessively free speculation at the expense of the masters. But there are, after all, two ways to inflict injustice on a great work of art: by over-­ interpreting it, or by under-­estimating its meaning. If unverifiable interpretations are rightly regarded as dangerous, there is as much danger of misrepresentation in restrictive assertions that feel safe only because they say little. . . . [T]he probity of resisting interpretation is not the virtue to which I aspired. Michelangelo’s idiom is so highly charged and so impregnated with thought that nothing would seem to me more foolhardy than to project upon his symbolic structures a personal preference for simplicity.”13

Notes to the Texts The volume begins with the 1970 essay “The Metaphors of Love and Birth in Michelangelo’s Pietàs,” which ranges from the early Roman Pietà to the late, unfinished Rondanini marble.14 The rest of the essays and lectures follow Michelangelo’s chronology of creation. At the end are three other pieces on Michelangelo: a serious book review, a lighthearted look at Michelangelo and the medical profession, and, finally, the shortest work Steinberg ever published.

The texts incorporate notes and revisions Steinberg made in the years subsequent to each publication. In the case of lectures, I have added endnotes from material in his files. A word about these previously unpublished lectures, of which there are two in this volume. From the early 1950s on, Steinberg was a sought-­after lecturer in museums and institutions here and abroad. He used the occasion of a lecture to work out and test new ideas, in the expectation of eventually publishing them. Sometimes he did manage to publish; but more often, his speaking schedule as well as teaching obligations kept important lecture material from reaching the printed page. Steinberg poured as much effort into lectures as he did into published books and essays, though such effort took time away from writing. But he felt a sense of responsibility to his listeners, a conviction that they deserved his very best. Even when a lecture was repeated over the years, he revised it for each venue, updating and improving it. Moreover, he treated the spoken word differently from the written: “I try to write the lecture not as publishable prose, but as speech to a living audience. It’s written the way a playwright might write dialogue, to sound spontaneous.”15 Small wonder that he usually played to packed houses. Lecture texts originally took the form of typed notes on small cards, with much ad-­ libbed. But around 1980, with his reputation as a lecturer secure, he began to write out his lectures in full, every word, every impromptu aside, with notations for emphasis and pace—­all so as not to disappoint the audience’s expectations, no less than to avoid the clichés born of improvisation.16 It is these lectures that he authorized me to include in the present series. The literature cited or discussed by Steinberg reflects what was relevant to him at the time of publication. If his postpublication notes contained comments on or references to later literature, they have been included. The attentive reader will observe that some literature which Steinberg must have known goes unmentioned. These omissions were intentional, for they often involved text-­based interpretations completely at odds with his image-­based principles. No point, he felt, in

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arguing apples and oranges. He would dismiss such literature in the spirit of Dante, guarda e passa.

Acknowledgments Ever since Steinberg published “Acknowledgments for a Book Not Yet Begun” (1980)—­“a mischievous satire” to divert those who have been “struck by a certain self-­ addressed puffery amidst the ostentation of thanks”—­ I’ve been aware of how easily the form can slip into inadvertent parody, though the acknowledgments he wrote for his own books raise the prefatory convention to a literary level. No matter the challenge, these volumes would not have seen print without the pragmatic and affective support of those who follow. Steinberg’s dear friends Paula and Herbert Molner and Kate Ganz cheered me on as I made the transition from working with Leo to working without him. Olivia Powell, while a student at Columbia, was Steinberg’s last research assistant, always ready to lend an investigative hand and a genial presence. Her PhD completed, she then became my own indispensable researcher, whose quick trips to the library kept the production of these volumes on a steady course. Equally essential have been her responsive and intelligent comments on parts of this manuscript. Christine Smith, professor of architectural history at Harvard, and my good friend for decades, answered pesky questions on architectural affairs with patience and expertise. Another old friend, Charlotte Daudon-­ Lacaze in Paris, stepped in to tackle thorny translations in medieval and Renaissance German and French, find an obscure illuminated manuscript, and arrange contacts in French museums. Renaissance man John Cunnally was Leo’s student and assistant at the University of Pennsylvania in the 1980s. A longtime professor at Iowa State University, he came through with difficult Greek and Latin translations, iconographic enlightenment about ancient coins, and a much-­needed citation for the Pseudo-­Aristotle. My meetings and email exchanges with Daniele Di Cola, now studying the foundations

and intellectual context of Steinberg’s art history for his PhD thesis at the Sapienza, University of Rome, have added immeasurably to these volumes. I was fortunate to have the aid of James Whitman Toftness, editorial associate at the press, whom I enlisted to oversee the messy business of securing images and permissions. Mike Brehm’s elegant design gives visual clarity to the essays. Susan Bielstein, executive editor at the press, arrived there in 1996, just as the revised edition of The Sexuality of Christ in Renaissance Art and in Modern Oblivion was going into production. She saw the book to completion with patient skill and soon became Leo’s supportive confidante in the publishing world. It is with pleasure that I put this project in her proficient hands. Others have made key contributions to this endeavor with timely responses to questions or with references, photos, and translations. I list them here in alphabetical order, but with unsequenced gratitude: Beryl Barr-­Sharrar, Jonathan Bober, Robert Dance, Annie Heminway, Leatrice Mendelsohn, Diana Minksy, Richard Neer, John O’Malley, SJ, Alexander Perrig, the late David Rosand, and Dale Tucker. My largest debt is to Prudence Crowther, a staunch and devoted friend to Leo in his last decade. She has been a constant companion in this publication venture, offering both encouragement and wise editorial feedback. But my debt to her began at Leo’s death. The job of closing his apartment was a melancholy one. His presence, and his absence, abided in every pile of papers, every book, in his scattered jars of pencil stubs and the dust layers on long-­abandoned projects. For fifteen months, Prudence worked closely with me in the excavation of a man’s life, helping to sort, organize, or recycle thousands of documents and sustaining me with sound advice, welcome humor, and shared emotions. It would have been an impossibly lonely job without her. Sheila Schwartz New Yor k , 2018

I n trodu c t i on Richard Neer

A

dangerous model to follow.” That is how Sir Ernst Gombrich described Leo Steinberg to readers of the New York Review of Books in 1977.1 The dismissal illustrates the polarization of both the art world and the academy in the wake of the sixties. It is striking to go back to the first, 1976 issue of the journal October—­ which would quickly become a standard-­bearer for avant-­gardist theory—­and to read, in its manifesto, a declaration of war against the “philistinism” of that same NYRB for effectively excluding contemporary art, film, and performance from its pages.2 Steinberg himself published in October, and like the latter quickly went from the margins to the center of the discipline. By 1982, he was delivering the prestigious Mellon Lectures at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, DC—­ the very series in which Gombrich had cemented his own reputation with Art and Illusion some twenty-­five years previously.3 By 1984 he was writing for the NYRB himself (the essay is reprinted in the present volume), and in 1986 he won a MacArthur fellowship. With the benefit of hindsight, it is clear that he was one of the most important and influential art historians of the last fifty years. Professionally, however, Steinberg was always a bit of an outsider; although he occupied a distinguished chair at the University of Pennsylvania, he did not establish a lineage of students or build himself an institutional base by founding a journal or leading a research center. Nomadic between the academy and the art world, he affected a prose style that seemed designed to flout scholarly norms and published in what can seem a willfully scattershot way (those Mellon Lectures, for instance, never appeared in print).4 In an era of specialization,

he was as much at home in the Renaissance as in the twentieth century, publishing book-­length studies of Michelangelo and Leonardo alongside seminal discussions of Rodin, Rauschenberg, Picasso, and others.5 All of which was, in retrospect, quite pointed—­a rebuke of sorts to a discipline that revered him but to which he never fully subscribed. Yet Gombrich had a point: Steinberg was dangerous. What made him so was his approach to evidence. Gombrich emerged from a German tradition of art history grounded in philology. The characteristic move of this school was to decode Renaissance paintings as quasi-­allegorical statements of philosophical theses by reading their iconography on the basis of handbooks of emblems. Primary evidence for any such reading was not to be found in the picture itself, or even in groups of pictures, but in the emblem book. This approach was well suited to the academy, as it put a premium on erudition and established clear canons of evidence and evaluation. The trouble was that it gave the verbal priority over the visual, the book over the work of art, and was therefore intrinsically reductive. Still, under the aegis of Gombrich, Erwin Panofsky, and other doyens, this “iconology” dominated anglophone art history throughout the postwar era and into the present day.6 Steinberg was plenty erudite, but his formation was in art schools and museums, not in libraries. For him, emblem books and the like were at best circumstantial evidence, at worst distractions, leading the professoriate to impute their own philosophical ambitions and book learning to artists who operated by what he famously called “other criteria.” The cardinal feature of his mode of argument was to find words for pictures

in troduc tion [xii]

not by reference primarily to verbal cipher keys, but by comparison with other pictures. This tendency was at its most provocative in his book The Sexuality of Christ in Renaissance Art and in Modern Oblivion, first published in 1983. Steinberg documented an iconographic tradition whereby the Virgin Mary and others point at, fondle, or otherwise draw attention to the genitalia of the baby Jesus. There were few ready textual or theological sources for this tradition—­it was purely visual—­yet Steinberg documented its existence beyond dispute. He argued that the iconography represented an ongoing reflection by painters on the miracle of Incarnation, such that the emphasis on genitalia was a way to convey visually the miracle of the Word made flesh. Textual evidence here was important but always secondary, and one may observe that Steinberg’s thesis (about the visual representation of the Word made flesh) recapitulated his method (which took seriously the imbrication of discursive content with the materiality of the picture). Naturally, the book sparked a firestorm of controversy, not just for the provocative nature of the argument but for the challenge it offered to the research protocols of the discipline (Steinberg responded in the second edition that appeared in 1996 under the imprimatur of the University of Chicago Press).7 If painting can be a form of nondiscursive thought and can produce its own, independent reflections on divinity and embodiment, then a philological art history can seem redundant or worse. Steinberg did not, however, sequester art in its own little domain of disinterest or formal autonomy. On the contrary, he stressed a constitutive relation to beholders. Of Picasso’s Les Demoiselles d’Avignon, for instance, he declared, “Without the mutual dependency of aroused viewer and pictorial structure there is no picture.”8 Taken literally, this means that Picasso’s masterpiece is not a physical object at all, but a relation of viewer and structure, a “mutual dependency.” So far from making him a formalist, then, Steinberg’s emphasis on perceptual proof led him to dissolve “the object” into a complex network that included both the artist’s intentions and the beholder’s response. Encounters with Robert Rausch­ enberg in the 1950s had prompted this insight: “I sud-

denly understood that the fruit of an artist’s work need not be an object. It could be an action, something once done, but so unforgettably done, that it’s never done with.”9 This thought became a truism for art critics of the 1960s and beyond.10 Its application to historical scholarship, on the other hand, is not straightforward—­ and it is here that, increasingly, Steinberg concentrated his energies. If artworks are not reducible to physical objects, then what do art historians study? Steinberg’s best writings attend, more or less explicitly, to criteria. This term does not refer solely to normative standards of evaluation, although that is part of it. It can also refer to the deeper patterns of agreement and disagreement by which we come to apply or withhold concepts like “artwork,”  “intention,” and “object” in the first place. As the philosopher Stanley Cavell once put it, “we do not first know the object to which, by means of criteria, we assign a value; on the contrary, criteria are the means by which we learn what our concepts are, and hence ‘what kind of object anything is.’”11 Steinberg, as usual, took a large view. In his first book of essays, aptly titled Other Criteria: Confrontations with Twentieth-­Century Art (1972), he argued that the predicament of twentieth-­century art was, precisely, a perpetual openness, an “otherness,” to criteria in every sense: it is not settled in advance what is or is not (good) art. Criticism, in this situation, amounts to a sounding or testing of attunement in criteria with both the work and the reader amid an ongoing “shakeup which contaminates all purified categories.”12 Historical scholarship, on the other hand, demands a second-­order reflection on these same relations, these same shakeups. Along with criteria of evaluation, and criteria of concepts, a third notion of criterion imposes itself: that of evidence. What counts as proof in the historical study of art? What secures an account of a Cinquecento sculpture under these conditions? Steinberg’s art-­historical writings explore, and offer, “other criteria” in this sense: ones that are not given in advance but that, like the writings themselves, seem always in need of discovery. The present volume collects Steinberg’s scattered writings on the sculpture of Michelangelo. Their subject

in t roduction matter ranges from the great Pietà in St. Peter’s basilica to doubtful pieces like the so-­called Fifth Avenue Cupid in New York. Arguably, however, a single idea animates them all, encapsulated in a phrase that recurs several times in these pages: “In Michelangelo’s hands, anatomy became theology.”13 Michelangelo, that is, extrapolated from the body, from the vitality of flesh, to godhead: he understood divinity through, by means of, the carnal. This thought upends the Christian doctrine of Incarnation, whereby the immaterial and transcendent deity takes on a body in the miracle of Christ’s birth (the exact nature of the relation being the stuff of theological debate down the ages). It also upends the traditional hierarchy of art-­historical interpretation, which would see the Renaissance artist as “a sort of illustrator of foregone poetics.”14 The resulting essays are of a piece with Steinberg’s work on the sexuality of Christ, but drill down into the oeuvre of a single master instead of surveying a broad epoch. Again and again, we see the sculptor “thinking theologically within his own idiom.”15 Steinberg’s Michelangelo typically proceeds by “adaptive borrowing,” creatively reusing older motifs and symbols to produce a new “bodied theology” all his own.16 Even a stock pose “may have various meanings, more than one at a time—­or none, depending on context,” and the task of the historical critic is to delineate that context and tease out those meanings, if any.17 In two essays on the Medici Madonna (chs. 3 and 4), for instance, Mary’s crossed legs emphasize her perpetual virginity while giving prominence to the fruit of her womb; Christ twists in such a way as simultaneously to nurse and to adopt the pose of a bridegroom, revealing his dual nature. Here it is the interaction, the mutual inflection, of motifs that matters: their significance is relational, not inherent. In like fashion, a programmatic piece on the Pietà in Rome (ch. 2) analyzes the work into three components: “affect,” “theological symbolism,” and “the dictates of structure.”18 To each there corresponds a separate branch of art-­historical inquiry: psychology, iconology, and formalism. Michelangelo’s specific achievement was to anneal the three in an act of  “sheer power” that entailed willful distortions of anatomy and proportion.19 For example, Steinberg

notices that the dead Christ has the toned muscles and pumped-­up veins of a living body; he identifies this mysterious vitality with “the mystery of Christ’s two natures” and declares it “the true subject” of the work.20 At the heart of this collection, however, stand two essays devoted to the late Pietà that Michelangelo carved for his own tomb but mutilated before completion.21 Both exhibit Steinberg’s characteristic moves. As usual, he frames his research questions in terms of visual evidence: Why was Christ’s leg originally slung over the Virgin Mary’s thigh, and why did Michelangelo later hack it away? As usual, he seeks answers in the visual as well. First, in one of his most characteristic, provocative, and ingenious moves, Steinberg identifies the most salient elements of the work by comparing the original to copies made of it by a wide range of artists down the years. We are quite used to scholars employing contemporary verbal accounts of a picture or a statue to guide their readings, but Steinberg often put more faith in the visual responses of fellow artists. Like many brilliant ideas, this one seems obvious in retrospect, but its radicalism should not be underestimated: it opens art history to a completely different sort of argument and demands a completely different kind of erudition, one that is visual rather than literary. Second, he observes that the original pose of the leg was a stock motif with nuptial or even erotic overtones; thus, by means of pose, Michelangelo represented the dead Christ as the bridegroom of his mother, Mary. Steinberg then provides a comprehensive account of the sculpture in terms of the verbal and visual tradition of the marriage to Christ in medieval theology and argues that Michelangelo’s decision to alter the work was most likely motivated by discomfort with this specific, highly charged feature. The result, although dated somewhat by its Freudian terminology, is still more germane to the actual work of art—­more relevant and more convincing—­than many a thickly documented cultural history. Yes, it’s a dangerous model to follow, but only because it takes seriously the intractability of visual art, its resistance to verbal reduction of the sort that Gombrich practiced. Maybe it’s art itself,

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and the very idea of a nondiscursive rationality, that is dangerous—­at any rate, to art history as an academic discipline. Steinberg himself was perfectly alive to this danger and took it seriously. “Shrinking Michelangelo” (ch. 7), his one review for the NYRB, sees him panning a monograph that found all of Michelangelo’s works to be aftershocks of Oedipal fantasy. Steinberg dismisses the book as an unwitting parody of psychoanalytic theory, but his animus seems overdetermined: in fact, the book was also an unwitting parody of his own approach. Reading Michelangelo’s Taddei Tondo and The Expulsion of Adam and Eve, for instance, the author had in each case identified a stock motif out of antique sculpture, assigned that motif a symbolic significance, and then taken it as a key to the work as a whole—­rather as Steinberg himself had done time and again in his own essays. Steinberg’s response, therefore, is at least partly a way to distance himself from such misapplications of his method and, by extension, from the charges that Gombrich had leveled in the same journal a few years previously. To that end, he criticizes the book on both factual and theoretical grounds. It replaced the complex play of citation and adaptation in Michelangelo’s sculpture (and Steinberg’s readings thereof ) with a crude symbology, which exactly missed the imbrication of motif and context that Steinberg stressed. What really draws his ire, however, is the implication that Michelangelo’s works were failures on their own terms: defenses against unwelcome fantasies, they none-

theless revealed, indeed were the prime evidence for, those same fantasies. For Steinberg, as we have seen, perceived infelicities, like the veins of the dead Christ, need to be taken seriously when it comes to such “carefully pondered symbolic structures” (the pun on “ponder,” suggesting both thought and weight, is typical).22 Like vulgar iconology, vulgar Freudianism failed to take art seriously, and so reduced it to the reflex of a prior discourse, be it philosophy or fantasy. These essays remain challenging even as the world in which they were written has receded into the past. Contemporary art is no longer excluded from the academy; on the contrary, the new “philistinism” may be the consignment of historical art to the dustbin as museums and universities chase wealthy donors at Basel, Miami, or Kassel.23 Yet Steinberg is no less urgent in this predicament than he was forty years ago: his acknowledgment that our criteria are always unsettled, always “other,” obviates easy distinctions between historical and contemporary and suggests that he, like Michelangelo, is both permanently contemporary and permanently alien. He recurs continually to the idea that the imbrication of multiple criteria in art-­historical scholarship is not an impediment to, but a condition of, intelligibility. Yet the special brilliance of these essays is to show that this problem was Michelangelo’s as well. Is there an academic or curatorial analogue to Michelangelo’s “bodied theology,” an approach to historical works of art that acknowledges the mutual dependency of, say, a Pietà and its multiple beholders? If so, it is to be found in these pages.

One

The Metaphors of Love and Birth in Michelangelo’s Pietàs

The Roman Pietà

I

n March 1549, the Florentine church of Santo Spirito installed a life-­size marble copy of Michelangelo’s first masterwork, the long-­revered Roman Pietà (figs. 1.1, 1.9). The copy had been executed by an artist of modest talent, Nanni di Baccio Bigio, but it was neither the mediocrity of the work nor its inaccuracy that aroused the indignation of a contemporary Florentine. His unsigned letter begins by denouncing certain “dirty and filthy marble figures” (Bandinelli’s nude Adam and Eve, fig. 2.4), which had just been placed in the cathedral; it proceeds to our copy of the Pietà, unveiled in the same month: “They say that it derives from that inventor of obscenities, Michelangelo Buonarroti, who is concerned only with art, not with piety. All the modern painters and sculptors, pursuing Lutheran whims, now paint and carve nothing for our holy churches but figures that undermine faith and devotion.”1 One’s first impulse is to reject these words as blind bigotry. We know Michelangelo’s Pietà so well, its religious intention seems so self-­evident, and our respect for Michelangelo’s canonic art runs so deep, that we can hardly conceive the set of values by which this of all works could become an affront. But a zealot of the Counter-­Reformation apparently found the impure mind of its inventor confirmed in this work, so that he could bracket it with the offending nudities of Bandinelli. Perhaps he was seeing what no one had been disposed to see before: a smooth marble group which, under cover of a devotional theme, displayed an exceptionally beautiful youth lying naked in the lap of a girl. Something of the pious resistance to Michelangelo’s group may be learned by comparing the original with its

various copies and observing what it is that the copies reject. In the comparison, it becomes more than ever apparent that the limbs of Michelangelo’s Christ are exquisite not in refinement alone but in their relaxation; and that their suppleness suggests living warmth more than the flaccid or rigid joints of the dead. They recall the divine sleeper in Botticelli’s Venus and Mars, painted twelve to fifteen years earlier. In Michelangelo’s group, the Christ’s groping, resistless members yield to their couch as bodies do in deep sleep (figs. 1.2, 1.3).2 It is exactly these qualities in the male figure—­ intimate adaptation and relaxation—­that the copies avoid. The first, completed in 1532, is a marble group commissioned from Lorenzetto for Santa Maria dell’Anima (fig. 1.4). Here the head of the Christ slumps down on the chest and the dropped right hand loses its will. The fainting languor which Michelangelo’s figure shared with Botticelli’s slumbering Mars gives way to the torpor of death.3 Similar changes mark the free copy of the Pietà carved in 1543–­46 by Michelangelo’s one-­ time pupil Montorsoli for a Genoese church (fig. 1.5). And even the two reproductive engravings published in 1547 modify the original. In Salamanca’s print (fig. 1.6), the torso of Christ is propped up, almost upright, Originally published in Studies in Erotic Art, ed. Theodore Bowie and Cornelia V. Christenson (New York, 1970), pp. 231–­335. The section on the Florentine Pietà, here pp. 9–37, was first published in the Art Bulletin, 50 (December 1968), pp. 343–­53, as “Michelangelo’s Florentine Pietà: The Missing Leg.” Steinberg reprinted it in this longer study, with some revisions and additions. See also the correspondence between Steinberg and Athena Tacha Spear published in the Art Bulletin, 51 (December 1969), pp. 410–­13, discussed here, pp. 153–55.

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Figure 1.1. Michelangelo, Roman Pietà, 1498–­99. Rome, St. Peter’s.

iconic, as if to approximate the traditional Man of Sorrows.4 In Bonasone’s more faithful version (fig. 1.7), the dogmatic emphasis is achieved by setting the figures against the instruments of the Passion. The later engraving by Adamo Ghisi enlarges the Virgin’s bosom to that of a mature woman who had nursed a family of children (fig. 1.8). In the 1549 marble copy by Nanni di Baccio Bigio (fig. 1.9), the departures from the original which Nanni permits himself are hardly explained by lack of talent alone. Some of his brutalizations must be deliberate. He

may or may not have responded, as Vasari did, to the bellezza of the original, to its “sweet air and concordance,” to the common intuition that in Michelangelo’s group the very pliancy of Christ’s limbs in adapting to Mary’s conveys, beyond the apparent death, some profounder satisfaction of harmony. His copy, at any rate, emphasizes a cramped angularity, especially in the legs; and in the Virgin’s face he replaces frail, girlish beauty with features afflicted and bloated. These alterations in a copy which purports to reproduce a revered model suggest a rebuke to the original; they correct its erotic appeal.5

Figure 1.2. Michelangelo, Roman

Pietà, 1498–­99, detail.

Figure 1.3. Botticelli, Venus and Mars, 1483. London, National Gallery.

Figure 1.4. Lorenzetto (Lorenzo Lotti),

copy of the Roman Pietà, 1532. Rome, Santa Maria dell’Anima.

Figure 1.5. Giovanni Montorsoli, Pietà, 1543–­46. Genoa, San Matteo.

t h e m etaphors of lov e a n d b irt h in m ic h el a n gelo’s pietàs

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Figure 1.6. (top left) Antonio Salamanca after the Roman Pietà,

1547. Blanton Museum of Art, University of Texas at Austin; The Leo Steinberg Collection, 2002. Figure 1.7. (bottom left) Giulio Bonasone after the Roman Pietà, 1547. New York, Metropolitan Museum of Art; Elisha Whittelsey Collection, Elisha Whittelsey Fund, 1959. Figure 1.8. (top right) Adamo Ghisi after the Roman Pietà,

1566. New York, Metropolitan Museum of Art; Elisha Whittelsey Collection, Elisha Whittelsey Fund, 1958.

If one considers these late “corrections” and, on the other hand, the agonized tragic Pietàs that prevailed in all European art to the end of the fifteenth century, Michelangelo’s Roman Pietà of 1498 stands forth as an interlude of disturbing beauty. And the reproof of its loveliness, implicit in the work of his copyists, is as telling as the outspoken bigotry of the anonymous pamphleteer for whom even Nanni’s modifications had not gone far enough. His letter of 1549 does not tell exactly how the Pietà had offended. We can guess, nevertheless, because his protest accords in tone and content with a more famous blast against Michelangelo, an open letter of 1545, in which the nudity of the saints in the Last Judgment

one Figure 1.9. Nanni di

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Baccio Bigio, copy of the Roman Pietà, 1549. Florence, Santo Spirito.

was denounced as fit for a brothel wall. That earlier attack had been launched by Aretino, and it was this same subtle publicist who in a letter of 1537 put into writing what must have been a familiar charge against the Pietà—­that the Virgin was too young for the Son.6 Needless to say, the word “young” is too simple for Michelangelo’s image. What the sculptor has done is to place the head of a delicate girl upon the frame of an Earth Mother, comparable to those looming Etruscan tomb figures, of which one, the famous “Mater Matuta,” seated on a sphinx throne, had already served Donatello as the type of the Virgin.7 These large limestone figures, with underscaled detachable

heads, are cineraria, hollow inside to hold the ashes of the deceased. Thus the enthroned mother figure is herself a tomb, though she holds a swaddled child in her lap. The child then, born of its tomb, is born anew. And to the extent that the Etruscan figure, familiar to Donatello, is allowable as one of Michelangelo’s sources, his Christ also (designed for a tomb) becomes the “firstborn from the dead.” The ambivalence of the Madonna’s scale helped solve an old problem. In traditional Pietà groups, it had always been difficult to maintain the full-­grown male body on the slighter scaffolding of the woman. Michelangelo, by several imaginative adjustments af-

t h e m etaphors of lov e a n d b irt h in m ic h el a n gelo’s pietàs fecting both figures, discovers them in a single cone. The Christ figure’s apparent length is checked by being flexed both at groin and waist, and again by its double curvature, not only dipping between the Virgin’s thighs but wound in a crescent about her (fig. 1.2). And the body is actually reduced in proportion, evoking those Trecento Pietàs which gave the dead Christ the symbolic size of a child (see p. 77). But, for all this, he is still a grown man mysteriously banked on the young woman’s lap. To enable this lap to contain his extended length, the sculptor keeps expanding the Virgin’s body. The augmentation begins at her head, a small head enveloped in many layers of drapery. And this superfluity of cloth, rather than the head itself, scales the next phase. Turbulent draperies mask a continuous escalation of breast, shoulders, and waist; they are massed about knees and legs that seem measureless.8 The result is that very solution to the problem of coordination which had baffled previous attempts. The solution is found in the anatomic anomaly of continually shifting proportions. But this solution—­the conjunction of maiden features and pylon limbs fronting a cavernous lap—­is only as anomalous as the paradox of virgin motherhood.9 Such observations are necessarily modern. Earlier critics lacked the theoretical presuppositions that would have allowed them to accuse prestigious works of the Renaissance of deliberate inconsistencies, such as unstable scale. They could only point to this or that portion as either too delicate or too gross. The “shoulders of a washerwoman,” which the great eighteenth-­century critic Francesco Milizia descried on Michelangelo’s Virgin, seemed to him a mere lapse of judgment, an offense to eighteenth-­century standards of breeding and elegance. The sixteenth-­century observer, if inclined to be critical, would direct his objections to the impropriety of the Madonna’s head: too young for her role in the Pietà.10 Clearly, whatever suspicions or fantasies Michelangelo’s image may have aroused, it was only in this particular that his critics could show actual error: the grieving Madonna, a matron forty-­seven years

old, had been reduced to a nubile girl lamenting a youth. Hence it was on this sole point that articulate criticism could focus. And the copies that invest the Virgin with a respectable age confirm the currency of the objection. Our anonymous bigot of 1549 is not altogether alone. And this may explain why both editions of Vasari’s Michelangelo Life (1550 and 1568) strike back defensively and seek to meet the religious reproach with superior theology: “Though some fools say that he has made the Virgin too young,” writes Vasari, “they ought to know that spotless Virgins keep their youth for a long time, while people afflicted like Christ do the reverse.”11 That this apology was Michelangelo’s own, and that the matter disturbed him, emerges from the corresponding passage in Condivi’s Michelangelo Life, written in 1553 under the master’s direction. Citing the Virgin’s excessive youth, Condivi lets the master explain it in a prolix and unusually argumentative speech. “Are you not aware,” Michelangelo begins, “that chaste women maintain themselves much more fresh than the unchaste? How much more so a virgin in whom there had never arisen the least lascivious desire that might have affected her body?” “A consideration worthy of any theologian,” says Condivi at last, closing the subject. It matters little whether Michelangelo invented or adopted the argument. Its moralized physiology served him as a defensive screen, as a rare point of doctrine to justify the Madonna’s bridal radiance in mourning her son. The simple truth is proclaimed in an anonymous poem with which Vasari ends his eulogy of the Pietà. Its closing words, addressed to the marble Virgin of Nanni’s Florentine copy, invoke “thy spouse, son and father, / Thou his only spouse, daughter and mother.”12 There is nothing new or heretical in these lines. The Virgin had been extolled as the Bride of Christ since the twelfth century. It was then that the Beloved of the biblical Song of Songs, traditionally interpreted as Ecclesia, the Church of Christ, came to be identified with the Virgin. But the medieval Virgin as Bride of Christ was an allegory or mystic ap-

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Figure 1.11. Ercole Roberti, Pietà, c. 1482. Liverpool, Walker Art

Gallery.

Figure 1.10. German, Coburger Pietà, c. 1360–­70. Coburg,

Kunstsammlungen der Veste Coburg.

proximation, a poetic equation that involved Mary and Church as interchangeable concepts. The Mary who was both mother and bride was, so to speak, projected into a preexistent figure of speech. And in the representational arts, even this figure was visualized only in contexts that were at the furthest remove from the life of the flesh—­in scenes of the Virgin’s death, or at her coronation in heaven; in allegorical triumphs of the Virgin as Church, or in theological commentaries on Canticles.13 But in Michelangelo’s imagery the old symbolic equations are so concretely embodied that even the tragic presentment of the Pietà (figs. 1.10, 1.11) is sensualized. Michelangelo’s critics had every right to protest, for the artist had imported an unfamiliar, perhaps disturbing component. His Pietà not only rendered the mother youthful enough to be mourning a lover; it compounded her Christian grief with the pagan passion of an Aphrodite lamenting the dy-

Figure 1.12. Pompeian painting engraved by Giovanni Paolo

Lasinio, Venus and Adonis, 1827.

ing Adonis laid on her lap (fig. 1.12).14 Michelangelo’s treatment of the Pietà gave the Christian theme for the first time a kind of formal and psychic equivalence to the Venus lament.15 It established, for the whole

t h e m etaphors of lov e a n d b irt h in m ic h el a n gelo’s pietàs

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Figure 1.13. Annibale Carracci, Pietà, 1599–­1600. Naples, Museo Nazionale di Capodimonte. (See note 14.)

sixteenth century, the interchangeability of the two themes—­not by diluting the Christian content of the Pietà, but by grasping its mystic sense.16 Michelangelo’s explanation that it was chastity which preserved the Virgin’s bloom is a rationalization, designed to absolve or explain away this specific feature without venting its secret. It is significant that, even as he offers his plea to his literary defenders, a new

Pietà is taking shape under his hands, but the Madonna’s youth is not again featured.

The Florentine Pietà The second marble Pietà is the unfinished, over-­life-­size, four-­figure group in the Cathedral of Florence (fig. 1.14). It was begun about 1547, when the artist was seventy-­

Figure 1.14. Michelangelo, Florentine Pietà, c. 1547–­55. Florence, Duomo.

t h e m etaphors of lov e a n d b irt h in m ic h el a n gelo’s pietàs

eration: Michelangelo did not conceive a Christ with amputations. He planned a whole, and whatever that whole was meant to embody, he lived with and worked on for eight or nine years. Any thought that Michelangelo entertained for nearly a decade is worth thinking again. Hence we may well ask how the missing member completes Michelangelo’s group. There is only one action possible for the missing leg. The left groin still shows a slot or socket for its insertion, presumably for a replacement to be cut from a separate block. And the Virgin’s thigh shows a depression where the leg would have rested, like a wake left behind by its passage. It is indeed in this only possible pose that the leg appears in a number of painted and engraved reconstructions of the late sixteenth century (figs. 1.15, 1.16).19

Figure 1.15. Cherubino Alberti after the Florentine Pietà, reversed, c. 1580. Los Angeles County Museum of Art; Mary Stansbury Ruiz Bequest.

two, and was worked on, mostly at night, for eight or nine years. There was no commission for it; it was done, we are told, “as a pastime” and “because carving kept him in good health.”17 We are further told by Vasari that Michelangelo had destined the work for his own tomb, and that the summit figure of the hooded male penitent was his ideal self-­portrait. Finally, Vasari reports that, after almost a decade of labor, Michelangelo destroyed the group and then let a pupil reassemble the pieces. In the reconstructed group as we have it, the Christ figure is deprived of one leg. The missing limb is rarely missed by observers, so well does the figure in its truncated state seem to work. Some have regarded the lack of the other leg as inevitable; others have welcomed its loss as an artistic gain.18 It is to those who take this position, or who for any reason whatever deplore the attempt to put back what Michelangelo had removed, that I offer this consid-

Figure 1.16. Lorenzo Sabbatini, Deposition, after the Florentine

Pietà, before 1576. Rome, St. Peter’s, sacristy.

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Figure 1.17. Jacques de Gheyn II, Crossbowman Assisted by

a Milkmaid, c. 1600–­1610, detail. Cambridge, MA, Harvard

University Art Museums/Fogg Museum; Gift of Meta and Paul J. Sachs, 1953.86.

The left leg of Christ is slung over the Virgin’s thigh. It forms a connection which in subsequent sixteenth-­and seventeenth-­century art becomes a common and unmistakable symbol of sexual union. The word “symbol” is crucial. Looking at a seven­ teenth-­century genre scene of lovers linked in this pose, one might mistake it for something “taken from nature.” But, in fact, the scheme of two figures of opposite sex seated side by side, with the leg of one bridging the thigh (or both thighs) of the other, is a received convention. It is as a symbolic form that artists such as Jacques de Gheyn and Govaert Flinck naturalize it into their style (figs. 1.17, 1.18). During the seventeenth century, this token gesture was finally vulgarized. By the mid-­1600s, it had come to seem no less appropriate to bourgeois than to divine lovers. Then, only, does one see it performed by common soldiers or by unbuttoned wenches besieging the Prodigal Son (fig. 1.19).20 The transition is best observed in late sixteenth-­century Northern works, where the motif is domesticated by way of allegory and moralization (fig. 1.20).21 But in the decades that more closely concern us, one discovers—­tracing the motif backward in time—­ that the slung leg (its sex interchangeable and in Italy

Figure 1.18. Govaert Flinck, Lovers. Paris, Musée du Louvre, Cabinet des Dessins.

Figure 1.19. Theodor van Thulden, Prodigal Son in a Brothel. Amsterdam, Rijksmuseum, Rijksprentenkabinet.

t h e m etaphors of lov e a n d b irt h in m ic h el a n gelo’s pietàs

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Figure 1.20. Pieter Pourbus, Allegory of True Love, c. 1547. London, Wallace Collection.

usually assigned to the woman) becomes progressively less profane, almost solemn in context. In the quarter century that immediately follows Michelangelo’s abandonment of the Pietà—­that is, before 1580—­the slung leg occurs only in allegories or in biblical and mythological scenes. By 1550 the motif is assimilated to scenes of Lot and his daughters—­perhaps because the sexual act represented is at the opposite pole from trivial or private lust, being rather a desperate if misguided attempt to save the human race from extinction (fig. 1.21). In a few rare instances, the slung-­leg motif occurs in lesbian situations: once in a Fontainebleau School engraving, Women Bathing (fig. 1.22)—­a work unique in exhibiting the motif without mythological pretext; and more significantly in a drawing after Giulio Campi in which Jupiter, in Diana’s person, seduces Callisto (fig. 1.23). Here, in the Callisto context, the slung leg could be especially useful; in a scene of apparently sterile erotic play between two seeming women, it intervened as the sign of a fecund moment.22

Figure 1.21. Heinrich Aldegrever, Lot and His Daughters, 1555. Amsterdam, Rijksmuseum, Rijksprentenkabinet.

t h e m etaphors of lov e a n d b irt h in m ic h el a n gelo’s pietàs

The slung leg in sixteenth-­century art is invariably a token of marital or sexual union, of sexual aggression or compliance. As a conventional sign, it is so unambiguous and legible that when a given story calls for the awkward depiction of a nymph loved by a horse (as happens in the rare myth of Philyra and Saturn in equine disguise), it is the slung leg that carries the message (fig. 1.24). Most relevant to this inquiry is the incidence of the Figure 1.22. (opposite top) Jean Mignon after Luca Penni, Women Bathing, c. 1550–­55. Cambridge, MA, Harvard Art Museums/Fogg

Museum; Anonymous Fund for the Acquisition of Prints Older than 150 Years, M23600. Figure 1.23. (opposite bottom) Drawing after Giulio Campi’s fresco of Jupiter and Callisto in the Palazzo Aldegatti, Mantua, 1545–­50. Art market. Figure 1.24. (top) Giulio Bonasone after Giulio Romano, Saturn

and Philyra. New York, Metropolitan Museum of Art; Elisha Whittelsey Collection, Elisha Whittelsey Fund, 1959.

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motif from its first emergence before 1520 to about 1547, when Michelangelo’s Pietà was begun. During this quarter century the motif is extremely rare, confined to a few prints, drawings, and small cabinet pictures; and not only is it reserved for divine and heroic lovers but it tends to remain within a context of marriage. The currency of the motif is established in the late 1520s and 1530s by engravings after Perino del Vaga and others of Raphael’s circle, the subjects being the loves and nuptials of divine couples: Venus and Adonis, Bacchus and Ariadne, Neptune (as suitor) and Thetis (figs. 1.25, 1.26). And finally, as the earliest significant occurrence of the motif in its canonic form, it appears in the Isaac and Rebecca fresco in Raphael’s Vatican Logge (fig. 1.27): “Abimelech, King of the Philistines, looked out at a window and behold, Isaac was sporting with Rebecca, his wife” (Gen. 26:8). We need hardly remind ourselves that the Old Testament scenes in “Raphael’s Bible” refer by anticipation to Christ. So, too, Isaac’s

Figure 1.25. Giulio Bonasone, Venus and Adonis, from The Loves of the Gods. New York, Metropolitan Museum of Art;

Figure 1.26. Jacopo Caraglio after Perino del Vaga, Neptune and Thetis (reverse copy), from The Loves of the Gods. London, British

Rogers Fund, 1962.

Museum.

Figure 1.27. Raphael School, Isaac and Rebecca Spied on by Abimelech. Vatican Logge.

t h e m etaphors of lov e a n d b irt h in m ic h el a n gelo’s pietàs

Figure 1.28. Bronze krater from

Derveni, c. 320 BC. Thessaloniki, Archaeological Museum.

“sport with Rebecca” is a link in the chain of Christ’s ancestry which may explain such of the fresco’s features as the fountain, the benediction of the great sun, and the brightness at the young patriarch’s loins. Variant forms of the motif appear shortly before 1520. Not all can be traced to Rome, nor to a single milieu. And this emergence of a purely symbolic gesture over a period of some ten years in various artistic circles suggests that one or several antique models had come to be known—­by hearsay perhaps to some, by actual acquaintance to Raphael and his school. The presumed model, however, turns out to be strangely elusive. It is not found in antique symplegmata, the ancient name for groups of figures interlocked in combat or love. It does not appear

among the countless vase and wall paintings of antiquity that depict sexual relations. They may have ignored it precisely because it was clearly nonfunctional and associated with hieratic use. And this seems borne out by one splendid antique example that came to light in the 1960s when six tombs from the time of Alexander the Great were uncovered at Derveni near Thessaloniki in northern Greece.23 Their most spectacular yield was a resplendent bronze krater for cremated ashes, three feet high, displaying continuous relief decoration of satyrs and maenads dancing. The dance centers upon a ritual action—­the uncommon scene of the marriage of Bacchus and Ariadne (fig. 1.28). The scene is so rare, yet in this representation so precise and perfected, it suggests the possibility that

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Figure 1.29. Hubert Gerhard, Tarquin and Lucrece, 1605–­10. New York, Metropolitan Museum of Art; Edith Perry Chapman Fund, 1950.

we are privy to that mimetic ritual which in antiquity formed part of the secret mysteries of Dionysus.24 The bride is seated and draped, her veil held out in the traditional bridal gesture. She turns toward her divine spouse, a naked god, his leg flung over her thigh. Let me assume that the type of this image had become known in Rome before 1520.25 This would account for the multiple emergence of a purely symbolic action and for the close resemblance of the slung leg in Renaissance works to that of Dionysus on the Derveni krater. The model need have been no more than a small gem or cameo seen and understood by a handful of people. Present evidence indicates that a few Roman artists of the second and third decades of the Cinque­ cento knowingly adopted the slung leg as an antique symbolic form, implying a context of heroic or sacred love, or, more exactly, of divine marriage. The antique derivation alone may have lent the slung-­leg motif a dignity not normally associated with

Figure 1.30. G. M. Le Villain after Luca Cambiaso, Venus

Lamenting the Death of Adonis, 1786–­1808. London, British Museum.

sexual sport. But only Michelangelo could reconceive the pose as a consecration. It is as though, for him, the whole meaning of the myth of Dionysus and Ariadne must be expressible in the language of physical action. Ancient poets may have believed that the mortal Ariadne, killed by the love of the god, was by that gift of death rendered immortal. But their artistic idiom never attempted to conflate love and death in one motion. Now, as Michelangelo meditates on the ancient gesture, death and love coalesce in it and the slung leg unites Mary and the crucified Christ in mystic marriage. At least two sixteenth-­century artists followed Michelangelo in making love and death converge in the slung-­leg motif. One is the Dutch sculptor Hubert Gerhard, who had studied in Florence in the 1580s. In his bronze group, Tarquin and Lucrece (fig. 1.29), the rising leg of the ravisher is both sexual and murderous. The other is Luca Cambiaso in a painting of the 1560s in the Hermitage (engraved by G. M. Le Villain, fig. 1.30),

t h e m etaphors of lov e a n d b irt h in m ic h el a n gelo’s pietàs where a fond Venus and a dying Adonis form a close-­ knit, almost sculptural group. Cambiaso’s Adonis, at once amorous and amort, engages his paramour with his left leg in direct imitation of Michelangelo’s Christ. In Michelangelo’s group the themes of love, death, and communion are even more intimately interfused. There can be no question that he conceived the action of the left leg in perfect awareness of what it meant. The leg does not of course work as a separable appendage; its action is vital within the strangely polymorphous anatomy of the entire Christ figure. For this body from head to toe is not of a uniform age. The full hair and low brow indicate the young man cut off at thirty-­ three, and the arms are sheer vigor. But the loins are senescent; and both legs—­like the right leg even now—­ must have been gaunt, desiccated, and old. To unsex the erotic gesture it was perhaps necessary to assign it to a limb whose flesh was already spent. These internal changes are only one manifestation of the Christ’s two-­natured anatomy. The parts of the body act like parts in a play—­in opposition to one another. The body seems both to rise and to fall; it collapses, yet in an expansive embrace; it is literally zoned and quartered, abnegation and eagerness alternating. This is not a contrapposto evolved from the studied agility of a man’s body, but rather the coherence of many thoughts in one personification.26 One movement only is unequivocal. Neither muscular nor gravitational, it suggests an ineluctable trend, like the drift of a system in space. The entire group seeks one direction; the Christ presses forward, urged on to where his and the Virgin’s body wind about one another. Here, at the focus of interpenetrant union, the sculptor implanted the mounting left leg. Of all possible symbols of marriage, Michelangelo chose that which symbolized its consummation. Even with the clear sign removed, the message was read by at least one observer who acknowledged the mystic eroticism of the Pietà. Tolnay saw bliss and marriage where the ostensible subject allowed only for grief. “With closed eyes and a face transfigured by supernatural bliss,” he wrote, the Virgin “receives him into her arms. . . . St. Joseph of Arimathea unites mother and

son in a kind of ultimate sposalizio. . . . This spiritual marriage is the essence of the concetto.”27 Three things follow from the interpretation of the missing leg of the Christ. First, a closer pattern of symbolic and formal coherence for the entire group. Second, a new way of thinking about Michelangelo’s reasons for destroying the group. Third, the possibility of identifying the slung-­leg motif in other classes of monuments. I shall treat each in turn.

1. Does the marital symbolism of the missing leg enhance the coherence of the whole group?

The Virgin is not alone in being the spouse of Christ. In Christian tradition, Christ as bridegroom is as multipresent as is his body in the Host of the altar. The Church is his bride. The human soul is his bride. The nun who has taken the veil is his bride. So is St. Catherine, whom he espouses with the same words from Canticles—­“Come unto me, my fair love and my spouse”—­which also welcome the soul of the Virgin. And so, in the medieval tradition exemplified by the Biblia pauperum, is Mary Magdalen: “We read in the Song of Solomon, third chapter, that when the bride had found her beloved she said, ‘I have found him whom my soul loveth, and I will again hold him and will not let him go.’ This bride is a type of Mary Magdalen, who, seeing her spouse, that is Christ, would fain have held Him.”28 This introduces the other woman, the Magdalen figure on our left. We do not much like looking at her because, after Michelangelo’s destruction of the unfinished group and its subsequent restoration by Tiberio Calcagni, it was this figure that was most overworked, scaled down, pettified. Nevertheless, in the role he has made her play, as Magdalen and as counterpart of the Virgin, she is all Michelangelo’s. She is embraced. That she is truly embraced, not merely caught in the peripheral sweep of a circuiting rhythm, is confirmed by one small nuance. The drapery fold between the Magdalen’s breasts that flows down her abdomen is not her own garment but the loose end of Christ’s winding sheet. Released from his chest, it

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presses gently against her body. The delegated caress of the shroud confirms the Magdalen as an object of love.29 At this point we touch a vast medieval tradition concerning the erotic association of Christ and Mary Magdalen.30 Thus Rabanus Maurus in the ninth century: “Mary Magdalen suffered as lovers are accustomed to suffer, and mourned inestimably concerning the corporeal absence of her beloved lover.” Passion plays kept the tradition alive. In the Noli me tangere scene of a late fifteenth-­century English play, she exclaims: “O mine heart, where hast thou been. / Come home again and live with me!” And in the anonymous fourteenth-­century Italian Life of St. Mary Magdalen, she cries out: “Oh, most blessed cross. Would that I had been in thy stead, and that my lord had been crucified in my arms, my hands nailed against His . . . so that I had died with him, and thus neither in life nor death ever departed from Him.” An erotic energy derived from these unbiblical fantasies invests Michelangelo’s group. The Magdalen’s approach to Christ’s body betrays a sexual intimacy either uninterrupted or generated by death. But the Magdalen is not simply a paramour. She is here what she is to the whole Patristic tradition—­the sinner in the flesh, the forgiven harlot, repentant. Her pardon is everyman’s hope. “For whereas sin abounded,” says the Golden Legend speaking of her salvation, “Grace overabounded and was more.” It is in her dual role as lover and penitent that she too inhabits the essential conception of the Pietà. She is the counterpart of the Virgin in a single bilateral scheme. “It is she whom he loved more than any other woman in the world, save the Virgin Mary,” says the fourteenth-­century Life. The two Marys are continually paralleled in the sermons. Both stand for the Church—­the sinner turned, and the one without sin, personifications of penitence and immaculacy. Together, bracing and being embraced, they sustain the dead body like the heraldic supporters of an escutcheon. Both are, or were meant to be, folded within the limbs of Christ’s body. Finally, the secret intimacies that connect the two Marys and Christ help to define the unity of the en-

tire group. Critical accounts of the work, overlooking the sensual bonds, have tended to reduce one or two of the figures to subsidiary roles. Even Tolnay assigned no essential part to the Magdalen—­nor to the cowled figure whom he called a “personification of Providence”—­for he saw the “essence of the concetto” in the union of only two figures. Yet an indivisible pathos unites the whole group as its secret intimacies begin to tell. Each Mary’s figure is passed three times by Christ’s body; each is received. But the more closely bound they are to the Savior, the more does the hooded penitent at their back stand alone. Since Michelangelo had planned to erect this image of Christ at his tomb, it is fitting that he should have projected his likeness upon the Joseph of Arimathea who, after the descent from the cross, received Christ in his sepulcher.31 Between this unused tomb of Joseph and Mary’s unopened womb elaborate analogies had been drawn since St. Ambrose.32 And St. Augustine closes his sermon 248, “De Sepultura Domini,” with words that work like a commentary upon Michelangelo’s group: “Joseph [of Arimathea] was not less moved than Mary. If indeed she received the Lord deep in her womb, he received him deep in his heart.” They are at one, therefore, in the communion of grief. But their separation is no less poignant, for the women serve—­in a given visual corollary—­to isolate the hooded mourner who bears Michelangelo’s face. His only contact with Christ’s body is with the arm that embraces the sinner, and his towering solitude contrasts with the communion of lovers under his hands.

2. Is it likely that the outright carnality of the symbolic slung leg helped to motivate the destruction of the Pietà?

Let us hear Michelangelo, as Vasari reports him, speak of this work. Since it was uncommissioned, it was, we are told, done for a pastime, for recreation, and “because the use of the mallet kept him [he was then seventy-­five!] in good health.” As an apology for an intended tomb monument, such remarks seem evasive almost to the point of flippancy. We then learn that

t h e m etaphors of lov e a n d b irt h in m ic h el a n gelo’s pietàs the work was destroyed. And Vasari, because he cannot imagine why, offers three reasons: the marble, he says, was marred by many flaws. (But Michelangelo himself speaks of only one troublesome vein in the stone, and furthermore this is not convincing ground for destroying a work nearly completed.) Second, says Vasari, the marble was hard, making the sparks fly from the chisel. (But though this might be reason for abandoning the work, it hardly explains the added labor of breaking it up; and furthermore, what remains of the stone shows Michelangelo equal to it.) Third and last, says Vasari, “the artist’s standards were so high that he could never be content with what he had done.” (But how should such general discontent explain a unique instance of mutilation? Though the Florentine Pietà is not the poorest of Michelangelo’s works, it is the only one he took the trouble to smash.) Moreover, the idea that an artist’s discontent leads to the destruction, or incompletion, of a work is a topos in sixteenth-­century art writing. Ignorant of Michelangelo’s true motif, Vasari reaches for the nearest cliché.33 Elsewhere in Vasari’s account, the sculptor himself being pressed to explain “why he had ruined such a marvelous work,” he responds with a tangle of incongruous motives: “It was because of the importunity of his servant Urbino, who nagged at him daily that he should finish it; and that among other things a piece of the Virgin’s elbow had broken off, and that even before that he had come to hate it, and he had had many mishaps because of a vein in the stone; so that losing patience he broke it, and would have smashed it completely had not his servant Antonio asked that he give it to him just as it was.” The story ends with Michelangelo consenting to let a young pupil, Tiberio Calcagni, reassemble the group on behalf of a wealthy admirer who promises to pay 200 ducats in gold to the servant Antonio, who now owns the pieces.34 Here again are some patent evasions. Michelangelo says he has come to hate the work to the point of wanting it utterly smashed. He did break away the left arms of Christ and the Virgin, as well as Christ’s right fore-

arm and the right arm of the Magdalen. He then allows the group, including the arm, to be restored—­but not the leg.35 And there is indication that he had broken this leg into fragments. For the inventory of his house taken in 1566 (after the death of Daniele da Volterra, who had taken it over) includes “a marble knee from the Pietà of Michelangelo”—­presumably from this work. A knee only was allowed to survive.36 One other incident points to the leg as the focus of special concern. It is a short anecdote which Vasari tells, at the end of his Michelangelo vita, to illustrate an interesting character trait: One night Vasari was sent by Pope Julius III to Michelangelo’s house for a drawing. He found the master working on the marble Pietà which he broke. Recognizing the knock, Michelangelo rose and took a lantern. When Vasari had explained his errand, he sent Urbino [his servant] for the design and began to speak of other things. Vasari meanwhile cast his eyes upon a leg of the Christ which Michelangelo was working on and was trying to alter, and in order that Vasari might not see it, he let the lantern fall, and being now in the dark, called Urbino to bring a light; in the meantime, stepping out of the room where he had been, he said, “I am so old that death frequently drags at my cloak to take me, and one day I myself will fall like this lantern and so the light of my life will go out.”

A dark story, not the kind that yields solid evidence. It contributes nothing to our purpose if we assume that Michelangelo kept open house in his studio, and that the Pietà was normally left exposed, so that Vasari would have known the concetto from previous visits. On the other hand, if Michelangelo was normally secretive about all or any of his unfinished works, and if, carving the Pietà by night, he normally kept it covered by day, then Vasari’s story gains interest. The question cannot be wholly resolved.37 But it is worth recalling that Michelangelo’s secretiveness was proverbial. Forty years after his death, Van Mander writes in his Schilderboek that Hendrik Golt-

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zius never allowed unfinished works to be seen and that, “in this as in many other things, he resembled the great Michelangelo.”38 In the first (open house) alternative, assuming Michelangelo’s friends to be familiar with the work in hand, the sculptor’s embarrassment on the occasion of Vasari’s nocturnal call would be due to some fresh mishap in the carving, caused perhaps by the emery vein. Such a hypothesis makes it fortuitous that the location of the vein coincides with that of the slung leg (whose eroticism, being merely symbolic, would hardly have caused the sculptor anxiety). A flaw in the marble becomes the sufficient reason for the destruction of the Pietà. Michelangelo would have been moved to destroy his work by a succession of accidents to the stone and the vexation that followed. The destructive act tells us nothing that is not technical about the work, nor about the artist, beyond proving his irascible temper. There is now a new way of posing the problem. The Florentine Pietà employs a direct sexual metaphor on a scale unprecedented in Christian devotional art. Michelangelo’s figurative use of the human figure recalls the poetic idiom of those earlier mystics and preachers who described the ultimate religious experience in figures of physical love. San Bernardino of Siena, for instance, says “sexual ecstasy” when he means “mystic transport,” and there is nothing uncommon in this kind of wording.39 But poets and mystics had the freedom of figurative speech as an ancient charter. It was another matter to claim such poetic license in the concretions of palpable sculpture. Now, with the reformist atmosphere settling on Rome, Michelangelo may have feared that his intentions would be misread by censorious and prurient men who, like the Florentine anonymous of 1549, expected to find his inventions obscene. He may have felt certain more inward resources of confidence failing—­confidence in the transcendent eloquence of the body—­in the possibility of infinitely spiritualizing its anatomic machinery while still respecting its norms. Perhaps it was simply the coarsening of his metaphorical idiom in the work of others that crowded and threatened his confidence. Or, more specifically, that the vulgarization of the slung-­leg motif during the very years of his work on the Pietà rendered

the pose increasingly unacceptable. Such conjectures suggest alternative or additional motives for Michelangelo’s destructive act. They keep open the possibility that he shattered his work, not because he was vexed by a servant’s nagging, and not because part of the Virgin’s elbow had splintered off, but that he destroyed it in despair: that he saw himself pushing the rhetoric of carnal gesture to a point where its metaphorical status passed out of control; that he felt himself crossing the limit of what seemed expressible in his art. His demolition then would be a renunciation, comparable to that which sounds again in the final lines of his sonnet: To paint or carve no longer calms the Soul turned to that love divine Who to embrace us on the cross opens his arms.40

The date of the sonnet falls within the year of the destruction of the Pietà.

3. Does the interpretation of the slung-­leg motif carry over to other classes of monuments?

There can be no doubt that the motif is sexual when it couples adults. The question arises whether we are to recognize the same symbolic charge in images of the Virgin and Child. In the early sixteenth century (in pictures by Raphael, Puligo, Andrea del Sarto, some half dozen Michelangelo drawings, etc.), the motif of the infant’s leg arched over the mother’s thigh is so common as to suggest either that it is wholly innocent or that, being thoroughly understood, it was felt to be more safely assigned to the lively child than to the man. This latter assumption would add another to the many proleptic themes of Renaissance art which show the child anticipating whatever the Christ is destined to do—­embracing some token of his Passion, raising his hand in preachment, benediction, or judgment, prefiguring the sleep of his death, espousing St. Catherine, and so on. In Michelangelo’s early marble Taddei Tondo, as in Andrea del Sarto’s Madonnas of the 1520s, the child’s leg scaling the Virgin’s thigh is presumably innocent; doubt on this score may even meet with resentment. On the other hand, the infant’s pose may have been at first playful, athletic, striding forth, to

t h e m etaphors of lov e a n d b irt h in m ic h el a n gelo’s pietàs

Figure 1.31. (top left) Michelangelo, Taddei Tondo, c. 1504–­6. London, Royal Academy of Arts. Figure 1.32. (top right) Andrea del Sarto, Medici Holy Family, 1529.

Florence, Palazzo Pitti. Figure 1.33. (bottom right) Giulio Romano, Madonna and Child

with St. John, 1522–­24. Baltimore, Walters Art Museum.

become erotic only by gradual adaptation to the slung-­ leg motif (figs. 1.31–­1.34). One’s confidence in the abiding innocence of the motif is shaken on comparing certain works of slightly later date in which the child seems cast in a similar role. Thus, remarkably similar poses are struck by the Christ Child—­long past infancy—­in Cambiaso’s Mystic Marriage of St. Catherine (fig. 1.35), and again in a seventeenth-­century engraving by Schelte à Bolswert after a Parmigianino design (fig. 1.36). Here the “innocence” of the pose can no longer be argued, particularly when it is found, by comparing Primaticcio’s Venus and Cupid (fig. 1.37), that regardless of the boy’s age this bestriding a woman’s thigh is an unmistakable gesture of male appropriation.41 In the Bolswert engraving, the erotic tenor is further emphasized by the riper age of the child: as in the Cambiaso, he is not a babe, but the young Savior embracing with one hand the urn of his Passion while his other hand grasps Mary’s shoulder. This seizing of a shoulder is another ceremonial gesture of possession taking. It demonstrates manus, the dominion over a

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Figure 1.35. Luca Cambiaso, Mystic Marriage of St. Catherine,

1570s. Genoa, Palazzo dell’Opera Pia Causa.

Figure 1.34. J.-B. Barbé after Frans Francken the

Younger, Madonna and Child. Amsterdam, Rijksmuseum, Rijksprentenkabinet.

person—­specifically, in Roman law, the husband’s power over his wife. It places the woman in manu.42 There is a wide frame of reference for these sixteenth-­ century images in which the nuptials of the heavenly spouse are prefigured in the approach of the child. The emotions projected into such pictures may not always have been formal doctrine, but their part in the religious imagination of Mediterranean Europe was vital. A millennial procession of symbolic equations had left thought and feeling caught up in constellations of metaphors—­metaphors in which subtle theological formulas and secret fantasies consorted together. The Old Testament’s Song of Songs, which in the rabbinical exegesis declared God’s love for Israel, became, in the Chris-

Figure 1.36. Schelte à Bolswert after Parmigianino, Madonna

and Child. London, British Museum.

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Figure 1.38. Bride and Groom from the Pseudo-­Jerome, Expositio in cantica canticorum, c. 1150, Paris, Bibliothèque Nationale de France, Figure 1.37. Primaticcio, Venus and Cupid, c. 1533–­36, Paris,

Ms. lat. 1808, fol. 1v, from Valenciennes, Abbaye de Saint-­Amand.

Musée du Louvre.

tian translation, Christ’s love for his Church. “It can be said frankly and safely,” writes St. Gregory the Great, “that when in the mystery of the Incarnation the Father celebrated the wedding of his royal son, he gave him the Holy Church as his companion. The womb of the Virgin Mother was the nuptial couch of this bridegroom.”43 But from the second century onward, Mary herself becomes a type of the Church. Before long the Church is figured in Mary as Mary is in the Church. Christ is the bridegroom of the one as of the other. By the twelfth century, Ecclesia, herself Virgin and Mother and Beloved of Christ, has become in every respect interchangeable with the Virgin. As in the doctrine of Perichoresis, which describes the two natures of Christ, Mary and Church wholly inhere in each other. “Everything that is said of the Church can also be understood as being said of the Virgin herself, the bride and mother of the bridegroom” (Honorius of Autun).44 In the reading of Canticles, and in its pictorial complement, the Beloved embraced by Christ became and remained an ambivalent symbol. In illuminated twelfth-­century Bibles, or in manuscript commentar-

Figure 1.39. Lyons Bible, Madonna and Child, 12th century. Bibliothèque Municipale de Lyon, Ms. 410, fol. 207v.

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Figure 1.41. Michelangelo, Madonna and Child, c. 1503. Paris,

Musée du Louvre, Cabinet des Dessins. Figure 1.40. Abraham van Merlen, Madonna and Child. Blanton

Museum of Art, University of Texas at Austin; The Leo Steinberg Collection, 2002.

ies on Canticles, the initial “O” of the opening “Osculetur me oscula oris sui” may enclose lovers who share even their single halo; but the lady’s identity, whether Virgin or Church, is undefined (fig. 1.38).45 But another type exists which seems to demand a simple Marian interpretation: the bridegroom of Canticles takes form as the newborn Christ—­as in the Lyons Bible (fig. 1.39). Here the historiated initial which opens the “Let him kiss me with the kisses of his mouth” contains a Madonna and Child, the infant coming as bridegroom, as lover, as man, striding toward her, embracing, their cheeks sharing one contour, so that their eyes touch and their coupled lips align as in a kiss folded out.46 There is a tradition here which reaches both forward and backward. An engraving by Abraham van Merlen, a Jesuit illustrator of about 1600, shows the Madonna and Child over the legend—­“ My beloved

is mine, and I am his  .  .  . He shall lie all night betwixt my breasts” (Cant. 2:16 and 1:12; fig. 1.40. Cf. the inscribed arch in fig. 1.34). On the other hand, the Lyons Bible initial, painted by an unknown Byzantinizing illuminator, points back to the Byzantine Madonna of “sweet love,” the Glykophilousa. It is here and in its derivatives that one finds, in the tender contact between the mother and child, the first veiled erotic allusions to their mystic marriage.47 The intent of countless later Madonna confrontations in art is to reveal the child Jesus as fully the Christ and fully man who, having chosen his mother, now chooses her for his virgin bride. Nowhere were such thoughts more compellingly realized than in the preaching of Savonarola, which Michelangelo heard in his youth. In Savonarola’s remarkable expostulation for the pregnant Virgin, his “Sponsa Iesu,” Mary yields dramatically as mother and bride to the awaited bridegroom. Addressing herself to the Father, she pleads that he vouchsafe her a delivery

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Figure 1.42. Michelangelo, Madonna and Child, c. 1503. Vienna, Graphische Sammlung Albertina.

Figure 1.43. Michelangelo, Madonna and Child. London, British

as hurtless as her conception had been: “Even as I conceived him without shame and without violence to my virginity, so, by thy grace, let me now bring him forth without pain, abiding ever virgin and chaste.”48 So far we are on traditional ground. Savonarola merely presents as dramatic monologue what earlier Fathers, such as Andrew of Crete (c. 700 AD) expressed by apostrophe: “Your chastity, O Virgin, has remained as it was in the beginning, inviolate. For Christ the sun, like a bridegroom from the bridal chamber, has come forth from you.”49 But the traditional evocations of sun and bridegroom, derived from the Psalms, grow strangely sensual in Savonarola’s lines for the Virgin as they turn into direct address: “Come forth then, my Son, even as the bridegroom from his bridal chamber. Issue forth

from my womb. . . . Gladden your handmaid’s soul, fulfill at last your mother’s desire, my soul has desired you and desires you continually, Jesus mine, I can wait no more, I am consumed, I melt, I languish in love.”50 For Savonarola the delivery of the Christ Child was not only, as it had seemed to earlier visionaries, quick, painless, and without lesion; it was pleasurable, and the pleasure ecstatic. And the infant bridegroom who came forth in such sheer virility must be tremendous and ardent. In sheer virility he appears in Michelangelo’s Medici Madonna (fig. 3.1). The Christ Child is an infant Hercules, sitting forward, straddling his mother’s thigh. His upper body swerves through an astonishing 180 degrees, and he appears to be nursing. But

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his left hand, grasping the Virgin’s shoulder, leaves infancy as far behind as does the precocious athleticism of his physique.51 This child is many things. As infant Hercules, he absorbs the titles of championship and apotheosis implicit in the old hero cult.52 And the linen bands that cross and recross his body suggest a stripping away either of swaddling or winding sheet, or of both at once, one in the character of the other, defining the divine man in his twofold emergence. Why the crossed legs of the Virgin? Tolnay suggested that the Madonna’s legs were crossed so as to elevate the child  “to bring it closer to the bosom.” But in four surviving Michelangelo drawings that anticipate or relate to the Medici Madonna (figs. 1.41–­1.43), the child is already fast at the breast though the mother’s legs are uncrossed; it is rather her lofty shoulder that is out of reach.53 What the crossing of the Madonna’s legs accomplishes is to lift the child far above her breast level; evidently the literal contact here was dispensable since the mere direction of the child’s turn would suffice to suggest suckling. But with the Madonna’s legs crossed, the child rides the high crest of her thigh. Now all his body, his straddling seat and his grip on her shoulder, reveal in the child the divine lover electing his spouse.54

spring), has no precise parallel in Italian. Its equivalent appears in Italian Renaissance art. Again, the theme of a child held between his parent’s knees may seem commonplace. Yet it does not enter art as an observed phenomenon, but evolves from the most schematic representations of sonship—­from the Trinity type known as the Gnadenstuhl, or Throne of Mercy, and from the family groups of the Virgin and Child with St. Anne.55 In the Trinities that developed in the Romanesque art of the North, God the Father is seated,

Manifest Filiation Much of Michelangelo’s idiom is unintelligible so long as its indwelling sexuality remains unexplored. His bodies, in action or immobilized, are possessed by their sex. But sex here means the full sexual cycle—­courtship and brooding fertility, coupling and birth, and, beyond birth, a sexual symbolization of parenthood. The thighs, knees, and feet of the mother are, or become, outward tokens of the maternal womb; the child’s place with respect to these members indicates filiation. If this sounds self-­evident, it is not self-­evident visually, for a visual image of birth or of actual procession attends neither the word nor the mental picture of  “child.” The English word “issue,” medieval in origin and more vivid in describing physical derivation than the Italian progenie or stirpe (off-

Figure 1.44. Domenico di Michelino, Holy Trinity with Saints, c. 1470. Detroit Institute of Arts; City of Detroit Purchase.

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Figure 1.45. Francesco Pesellino, Trinity with Saints, 1455–­60. London, National Gallery.

accepting the crucifix. Devotional images of this type came to enjoy wide popularity in Italy after the mid-­fourteenth century, and it is in these pictures of Father and Son that the crucified Christ, often diminutive as a toy, first appears between the progenitor’s knees. But the word “between” claims too much. In the comparatively flat Trecento style, a Corpus Christi hung at the Father’s knees conveys little

sense of palpable interposition. One is not certain that the Trecento artist ever intended the visual effect of a child sprung from paternal loins. It is hard to say just when the anatomical symbolization of parenthood becomes intentional. It is clearly intentional after the mid-­fifteenth century, when the Trinity group is modified to become an emblem of manifest filiation. As the size of the cross expands to make the

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Figure 1.46. Francesco Granacci, Trinity, c. 1515. Staatliche Museen zu Berlin, Gemäldegalerie.

scale of Son and Father agree, the Corpus descends below the feet of the Father; and as plastic-­spatial relationships are intensified, the parental thighs clasp the Son’s body (figs. 1.44–­1.46, 2.27).56 Christ’s human descent through St. Anne, the Virgin’s mother, inspired another devotional image of the Trecento.57 The succession of generations was at first rendered schematically by means of relative size and precession: the Christ Child precedes the Vir-

gin, who sits in front of St. Anne; the grandmother, grandiose and overscaled, looms behind the mother and child and outmeasures her adult daughter by as much as the Virgin exceeds the size of the child. The scheme is concentric; the diminishing scale shows each progeny enfolded or circumscribed in its matrix (figs. 1.47, 1.48).58 This venerable Trecento schema remained authoritative for well over a century. One finds it preserved,

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Figure 1.47. Francesco Traini, Madonna and Child with St. Anne, 1340–­45. Princeton University Art Museum; Bequest of

Frank Jewett Mather, Jr.

despite the updated style in the figures, in pictures as late as the Signorelli school or even Correggio.59 Nevertheless, new solutions emerge throughout the 1400s, their fullest realization coming in works of the High Renaissance—­in Fra Bartolomeo, Leonardo, and Michelangelo. Fra Bartolomeo’s system departs from the concentric Trecento scheme by substituting an echelon structure. His Pala di Sant’Anna (fig. 1.49) indicates precession by the setting of podium and throne; the Virgin is seated below her mother in a literal show of descent. Another scheme, dispensing with props, enthrones the full-­grown Virgin on her mother’s lap—­either facing forward (figs. 1.48, 1.50), or sidesaddle in the solution made famous by Leonardo (figs. 1.56, 1.57).60 Lastly—­and this becomes Michelangelo’s way—­the forms of mother and

Figure 1.48. Anonymous, Madonna and Child and St. Anne,

14th century. Florence, Museo Nazionale di Bargello. Originally made for the St. Anne altar at Orsanmichele.

daughter are nested so that all primary motion is a visible coming forth, like a birth.61 But this fertile posture, the legs parted wide enough to encompass a seated adult, is originally a borrowing from the severe Trinity scheme discussed above. To convey kinship by generation, the Father’s spread thighs are adapted to the pose of St. Anne. As the crucified Son fills the open lap of the Father, and as Mary fills that of St. Anne, so the mani-

Figure 1.49. (top left) Fra Bartolomeo, St. Anne

altarpiece, 1510–­12. Florence, Museo di San Marco. Figure 1.50. (bottom left) Benozzo Gozzoli, St. Anne,

the Madonna, and Child, c. 1470. Pisa, Museo Nazionale di San Matteo.

Figure 1.51. (bottom right) Francesco da Sangallo, St.

Anne altar, 1526. Florence, Orsanmichele. (See note 61.)

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Figure 1.52. (top) Mantegna School, Sacra Conversazione, 1497–­ 1500, detail. Boston, Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum. Figure 1.53. (bottom) Michelangelo, Bruges Madonna, 1504. Bruges, Notre-­Dame.

fest filiation principle is applied a fortiori to the placing of the Christ Child. Whether one looks at the Mantegnesque Sacra Conversazione in the Gardner Museum (fig. 1.52) or at Michelangelo’s Bruges Madonna (fig. 1.53), the stationing of the child between the mother’s legs as her body’s issue is clearly adapted from the older symbolic visualizations of progeniture. But this final type presupposes another significant fifteenth-­century development: Mary’s lap relaxes to become an ever more flexible and articulate structure. The Trecento lap as pedestal or as solid throne is resolved into twin thighs. The Virgin’s legs assume the freedom of separate gesture, and the interval they contain becomes a stage for the child. The Christ Child cradled in a deep lap, or standing between Mary’s shins as between pillars—­these are among the new themes of the late Quattrocento. And each

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Figure 1.54. Benozzo Gozzoli, Madonna and Child Enthroned with Saints, 1461–­62. London, National Gallery.

of these themes may be activated to suggest the child coming forth (figs. 1.54, 1.55).62 A central figure in these preoccupations is Leonardo da Vinci. Most of the fifteenth-­century precedents he inherited were rational and naturalistic; the contact between the child and the mother was rarely implausible. It is Leonardo who uses his greater naturalistic resources for the further metaphorization of the son-­mother relationship. In his London cartoon of the St. Anne group with St. John (fig. 1.56), the

Christ Child is floated into space as if by an energy located in Mary’s abdomen. If the child is on the ground, as in the Louvre St. Anne (fig. 1.57), then he seems to have sprung from between Mary’s feet. Leonardo’s drapery studies for the Virgin’s lower body in this same painting (figs. 1.58, 1.59) are strangely emphatic in separating the legs, outlining even the mons Veneris, as if in relentless meditation on the organs of parthenogenesis. The devices, evolved during the opening years

Figure 1.55. (top left) Francesco Cossa, Pala dei Mercanti, 1474, detail. Bologna, Pinacoteca Nazionale. Figure 1.56. (bottom left) Leonardo da Vinci, Madonna

and Child with St. Anne and St. John, 1499–­1500. London,

National Gallery. Figure 1.57. (bottom right) Leonardo da Vinci, Madonna and Child with St. Anne, c. 1503–­19. Paris, Musée du Louvre.

Figure 1.58. (top left) Leonardo

da Vinci, study for a seated

Madonna, 1507–­10. Paris, Musée du Louvre, Cabinet des Dessins. Figure 1.59. (top right) Leonardo da Vinci, study for a seated Madonna, c. 1507–­ 13. Windsor Castle, Royal Collection. Figure 1.60. (bottom left) Master L. D. (Léon Davent) after Parmigianino, Holy Family, 1550–­56. New York, Metropolitan Museum of Art; Elisha Whittelsey Collection, Elisha Whittelsey Fund, 1959.

t h e m etaphors of lov e a n d b irt h in m ic h el a n gelo’s pietàs

Figure 1.61. Parmigianino, study for a Madonna and Child, 1530s, detail. Chantilly, Musée Condé.

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Figure 1.62. Michelangelo, Epiphany, c. 1550–­53. London, British Museum.

of the sixteenth century, retained their force at least to the mid-­Cinquecento. In countless images of the Madonna, from the most hieratic to almost genre-­ like presentations, the child issuant is the charge (figs. 1.60, 1.61).63 Nowhere is this code of expressive signs more profoundly indigenous than in Michelangelo’s work. The Christ Child in Michelangelo’s imagination exists throughout in an emergent relationship to Mary’s body. Just as in his drawings of the Resurrection one foot of Christ, no matter how impetuous the ascent, trails at the tomb, so his Christ Child, even

when striding out, leaves one lingering foot pointing his origin. The child displays “whenceness” like a physical attribute.64 Michelangelo’s insistence on these symbolic connections is almost obsessive and spans all his working life, from the Bruges Madonna, whose child steps forth from her body (fig. 1.53), to the late Epiphany cartoon in the British Museum (fig. 1.62). Here the young St. John in the lower right is discovering God newly incarnate as the fruit of a woman’s womb, the physical facts being stated with astounding simplicity.

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Figure 1.64. Cosimo Tura, Dead Christ Supported by Angels, 1460–­70. Vienna, Kunsthistorisches Museum.

Pietà for Vittoria Colonna Michelangelo’s determination to see Christ as the Virgin’s issue helps to understand yet another Pietà, a design of the 1530s known as the Pietà for Vittoria Colonna.65 The Marchesa Vittoria Colonna, to whom the artist dedicated the work, was a poetess and Catholic reformer in whose circle Michelangelo had undergone a religious conversion. The drawing he made for her may be the sheet preserved at the Gardner Museum in Boston (fig. 1.63). The concetto, at any rate, lives in a score of engravings and painted copies. Translated into relief, it survives in two monumental examples as well as on countless paxes, doors of small tabernacles, and liturgical ornaments. Variants and adaptations of the design in sixteenth-­and seventeenth-­century art are innumerable. Judged by its influence, its appeal and proliferation, the Colonna Pietà is one of Michelangelo’s most successful inventions. The design is syncretic. With the theme of the Pietà, and with the setting of Golgotha, it compounds three further iconographic types, yet without blurring their Figure 1.63. (opposite) Michelangelo, Pietà for Vittoria Colonna, 1538–­44. Boston, Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum.

distinct traits. The traditional tragic Pietà is re-­formed in the image of the Virgin with the infant between her knees (fig. 1.52), so that protected child and crucified God appear in one person. And the grouping of Christ with angelic supporters imports a mystical connotation by absorbing yet another devotional image: the dead Savior, Man of Sorrows, upheld at his tomb by attendant angels (fig. 1.64).66 The resultant fusion seems strangely schematic, and Tolnay is probably right to describe the Colonna Pietà as somewhat stiff and abstract—­“the diagram of a doctrine.” But these terms, “doctrine” and  “diagram,” are so interfused that to expound the doctrinal content is simply to see the picture itself. Consider the ground level first. It does not reach to the base of the picture, but stops in an upper stratum at the feet of the Virgin and the two angels. These feet rest on firm earthen ground, and it follows that the zone below is not “a kind of pedestal” (Tolnay) but a sheer drop. It represents the inside wall of the grave—­a feature best understood in those versions of the design which, like the marble relief in the Vatican (fig. 1.65), are demonstrably closest in origin to Michelangelo’s shop. The significance of the idea was of course quickly grasped. Several Pietàs of the 1540s, dependent on Michelangelo’s

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Figure 1.65. (left) Michelangelo School, Pietà for Vittoria Colonna. Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana, Office of the

Prefect. Figure 1.66. (right) Jean Mignon after Luca Penni,

Descent from the Cross, c. 1550. London, British Museum.

model, show a freshly dug grave at the foot of the cross ready to receive the deposed body (fig. 1.66). But more than all imitators, Michelangelo so orders his space that the worshiper confronting the image must visualize himself inside the grave. It is as though the spatial conditions of the picture realized the words of Notker Balbulus’s antiphon—­“media in vita in morte sumus”—­“in the midst of life we are in death.”67 The fall under the Virgin’s feet is a detail. More emphatic in conveying the imminence of the descent is the pattern of the whole image, its kinship with the scheme of the Trinity discussed above. These Thrones of Mercy are the unmistakable analogues for the motif of the seated parent holding the crucified Christ between parted legs. And it was in these images, as Quattrocento painters developed them, that the change of level from the feet of the Father to those of the incarnate Son came to symbolize distinct phases of the redemption—­ from the Trinity in its heaven to Christ sacrificed in

the world. In Pesellino’s Trinity Altarpiece (fig. 1.45), the stratification is confirmed by the scene shift from a schematic heaven to a landscape on earth. Michelangelo’s Colonna Pietà shifts from earthly life to the state of death, but the going down is implicit in the analogous pattern. And every action of Michelangelo’s Christ—­ the cast of his head, the pointing fingers, the centered feet—­all converge on one purpose. It is a dead body willfully seeking its destination—­perhaps in Adam’s tomb, which tradition sites under the Calvary cross, or in its own, the actual mileage from Calvary to Christ’s burial cave being elided. It would not be against the nature of Michelangelo’s “diagram” to compress spatial relations and, at the same time, to collapse in the single notation of death the historic distance between the tombs of the First and the New Adam. The next phase of the diagram is made legible in the symbolic parturience of the Madonna’s spread thighs. We are made to see both birth and burial in a single

t h e m etaphors of lov e a n d b irt h in m ic h el a n gelo’s pietàs appearance, a visible approximation that gives body to an ancient verbal tradition. The Church Fathers had dwelled continually on the similitude of Christ’s unused grave and the uneared womb of his mother, two earthly tabernacles chosen to house the divine.68 Once the godhead dwelled in a virgin’s womb to emerge from it bodily for the Incarnation, and it deigned to enter a sepulcher to emerge from it bodily for the Resurrection, each emergence being miraculous, without breaking the seal. Womb and tomb were twinned analogically. But an analogy understood as a correspondence of stable terms would be too static to describe Michelangelo’s aim. His image is energized by motion and sequence. There is work being done by the angels. He has made it their task to be visibly withdrawing the body of Christ, lifting it, as midwives might, out of the Virgin’s lap, thence to lower it into the tomb. All duration collapses; the span of life from birth to entombment shrinks into a sign.69 The direct birth-­to-­burial passage in turn illuminates the Virgin’s action. She is in the attitude of an orant, performing the ancient gesture of prayer. But in the present context her pose takes on additional meaning. In other Pietàs, the Virgin naturally supports the dead body and touches it with one or both hands. In Michelangelo’s image, the suspension of this common necessity becomes an act of willed resignation. The Virgin’s desistence, raising her hands at this moment, disengaging them even as the body is being taken, suggests that she is letting it go, so that the death of Christ becomes—­not as a dogma, but as an immediate visual intuition—­her sacrifice also. This at least is what her gesture might signify in dramatic psychological terms. Mary’s hands, inasmuch as they refer to the lower half of the design, acquiesce in the process which draws the life she bears to its grave. But the conventional meaning of Mary’s gesture is equally operative. Together with her uplifted glance, it defines the third theological dimension, the hope and promise of resurrection. She initiates all that energy which in the upper portion of the design appears to ascend. And it is her action which is taken up and transmitted by the arms of the cross (fig. 1.67).70 It may well be as a comment on her personal sacrifice

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Figure 1.67. Giulio Bonasone after Michelangelo, Pietà for

Vittoria Colonna, 1546. New York, Metropolitan Museum of Art; Harris Brisbane Dick Fund, 1953.

that we are to read Dante’s line inscribed behind her on the shaft of the cross: “Non vi si pensa quanta sangue costa”—­“they care not there [on earth] how much blood it cost”—­“an inscription obviously to be attributed to the Virgin,” as Tolnay says. But Dante’s words, spoken by Beatrice (Paradiso, XXIX, 91), refer to the arbitrary interpretations of Scripture preached by men who forget “what it cost in blood to disseminate it in the world.” Thus, although the application of these words to the personal sacrifice of the bereaved mother is not ruled out, neither is their original reference to the promulgation of orthodoxy. And this suggests that the speaker is not

t h e m etaphors of lov e a n d b irt h in m ic h el a n gelo’s pietàs Mary alone, but Mary-­Ecclesia, the Virgin as Church. Her gesture certainly is adaptable to her dual role; for the orans, the familiar figure who stands with palms outspread in the frescoes of Rome’s Christian catacombs, was a figure often interpreted as the Church. A reading of Michelangelo’s Virgin as both woman and personification reconciles us to her monumentality, to the reach of her arms, the pillar strength of her legs, her place at the grave, and her all-­apparent mediation between mortal birth and heaven. It may even justify the contrived, abstract, almost perfect hexagonal geometry of the design. The Pietà for Vittoria Colonna is the diagram of a catechism. There has perhaps never been an image which precipitates so much creed and thought into one compact appearance. Vittoria Colonna herself wrote to the artist in a letter that seems to refer to this work: “I had the greatest faith in God that he would give you a supernatural grace to make this Christ: then I saw it so marvelous that it surpassed in all ways all my expectations. . . . One could not wish more, nor come to wish so much.”71 It is significant for Michelangelo that the fixed pivot of this elaborate summa of doctrine and faith is the birth mystery.

Figure 1.68. (opposite) Michelangelo, Rondanini Pietà. Milan, Castello Sforzesco. Figure 1.69. (bottom) Michelangelo, studies for the Rondanini

Pietà. Oxford, Ashmolean Museum.

The Rondanini Pietà To this work, the Colonna Pietà, Michelangelo returned twenty years later to conceive from it the Rondanini Pietà, his ultimate sculpture (fig. 1.68). The block from which it is carved had passed through two previous phases before reaching its present condition. In 1552–­53, Michelangelo had roughed it out for a Pietà composition of which no certain record survives. Then, in the mid-­1550s, after abandoning the Florentine Pietà, this smaller stone was taken in hand and radically reworked. Either its original 1552 phase or this revision of 1555 is reflected in three of five drawings on a single sheet at the Ashmolean Museum, Oxford (fig. 1.69).72 These faint sketches are studies for a compact three-­figure group: the dead Christ flanked by two supporting male figures. They form an Entombment, but in a grouping clearly dependent on the Colonna Pietà, especially in the square yoke formed by the arms of Christ. The two remaining drawings on the Oxford sheet, showing the Virgin and Christ alone, seem at first glance to be unrelated; and yet, it is another feature of the Colonna Pietà that they take up, for they express the Entombment idea exactly as the Colonna Pietà had developed it—­by change of level. These two sketches determined the design of the Rondanini Pietà from 1555 until just before its last transformation in 1564, the year of the artist’s death at eighty-­nine.

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Figure 1.70. Michelangelo, Rondanini Pietà. Milan, Castello Sforzesco.

Figure 1.71. Michelangelo, Rondanini Pietà. Milan, Castello Sforzesco.

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As the work has come down to us, the Virgin alone supports the dead son, his pendent body already far sunk beneath her own solid footing, yet their two forms so consubstantial that we seem to be witnessing some aboriginal separation (figs. 1.70, 1.71). This effect of absolute fusion came at the end. It came with the last mutilating revisions Michelangelo made. Cutting away the whole upper portion of the completed Christ figure, he tried to make the loved form issue again from the diminishing core of the stone. At the cost of the work itself, he tried once more to enact the Incarnation from Mary’s body. And in this final happening, which still absorbed him in the week of his death, he brought about those destructive changes which reduced the near-­finished group to its present abbreviation, and which Tolnay’s technical section inventories as follows: “He reduced the size of the group and made vertical the position of the body of Christ to join it more closely to that of the Virgin. . . . He achieved this effect by hewing the new body of Christ directly from the part of the block belonging to the Virgin: the new head of Christ is carved from the right shoulder of the Virgin, the new arms of Christ from the sides and thighs of the Virgin’s body.”

ria and Albert Museum), in which the Christ figure, extended across the Virgin’s lap, allows its right leg to slip to the ground. The left leg remains arched over the Virgin’s thigh without, however, constituting the appropriative action.74 Ruled out on yet another count are seated couples with elaborately intertwined legs, as in Robetta’s Allegory of Envy engraving of c. 1520, or as in Gossaert’s picture of Hercules and Dejanira of 1517 in the Barber Institute, Birmingham.75 I would call these the “hearsay type,” since they suggest a knowledge of the symbol but not of its visual form. In the work of Gossaert, who sojourned in Rome during 1508–­9, the motif appears twice more in similarly unorthodox fashion: in a drawing of Adam and Eve at the Albertina (c. 1520–­ 25), and most significantly in his Hercules and Dejanira woodcut. In both of these it is the husband’s leg that

Appendix A: The Slung-­Leg Motif The attempt to construct a history of the slung-­leg motif is somewhat foolhardy, since any new find may modify the structure and examples are bound to keep turning up. But to forestall an undue expansion of the inventory, let me define what I consider the chief limiting feature of the motif. Pairs of lovers of whom one sits on the lap of the other, or on one thigh within his lap, are ruled out. The “canonic form” requires that partners maintain their own seats, so that the leg that is thrown across becomes a gesture toward the other, a wooing or claiming, an action that visibly changes a relationship or establishes a condition. Whereas the settled intimacy of the lap-­sitting pose, even though it include a slung leg, suggests the condition itself.73 Also ruled out are certain late fifteenth-­century Italian Pietàs (e.g., a Ferrarese bronze relief in the Victo-

Figure 1.72. Andrea Riccio, Satyr and Satyress, c. 1510–­20,

London, Victoria and Albert Museum; Presented by the Art Fund.

t h e m etaphors of lov e a n d b irt h in m ic h el a n g elo’s pi etàs crosses the wife’s. The woodcut has further importance as a likely source for Rubens’s Shepherd and Shepherdess in Munich. The earliest instances of the motif in “correct” visual form occur in Italy soon after 1500. They show the woman’s leg raised, so that the male knee assumes a quasi-­penetrant function—­a variant which may have been served by a separate prototype. I cite Riccio’s small bronze Satyr and Satyress (fig. 1.72) and two rare engravings with obscure subjects. First, The Faun Family by the Bolognese Master I. B. with the Bird: a Leonardesque nymph loops the knee of a laurel-­ crowned wild-­man (fig. 1.73). Second, an Agostino Veneziano engraving of 1516–­18 (fig. 1.74)—­after a Bandinelli design, according to Bartsch. Bartsch’s title, “The News Brought to Olympus” (retained in Passavant, Peintre- ­Graveur, VI, 60) is a confession that the subject is unidentified. The pattern of the amorous group in the sky seems to anticipate both Raphael’s

Isaac fresco (fig. 1.27) and some of the action of Michelangelo’s Christ in the Florentine Pietà. Raphael’s fresco of c. 1520, which may have been executed by Perino del Vaga, is followed in 1527 by the Caraglio engravings after Perino’s designs (Neptune and Thetis, fig. 1.26; Vulcan and Ceres, Bacchus and Erigone, Bartsch XV, 13, 14) and Bonasone’s Saturn and Philyra (fig. 1.24). That these prints were chiefly responsible for the diffusion of the motif is confirmed by a majolica dish at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, dated Urbino, 1542, by Fra Xanto Avelli da Rovigo, inv. 04.9.9. Here the Caraglio-­Perino Neptune and Thetis is adapted to a Venus and Mars. The dispersion of prints may also account for the occurrence of the motif in two Venetian pictures of the 1530s: Bonifazio’s Lot and His Daughters, c. 1545, Chrysler Museum of Art, Norfolk, Virginia; and the Mythological Scene in the London National Gallery (inv. 1123), formerly given to Bonifazio, now catalogued as “Titian follower.” The set of

Figure 1.73. (left) Master I. B. with the Bird, The Faun

Family, c. 1510–­20. Private collection.

Figure 1.74. (right) Agostino Veneziano after

Bandinelli, The News Brought to Olympus, 1516–­18, detail. London, British Museum.

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engravings of the Loves of the Gods by Bonasone (esp. Bartsch 151 and 155) again displays our motif but cannot be dated with certainty before the mid-­century. Indicative of the eloquence of the leg as a conjugal symbol is this remarkable record of the proxy marriage of an English princess, sister of Henry VIII, to a decrepit French king: Consummation of the marriage by proxy between the Princess Mary and Lewis XII. Last Sunday the marriage was concluded per verba de praesenti. The bride undressed and went to bed in the presence of many witnesses. The Marquis of Rothelin, in his doublet, with a pair of red hose, but with one leg naked, went into bed, and touched the Princess with his naked leg. The marriage was then declared consummated. The King of England made great rejoicing, and we at Abbeville did the same. 18 Aug. 1514.76

The impetus for the “deconsecration” of the motif derives from its early association with the theme of Lot and his daughters. (The early instances have been cited; seventeenth-­century examples, as in works by Elsheimer, Stanzione, Vouet, and others, are common.) The same biblical subject further popularized the assumption of the slung-­leg pose by the woman. The motif remains with the woman in most Italian sixteenth-­century examples. Rodin understood the full implications of the motif when he revived it, as part of the woman’s enterprise, in Le Baiser. In the seventeenth century, the hoisted leg is usually male again—­or else improper (e.g., Thamar playing the harlot with Judah in the picture by Pieter Lastman, formerly in the Arnon collection, New York [sold Christie’s, New York, sale 2657, January 26, 2012, lot 258. —­Ed.], and Lastman’s etching of the same composition, Hollstein I, 11). In Othello (III, iii, 424), Iago tells Othello that he heard Cassio speaking in his sleep to Desdemona, “then laid his leg / Over my thigh, and sigh’d and kissed.” The woman who so engages her lover in the Jan Steen picture at Vienna serves, along with other engaging perversions, to define The World Upside Down. Ultimately,

by way perhaps of the Italian comedy and the circus, the slung leg passes into broad comedy and ends up as a Marx Brothers routine.77

Appendix B: The Figure of Christ in the Florentine Pietà The attitude of the Christ (fig. 1.14) is, as Vasari observed, utterly unprecedented. It is incomprehensible. From the point of view of its antecedents, it seems compounded from incompatible sources. The upper body, with falling head and outspread arms obliquely supported, is familiar both as a dying Niobid on Roman sarcophagi and as a Christ figure in a Descent from the Cross (e.g., Roger van der Weyden’s picture in the Escorial, engraved 1565 by Cornelis Cort). But in these partial precedents, the lower limbs invariably trail away, whereas in Michelangelo’s Christ, the forward thrust of the knees resumes the directional lead of the head. Such legwork indicates action and vital desire directed, as a lover’s would be, toward an object of passion. But then, unlike Michelangelo’s Christ, figures whose lower body is so disposed always advance chest and shoulders to bring the arms into play. The discrepancy of upper and lower zones encourages a psychological viewpoint—­that is, to regard every attitude as expressive gesture and the entire body as a scene of conflicts. Thus the erotic energy of the leg mounting the bride is belied by the elbows-­out arm and the shoulder twisted away, as if to renounce a love, the same love, which the head seeks again. Similarly, the lingering tenderness of the right arm embracing the Magdalen is belied by the averted loins. Every part of this breaking body responds to a twice-­turning will. But such psychological readings become suspect as soon as we realize that there exists another determinant for the pose, one which the loss of the left leg makes strikingly clear. Seen as a formal pattern, the Christ’s attitude—­that same action of arms in a single arc intersecting the S-­curve of the body—­displays an unmistakable kinship with the ancient Discobolos. John Shearman has pointed out  “how popular the Discobolos pose became in the sixteenth century,”

t h e m etaphors of lov e a n d b irt h in m ic h el a n gelo’s pietàs citing Pontormo’s use of it for an angel of the Annunciation, Bandinelli using it for his self-­portrait in Boston, and Titian, in 1545, for the suppliant nephew in the Portrait of Pope Paul III at Naples.78 One reason for this remarkable adaptability was the fact that copies of the Discobolos known in the sixteenth century were too fragmentary to associate with a specific content; they were not even recognizable as representing an athlete. They were simply the model of an energetic male form defined in a circular orbit and so turned that its every part appeared unforeshortened. This immediately suggests a new set of governing considerations for Michelangelo’s Christ. The parts of his body seek an ideal plane, every limb revealed in its longest extension, legs and head in side view, shoulders full front, extended arms tracing a circle. Thus, from a formalist point of view, the pose of the Christ seems conditioned not so much by the joining of disparate models, and less by any expressionism of conflict, than by an aesthetic principle of maximum visibility. And yet again, this formal solution, almost archaic in its insistent clarity, is so strangely appropriate to a theological program that, suspecting a symbolic intention, one looks again and from a new point of view. Of the three living figures who support the Christ, each is foreshortened and in part obscured. And it is immediately apparent that any similar effect in the Christ figure, allowing concealment and foreshortening of the divine limbs, would be an imperfect theophany. The adaptation to the Discobolos pose lays out the body of Christ in the space of a giant disc; to the concrete three-­ dimensional life of the supporting figures, it opposes the radiant clarity of abstraction. In the traditional scheme of the Pietà, Christ’s body appeared in profile so that some of its substance, especially the distant arm, was unseen, and the showing of the wounds was made difficult. In his Roman Pietà (fig. 1.1), Michelangelo had been content to adopt an old compromise remedy—­a slight tipping of the body’s supporting plane. In all his subsequent attacks on the subject, in drawings as well as in the late marble groups, the Christ figure is wholly displayed. This resolution was unexpected. Writing about the Christ

in Michelangelo’s Pietà for Vittoria Colonna (fig. 1.63), the Bishop of Fano remarks: “Though he is in the form of a Pietà, nevertheless his whole body is seen.”79 It is Michelangelo’s invention to have reconciled the formal principle of full visibility with the Pietà theme and its required show of the wounds.

Appendix C: Mary Magdalen’s Love The medieval sources bearing on the Magdalen’s erotic attachment to Christ are brought together in Helen M. Garth’s exemplary study, St. Mary Magdalene in Medieval Literature (Baltimore, 1950). I have drawn heavily on Garth’s chapter 4, “The Personality of Mary Magdalene,” which supplied my references to Rabanus Maurus (p. 70) and the later Passion Plays. It is in these plays that the Magdalen’s melancholy becomes pure erotomania. Thus in the Digby Mystery Play called Christ’s Burial and Resurrection (ibid., p. 69): “Schew my best love that I was here! / Tell hym, as he may prove, / That I am dedly seke / And all is for his love.” Or again in The Lamentatyon of Mary Magdaleyne, a poetic English portrayal of her grief formerly attributed to Chaucer: A due, my lorde, my love so faire of face, A due, my turtel dove so fresshe of hue, A due, my myrtle, a due, al my solace, A due, alas, my savyour lorde Jesu.

In the anonymous Italian fourteenth-­century Life of St. Mary Magdalen, the Magdalen’s address to the cross is erotic in form no less than in content: “Oh, most blessed Cross! Would that I had been in Thy stead, and that my Lord had been crucified in mine arms.”80 The lover envying whatever object has contact with the beloved is a commonplace of love poetry. “Would that I could become a pipe, so that he might breathe upon me!” says Chloe as she watches Daphnis in Longus’s famous romance (3rd century AD).81 An early Michelangelo sonnet has the lover yearning to be the dress that binds the beloved’s breast and the ribbon that touches it (“Contenta è tutto il giorno quella vesta che serra ’l petto . . . [la] goda . . . che preme e tocca il petto . . .”). The humanist Marcantonio Flaminio wishes to be the rosy wreath

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Figure 1.75. (top left) Rodin, Christ and Mary Magdalen, 1908. Los Angeles, J. Paul Getty Museum. Figure 1.76. (top right) Marcantonio Bellavia after Annibale Carracci, pl. 10 from Pensieri diversi lineati et intagliati d’Annibale Carracci. London, British Museum. Figure 1.77. (bottom right) Marcantonio Bellavia after Annibale Carracci, pl. 17 from Pensieri diversi lineati et intagliati d’Annibale Carracci. Los Angeles, J. Paul Getty Museum; Getty Research Institute, Los Angeles, 91-­F89.

he gathers for Thestylis (Lusus pastorales, III, 12).82 This is the pattern of the Magdalen’s cry in the fourteenth-­ century vita. A Rodin sculpture, often known as La Madeleine (fig. 1.75), in which the despairing woman, alone with Christ, presses herself naked against his crucified body, comes so close to this spirit of star-­crossed love that one would take it for a rehearsal of the Gothic text. But what at first sight appears as fin-­de-­siècle romanticism turns out to be deep-­rooted Catholic. The subtlest artists of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries understood well enough that the crucifix in Mary Magdalen’s hands could be an object of erotic fantasy (figs.

1.76, 1.77). Some, especially certain Northerners such as Isenbrandt and Engelbrechts, allowed the Magdalen on Calvary to kneel in such manner as to take the upright cross between her thighs (fig. 1.78). The motif appears with more propriety in certain sixteenth-­century Italian Crucifixions, such as that engraved by Philippe de Soye after a design by an unidentified Michelangelizer.83 In pictures of the Deposition, the Magdalen sometimes appears anointing one of Christ’s hands; but the more common rendering shows her embracing, kissing, or embalming the feet—­as she had done at the Feast in the House of Levi. And several Italian High Re-

t h e m etaphors of lov e a n d b irt h in m ic h el a n g elo’s pi etàs

Figure 1.78. Adriaen Isenbrandt,

The Crucifixion, c. 1525. Los Angeles County Museum of Art; Gift of Jack Linsky.

naissance painters find ways of relating the wounded crossed feet of Christ directly to the Magdalen’s open body.84 Michelangelo’s own meditations on the subject of the Deposition rarely fail to define the Magdalen’s erotic character. See especially the reworked Michelangelo drawing for a Descent from the Cross, c. 1545–­55, at the Ashmolean Museum, Oxford (fig. 1.79). Michelangelo here participates in one of the great minor themes of sixteenth-­century art: the insinuation of disturbed physical love in scenes of Pietà and Entombment. Few subjects offered such challenge and so many pitfalls to an artist’s ardor and indiscretion.

But it would be a preposterous impoverishment of the tradition to regard Mary Magdalen as only, or as primarily, a medieval sex symbol. Her symbolic roles are almost as rich and multiple as those of the Madonna. She could be Eve again, or a type of the Virgin, or even the Holy Church. As an example of the Magdalen’s identification with the Virgin, Garth cites the Discourse on Mary Theotokos by Cyril, Archbishop of Jerusalem. The Virgin is speaking: “My father was Joakim. . . . My mother was Anna. . . . I am Mary Magdalen because the name of the village wherein I was born was Magdalia.” Later in the same Discourse, the Virgin on her death-

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Figure 1.79. Michelangelo, Descent from the Cross, c. 1545–­55. Oxford, Ashmolean Museum.

t h e m etaphors of lov e a n d b irt h in m ic h el a n gelo’s pietàs bed appoints Mary Magdalen to her own place on earth, saying to the Disciples: “Behold your mother from this time onwards.”85 The Magdalen as the type of Eve occurs in the Homilies of Gregory the Great (“Lo, the guilt of the human race is cut off whence it proceeded . . . for a woman tells the words of the Life-­Giver as [Eve] told the words of the death-­bearing serpent”) and in the sermons of St. Peter Chrysologus (“In this latter day a woman runs to grace, who earlier ran to guilt. In the evening she seeks Christ who in the morning knew that she had lost Adam. She who had taken perfidy from Paradise hastens to take faith from the sepulchre; she hastens to snatch life from death, who had snatched death from life”).86 In his commentary on Matthew 28:1 (“As it began to dawn . . . came Mary Magdalen and the other Mary to see the sepulcher”), St. Peter Chrysologus points out that the singular venit (came) is used rather than venerunt. In this, he says, the unity forms one person in two names, rather than two persons of one name, and indicates a changed woman who is mystically both Eve and Mary Magdalen. “She who led Adam to the death came; she who received Christ from the dead came.” The Magdalen as Ecclesia is, says Garth, “the most usual analogy made by medieval writers.” St. Odo of Cluny (sermon II, Patrologiae . . . latina, vol. 5, p. 133, col. 716) explained that since Magdalus, from the Hebrew migdal, or “tower,” refers to the Church, “mystically this blessed woman herself signifies the Holy Church.”87 Ronald Steinberg kindly reminds me that the Magdalen-­ Church equation was especially dear to Savonarola.

Appendix D: The Credibility of Blaise de Vigenère* The chief witness for the “open house” theory is the French littérateur Blaise de Vigenère (1523–­1596), who was in Rome in 1549–­51 on a diplomatic mission. In *This appendix was originally published in Steinberg, “Michelangelo’s Florentine Pietà: The Missing Leg” (1968), pp. 350–­53, to refute Vigenère’s claim to have witnessed Michelangelo at work on the Florentine Pietà. It is here significantly revised following Steinberg’s notes.

1597, a year after his death, a Paris publisher brought out Vigenère’s translation of the Imagines of Philostratus the Younger and the Descriptions of Callistratus, with annotations. It is in the latter that Vigenère claims to have met Michelangelo at mid-­century and to have watched him work: I am able to affirm that I have seen Michelangelo, at the age of more than sixty years, and not the strongest for his time of life, knock off more chips from an extremely hard marble in one quarter of an hour than three young stone-­cutters could have done in three or four—­a thing quite incredible to one who has not seen it. He put such impetuosity and fury into his work that I thought the whole must fly to pieces; hurling to the ground in one blow great fragments three or four inches thick, shaving the line so closely that if he had overshot it by a hair’s-­breadth, he ran the risk of losing all, since one cannot mend a marble afterwards or repair mistakes, as one does with figures of clay and stucco.88

The passage entered art writing in the early nineteenth century, not in relation to the Florentine Pietà but as proof of Michelangelo’s attack on a marble block as all fury and impetuosity.89 Only in the first volume of Henry Thode’s Michelangelo und das Ende der Renaissance (1902) is Vigenère’s recollection associated with the Pietà, where it furnishes the terminus ante quem for the sculpture’s inception, and continues to do so.90 The importance of Vigenère to Michelangelo studies derives above all from the personal contact he claims to have had with the master. It is because, elsewhere in his books, he twice reports opinions purportedly heard directly from Michelangelo’s lips that his recollections are ranked as primary sources.91 Yet a contextual reading of Vigenère’s various passages concerning Michelangelo shows his references to be practically worthless. Before citing the texts, a few words about the author in general. Of noble birth, Vigenère was a diplomat, cryptographer, alchemist, enthusiastic student of antiquity, including Hebrew and Greek, and a prolific translator and annotator of classical texts. His wide-­

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ranging books, which he began to publish at age fifty, include a history of Poland (1573) and of the fall of the Greek Empire to the Turks (1577), a treatise on occult signs (1586), translations of Livy (1583), Caesar’s Gallic Wars (1584), and the Psalms in free verse (1588). His literary manner, however, tends to be rambling and uncritical, and his memory is cavalier: “Les souvenirs de Vigenère ne sont pas très précis,” says his devoted biographer Denyse Métral. As for his reliability, the best she can adduce in his defense is that he never misleads the reader on purpose: “Lorsqu’il trompe le lecteur c’est qu’il se trompe lui-­même.”92 Nowhere does Vigenère sound more remote and naive than in discussions of art. Clearly, he entered the field only because the works of Philostratus and Calli­ stratus had become a precious literary monument in the Renaissance, to which he contributes his own reiterative comments on ancient art and remembered hearsay about modern artists.93 Thus, for example, his earliest reference to Michelangelo offers the already clichéd notion that Michelangelo’s primary education was the Torso Belvedere, whose influence can be seen in all his sculptures and paintings.94 Collectively, Vigenère’s citations of Michelangelo make for revealing reading. The artist always enters the narrative either as a foil to praise a lesser Frenchman, to give authority to an annotation, or as an exemplar of some banal, even silly point Vigenère is making about the materials of painting or sculpture. In the first, 1578 edition of Les Images . . . de Philostrate, the subject, proceeding from the elder Philostratus’s description of “The Hunters,” is the four colors used by “l’escholle pythagoricienne”—­black, white, yellow, and red. “Nevertheless,” writes Vigenère, introducing Michelangelo as paysagiste, “I have heard several times from Michelangelo and Daniele da Volterra that they’d rather do without yellow than without blue, because of the sky, which appears in nearly all works.”95 The second time Vigenère reports a conversation with Michelangelo we are in the midst of a comment to his translation of Livy’s History of Rome (1583), where Michelangelo is made to speak in unison with a sculptor Vigenère calls “Jacques natif d’Angoulême.” Both he

and Michelangelo assure Vigenère that a broken and heavily repaired marble satyr on the Capitoline Hill is among the most beautiful and excellent masterpieces to be seen. Jacques, he adds, was Michelangelo’s equal in sculpture and nearly the equal of the ancients, witness his marble statue of Autumn, made in Rome in 1550.96 Michelangelo’s presence in this imagined scenario raises Jacques, Vigenère’s otherwise unknown compatriot, to the heights of the Italian master. There is more chauvinism to come. In the 1597 La Suite de Philostrate, again in the annotations to Callistratus, Jacques d’Angoulême (“le plus excellent imagier François”) does an encore as the sculptor who prevailed over Michelangelo in a competition “for the model of an image of St. Peter,” which Vigenère claims even the Italians thought better than Michelangelo. As if to justify this swagger, he proceeds to describe, in superlatives, other works by Jacques, no traces of which have ever been found.97 Two hundred years ago, Leopoldo Cicognara scoffed at Vigenère’s anecdote, asking rhetorically why the elder Michelangelo, showered with honors, revered by popes and kings, would have agreed to a competition with a young foreign sculptor. Vigenère, as Cicognara sees it, finds Michelangelo the lesser talent only by exaggerating the merits of an otherwise mediocre name. “This is one of those cases where we can openly refute people who tell inane and boastful stories.”98 The rest of Vigenère’s remarks on Michelangelo appear in the same place, the 1597 La Suite de Philostrate, in his commentary on the first of Callistratus’s Descriptions—­a marble group of a satyr playing the flute (whom Blaise takes to be Marsyas), accompanied by Pan and Echo.99 Vigenère says little, however, about the ancient marble, save for a sentence at the end (p. 125b). He is more concerned with Callistratus’s failure to provide a preface to the art of sculpture, which gives him cause to write one.100 Being a Renaissance man without credentials in art, he takes up Cellini’s Trattato on sculpture (sans acknowledgment) and pens a long-­winded, muddled, twenty-­page primer—­the different forms and materials of sculpture, its tools, the use of drawings, models, and shadows, and the merits of sculpture over painting. This last, a conventional paragone, becomes a

t h e m etaphors of lov e a n d b irt h in m ic h el a n gelo’s pietàs leitmotif of Vigenère’s annotations, no doubt because it heads chapter 6 of Cellini’s treatise: “Breve discorso intorno all’arte del disegno, dove si conclude, che la Scultura prevaglia alla Pittura.”101 Throughout Vigenère’s pages, we find classical texts culled for references and famous modern masters introduced to demonstrate a continuity with the ancients. Enter Michelangelo, who crops up when Vigenère needs a modern exemplar. After rambling on about ancient statues, he shifts to the means and implements of drawing, and next (p. 117) quotes Pliny’s account of Apelles’s portrait of Alexander the Great with thunderbolt in the Temple of Artemis at Ephesus, where “the fingers have the appearance of projecting from the surface and the thunderbolt seems to stand out from the picture.”102 Which leads Vigenère to painterly renderings of three-­dimensional effects, and then to his main point: that “le relief [i.e., sculpture] est comme le pere de la peinture, & elle la fille du relief ” (p. 118; cf. Cellini, p. 212: “il rilievo è il suo vero padre, e la pittura sua vaga e graziosa figliuola”). What better endorsement could Vigenère contrive than Michelangelo, the Cinquecento’s most famous sculptor-­painter, who “surpassed all in sculpture and relief since the renascence of the arts and sciences a century earlier” (Vigenère has also read his Vasari).103 In a similar context, Michelangelo proves that sculpture is more difficult than painting, since “he who excelled in both arts could carve only one figure for every hundred he painted” (cf. Cellini, p. 213: “Michelagnolo . . . per ogni statua di marmo ne faceva cento di pittura”). Since Cellini offers no example of Michelangelo’s two-­dimensional art, Vigenère adds his own. Among the master’s many-­figured paintings, he notes, is the Sistine Last Judgment, “which is on the ceiling.”104 It should be clear by now that Vigenère’s Michelangelo is merely a convenient prop brought in to lend credence to the author’s assertions; no personal acquaintance necessary. With this in mind, we turn to the two longest references to Michelangelo in the Callistratus annotations. The first is preceded by sophomoric, step-­ by-­step instructions for making sculpture (which sound much more intelligent in Cellini): use drawings, clay or wax models, position the light correctly, have pa-

tience, even with large figures or multifigured groups. For the latter, Vigenère cites and describes the Farnese Bull. In the next sentence, we hear of a multifigured Michelangelo undertaking, one which shows the moderns to have been on a par with the ancient masters. “Daring and bold, with his assured hand, he began in 1550, when I was in Rome, a Crucifixion where there were ten or twelve figures, none less than life-­size, all from a single marble block, which had been the capital of one of the eight large columns of the Temple of Peace of Vespasian, which one can still see standing. But his approaching death [fourteen years too early] prevented the completion of this beautiful work.”105 Taken literally, the account is wild enough to be dismissed out of hand. No capital accommodates a life-­ size, multifigured Crucifixion, as anyone looking at the remains of the temple columns in the Forum, then or now, would have realized. Either the tale is pure invention or a faulty, fifty-­year-­old memory of something Vigenère heard while in Rome about an over-­life-­size Crucifixion group planned by Michelangelo. We know of this project only through a drawing of three measured marbles, the central one in cross shape, datable to the 1540s.106 Though the drawing does not show ten to twelve figures, nor is the composition of a single piece, this may be the project Vigenère heard about and recounted with his usual lack of precision and surplus of imagination. He never laid eyes on the work, nor claimed to have done so. What he did claim to have seen is quoted at the head of this appendix: a Michelangelo, “more than sixty years old,” furiously plying hammer and chisel. As Vigenère had Michelangelo approaching death fourteen years prematurely in his description of the Crucifixion project, so he here lops a decade or so off the seventy-­ five-­year-­old artist. More relevant is the context of the purported visit. Earlier on the page is the account of the competition between Michelangelo and Jacques d’Angoulême for an image of St. Peter. Then, with a mere comma’s break, he introduces “the most excellent” Germain Pilon (misdating his death by ten years), who made numerous works in marble, bronze, and terracotta, but preferred marble; not only because marble

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was harder to work with than softer materials, but because it needed cleverness and skill to understand the veining of the marble and know where to strike.107 “In this respect,” Vigenère immediately continues, “I am able to affirm that I have seen Michelangelo knock off more chips from an extremely hard marble in one quarter of an hour than three young stone-­cutters could have done in three or four” and with fury and impetuosity, “shaving the line so closely that if he had overshot it by a hair’s-­breadth, he ran the risk of losing all.” So Michelangelo steps in to sanction the preference of a French sculptor. Thus, like Vigenère’s other references to Michelangelo, this oft-­quoted passage merely serves to buttress the narrative. Should we continue to admit it into evidence, coming as it does from a garrulous littérateur who understands nothing of the sculptor’s métier, exaggerates by routine, and turns Michelangelo into Exhibit A to defend his own case? It seems preposterous to impute frenzy and expressionist recklessness to Michelangelo’s working process on the strength of Vigenère’s naive observation. Every Michelangelo marble tells of the master’s sense of its grain and density, of the responsive intuition of depth with which he cut every surface. If Vigenère did indeed watch Michelangelo carve for a quarter-­hour, then what he saw was a block so rough-­hewn that its figural composition was not yet discernible, at least not to him. This roughness and the large size of the chips being cut away suggest a preliminary operation which in sixteenth-­century Rome would normally take place in the courtyard outdoors. And this indicates once again that Vigenère was not in Michelangelo’s studio but, if present at all, was watching from some distance away, perhaps from a window. Putting himself inside the sculptor’s house at a remove of nearly half a century is a narrative ploy no more convincing than the other roles Vigenère scripts for Michelangelo. As for identifying the marble with the Florentine Pietà, this again seems arbitrary; it is worth recalling that for a century no writer thought to do so. Several other Michelangelo marbles that Vigenère might have seen in 1550 are on record. There was the large marble

group which was eventually cut down to become the Rondanini Pietà. Vasari mentions yet another Pietà—­ “un altro pezzo di marmo dove era stato già abbozzato un’ altra Pietà, molto minore”—­of which, however, nothing further is known.108 The location in 1550 of the architectural fragment from which the disputed Palestrina Pietà was carved is likewise not known. But Michelangelo certainly had other marble blocks standing about. The 1564 inventory of his estate mentions, among others, a St. Peter statue and a Christ with another figure, both “sbozzata e non finita.”109

Appendix E: Savonarola’s Rhetorical Fantasy What causes a man to project such orgastic sensations upon the pregnant Madonna, or to seek identification with her as birthgiver (pp. 26–27)? Having no access to Savonarola’s individual psychology, we can only set forth certain theoretical possibilities. These may be designated dramatic, erotic, and sacramental—­or, respectively, female, male, neuter. First: contemporary woodcut representations of Savonarola preaching show him addressing an audience which, conforming to the then common practice, was segregated by sex.110 Any turn of his head would thus make him aware of the sex of his audience and of their peculiar response. Judging from Savonarola’s concern for the elegant printing of his published sermons, and from his florid style, we may suspect that he had a normal modicum of vanity about his rhetorical prowess. A histrionic ambition could have projected him into an intense state of identification with the woman whose emotions he was describing to a rapt female audience. A second theoretical possibility is identification by way of a peculiar perversion of male eroticism. The history of sexual fantasy records one in which the male lover conceives himself penetrating the woman from within her womb, so that the process of birth becomes a sexual possession. Its most explicit statement occurs in a sestet entitled “The Wish,” by the notorious Restoration rake, the Earl of Rochester:

t h e m etaphors of lov e a n d b irt h in m ic h el a n gelo’s pietàs

O that I now cou’d, by some Chymic Art, To sperm convert my Vitals and my Heart, That at one Thrust I might my Soul translate, And in the Womb myself regenerate: There steep’d in Lust, nine Months I wou’d remain: Then boldly . . . my passage out again.111

It may be that Rochester’s egressive coitus is no unique private fantasy. It reeks of theology, but in the negative sense, like the Black Mass—­that is, the Devil’s side of the coin, the nightmare twist given to the quintessential christological myth.112 The second possibility then is that Savonarola drew from a well of repressed male sexuality what he sublimated in his remarkable Virgin’s expostulation. The third possible ground for identification is asexual, or priestly. I quote from Henri de Lubac: The spiritual maternity of the Church . . . includes that power over the Eucharist by the exercise of which

the Church, we may say, carries out a sort of maternal function with regard to Christ himself. Hence those comparisons, sometimes rather daring, between Our Lady and the priest and those speculations on Our Lady’s priesthood. . . . It was natural enough to consider, after the gift of life in Baptism, and that of the Word in the preaching which gives birth to faith, the sacramental sentence which makes present the body of Christ, as did Mary’s Fiat at Nazareth. From the twelfth century onward we repeatedly come across the exclamation: “O truly to be venerated is the dignity of priests, for in their hands, as in the womb of the Virgin, Christ is incarnated anew.”113

A priest for whom the transubstantiation of the Host was absolute reality might indeed have experienced a sense of identification with the Virgin birthgiver, since (in the words of the German Catholic theologian Scheeben, quoted in Lubac, n. 87) he too “engenders the God-­Man in his sacramental existence.”

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Figure 2.1. Michelangelo, Roman Pietà, 1498–­99. Rome, St. Peter’s.

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The Roman Pietà

Michelangelo at Twenty-­Three

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mong the Pietà’s many merits is its refusal to offer any sort of news angle. Not one of the causes that normally propels artworks into newsprint or prime-­ time TV operates here. First: Michelangelo’s Roman Pietà (figs. 2.1, 2.2) is unlikely to make news by emerging from under drastic cleaning; it’s clean enough, the cleanest thing there is. Second: the Pietà will make no more overseas trips, as it did in 1964 by agreement of Pope Paul VI and President John F. Kennedy, when it traveled to the New York World’s Fair. There it was tastefully installed in the fair’s Vatican Pavilion by Jo Mielziner, a well-­known stage designer of Broadway hits. Whereupon a million or so hushed admirers eyed the Pietà from a conveyor belt and bounteous revenues accrued from the sale of souvenirs. But the Pietà will go no more a roving. Third: the Pietà is unlikely to be stolen or suffer injury again, as it did on May 21, 1972, when a Hungarian lunatic, aged ominously thirty-­three, jumped the pedestal, shouting “I am Jesus Christ—­there is no Madonna!”—­and delivered three hammer blows to the back of the Virgin’s head. A camera-­wielding tourist recorded the action, his picture making the front page of the New York Times. Such excitement will not recur because, ever since that sad day in 1972, the first right-­hand chapel in St. Peter’s, Rome, where the Pietà is lodged in safekeeping, has been barricaded behind bulletproof glass, the viewer now so distanced from the work’s presence that we might as well be looking at a plaster cast. Fourth and finally: it is improbable that the Pietà will come up for sale. Of course, it may some day be

converted into hundreds of megabytes, but that’s computer news, not art news. So, with no revelations due to cleaning, no outrage to report, no blockbuster travel, and no record-­breaking auction bids, there is no way this piece will ever again be newsworthy. The Pietà comes with another handicap: in the words of a Michelangelo monograph, widely used in American colleges, it is “one of those famous works which it is almost impossible to see afresh.” Fortunately, the statement is cautiously worded. Blame is not laid on the Pietà, as on a thing intrinsically too banal to arouse fresh responses. Rather, the fault is ascribed to presumed familiarity, which means that one need only address the work with a new question. And that’s a resource always available, for surely there is nothing that one cannot put a new question to. It doesn’t even take much invention; each generation comes with its own and finds answers waiting. This is why even the St. Peter’s Pietà—­though it has been rightly named  “the most universally loved of Michelangelo’s sculptures”—­has not escaped changes of attitude that made it seem different to newcomers. A few facts first: Michelangelo was not yet twenty-­ three when he received a commission, indirectly, from Jean de Bilhères Lagraulas, the French cardinal-­ ambassador to the Holy See, to carve a life-­size Pietà,

In 1979, Steinberg expanded his first presentation of the Roman Pietà (pp. 1–9) into a full lecture, revised over the years with each of its two dozen deliveries until its final presentation in 1999. The lecture has been edited here to avoid repetition with the text of chapter 1.

Figure 2.2. Michelangelo, Roman Pietà, view from right side.

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Figure 2.3. Alessandro Vittoria, Pietà, tomb of Francesco Venier, 1556–­61. Venice, San Salvatore.

probably for the cardinal’s funeral chapel—­for the impressive fee of 450 gold ducats. (A year’s rent for a corner store on a main street in Florence was then about 5 ducats—­so 450 was a lot of money for a twenty-­three-­year-­old.)1 And Michelangelo was not yet twenty-­five when, after one and a half years of labor, he finished the work—­ about the time of the cardinal’s death, August 6, 1499—­ and saw it emplaced, not as at present, but in its intended location, which alas no longer exists. The present installation in St. Peter’s, first chapel on the right, dates from the eighteenth century. The original setting was the rotunda of St. Petronilla, patron of French kings, an Early Christian circular mausoleum attached to the south transept of Old St. Peter’s. No evidence remains of its place within the rotunda, but it may have been installed in a recessed niche against one of the rotunda’s pillars, raised on a low altar with the viewer’s eye level near the base of the sculpture.2 What we do know is that the work established the young Florentine artist as one who surpassed all sculptors living or dead, not excluding the excellent Ancients.

But the work was less than forty years old when it began to be criticized on account of the Virgin’s youth. This question of the relative ages of mother and son does not seem to have been asked right away, and I doubt it would be asked today; not the sort of question we address to a work of art. But it agitated people from the 1530s on—­after all, Mary was forty-­seven when her son died, and she doesn’t look it. And so the writer Pietro Aretino, casting about for a good example of the blundering to which even experts are prone, cites Michelangelo’s notorious misjudgment in showing a mother younger than her son.3 And the work was only fifty years old when certain people—­we’re not sure how many—­began to perceive it in a different light again. We have two kinds of evidence for this shift: one kind resides in the deliberate alterations made by artists who adapted or copied the work. Since Michelangelo’s marble group was the first monumental Pietà made of precious material, all sixteenth-­ century Pietàs, at least in Italy, make conscious reference to it, whether in homage, as critique, or ambivalence. Thus Montorsoli—­a former Michelangelo assis-

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in the Florentine church of Santo Spirito (fig. 1.9). The anonymous letter writer does not complain of the quality of the copy, nor of its inaccuracies. What appalls him is its apparent indecency. His letter begins by denouncing the “dirty and filthy marble figures” that had just been placed in Florence Cathedral—­i.e., Bandinelli’s Adam and Eve (fig. 2.4). He proceeds to the copy of our Pietà, unveiled in the same month:

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They say that it derives from that inventor of obscenities, Michelangelo Buonarroti, who is concerned only with art, not with piety. All the modern painters and sculptors, pursuing Lutheran whims, now paint and carve nothing for our holy churches but figures that undermine faith and devotion.4

Figure 2.4. Baccio Bandinelli, Adam and Eve, c. 1548–­49. Florence, Museo Nazionale del Bargello.

tant—­in his Pietà of c. 1546 for San Matteo, Genoa (fig. 1.5): apart from the curious crossing of the legs, which strikes me as infelicitous, Montorsoli’s Christ is larger and brawnier in build, as if Montorsoli found the limbs of Michelangelo’s Christ too svelte to be plausible. The action of Christ’s right hand—­which, in the Michelangelo, fingers a fold of the Virgin’s dress—­is eliminated as inappropriate to a corpse; and the Madonna herself is restored to the age and condition of a matron bereaved. As she is again in Alessandro Vittoria’s lunette for the Venier tomb in San Salvatore, Venice (fig. 2.3), where Christ’s right hand dangles straight down, never touching the Virgin, or Ippolito Scalza’s pastiche in the Orvieto Duomo (1570–­80). Works such as these are implicitly critical of the original. But rebuke far more explicit festers in an open letter published in Florence in March 1549, when a life-­size copy of the Pietà by Nanni di Baccio Bigio was installed

One’s first impulse is to reject these words as blind bigotry. We love Michelangelo’s Pietà so well, its Christian piety seems so self-­evident, and our respect for Michelangelo’s canonic art runs so deep, that we can hardly conceive a set of values that would convert this of all works into a moral affront. But it’s not really difficult, if one remembers how the psychological climate in Italy had changed between 1499 and 1549, the date of the letter: the more or less untroubled pleasure the Renaissance had taken in the revival of nude antique statuary had given way to a new spirit of censorship. The Reformation had ruptured the unity of Western Christendom; the Sack of Rome (1527) by the forces of the Catholic Emperor Charles V had scarred the papacy; the alarming spread of heresy in Italy itself made the Church feel beleaguered and threatened. And all these ills were felt by some to be the result of a general libertinism, of which the shameless cult of nudity was a stark symptom. Lutheranism and heresy, it was thought, sprang from a disrespect for the authority of the Church, abetted by the craze for pagan antiquity, which, among other evils, subverted the standards of Christian modesty. So what linked Michelangelo’s Pietà—­or its copy—­ with Lutheran heresy in the mind of our letter-­writer was the substitution, in both cases, of personal license for obedience. And this is why he perceived the Pietà as

t he roma n pietÀ perhaps no one in the previous generation had been disposed to perceive it: as a smooth marble group which, under cover of a devotional theme, displayed a beautiful youth, lying nearly naked in the lap of a girl. But a question arises: what value is there in attending to negative sentiments that are not ours? I think a great deal. Firstly, because such critical depositions tell us something about the way the work has lived in human experience—­and, after all, it lives nowhere else. Secondly, the faultfinders often see more acutely, more independently than the encomiasts whose acclaim is rarely specific; like the author of this characteristic eulogy from a famous guidebook to Florence of 1591. Referring to the marble copy at Santo Spirito, “made with consummate and diligent care,” the author proceeds:

Whoever has not been to Rome is right to linger in Florence contemplating this work and the miraculous skill in these two figures. . . . It shows the Mother of God transfixed by grief, whose abounding pity is rendered with singular effect. Rare and miraculous is the beauty of the limbs, the very marble seeming to breathe with the semblance of the divine.5

I share the author’s admiration (for the original) but his terms of praise—­“consummate care,”  “miraculous skill,”  “singular effect,”  “beauty of the limbs,” and  “marble seeming to breathe”—­they instruct me about the limitations of his critical vocabulary, and about fashionable art talk in the late Cinquecento. About Michelangelo’s Pietà they tell very little. The carpers, on the other hand, frequently point to things that are actually in the work, thereby promoting the work’s progressive self-­revelation. Negative criticism—­whether explicit in words or implicit in the alterations of copyists—­may reveal what is really there but gets lost in conventional praise. This applies with especial force to the criticism of the latter eighteenth century, when Michelangelo’s Pietà again fell into disfavor. One of the greatest exponents of Neoclassicism, Francesco Milizia, deplored the Virgin’s physique. Michelangelo, he complained, had given her “the shoulders of a washerwoman!”6 Another objected that the Virgin’s

garment, tunic, and mantle were bunched instead of falling in folds, and that the limbs of the Christ were too skinny. Thus Friedrich von Ramdohr, 1787: “The figure of Christ is too thin, and the joints look as if bashed [or broken—­zerschlagen]. Waist and hips,” he continued, “are overlong and the extremities are too small.”7 One complaint survives through the nineteenth century into modern times, to be voiced even by a founding father of modern art history, Heinrich Wölfflin:   the excess of the Virgin’s dress. One is “astonished,” he wrote, “at the immoderate display of drapery,” which is “somewhat obtrusively rich.”8 He is joined, among others, by Herbert von Einem: “Michelangelo gives the draperies of his later Madonnas firmer outlines . . . as though [he] now found his treatment of draperies in the Pietà too sumptuous, too decorative.”9 Though he is too respectful to say so, it is, one suspects, von Einem himself who finds that drapery treatment “too sumptuous.” This also was my peeve before I grew up. Was there not, for instance, too much fabric over the Virgin’s torso?—­where Michelangelo proudly signed his name—­this being the only work he ever signed; surely her tunic is several sizes too big. Why did Michelangelo do it? Well, I attributed it to his youth. He was, after all, in his early twenties, and had won the chance to exhibit his skill, coram papa, as the formula has it, before the pope himself and the congregants at St. Peter’s. The challenge may have prompted him to show off, to prove now and forever that he could outcarve anyone, ancient or modern. The result, needless to say, is superb; yet some may feel, as I used to, lavish beyond necessity. I’ve changed my mind. But I’m not sorry to have had that critical impulse, because it’s the kind that raises a question. In fact, all the criticisms cited so far seem valuable to me—­those about the fussed draperies, the Virgin’s exorbitant shoulders, the Christ’s overlong waist and hips and attenuated extremities—­because these reproofs spring from direct observation and focus attention. And we’ll have occasion to revert to each one of them, as we begin to question the artist’s decisions from a point of view that has nothing to do with taste, or opinion, or historical data.

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I want to try a cool analytical approach, taking the Pietà as a piece of engineering, a matter of problem solving. The problem is apparent in the solution, which has always struck observers as perhaps the most admirable characteristic about the Pietà: the consummate unity of the group—­mother and son at one within a compact cone. Michelangelo succeeded marvelously, as we can best appreciate by inverting a photograph of the group in its present setting. Undistracted by each figure’s appeal, we perceive not a pair but a single entity. The achieved unity of the group is remarkable because it solves an insoluble problem: the accommodation of a full-­grown man crosswise on a young woman’s lap. Readers with compliant partners at hand might try it sometime. If your male is of normal stature, you will find the fit as difficult to bring off as did the artists who

Figure 2.5. Jacopo Bellini, Lamentation and Descent from the Cross, c. 1450, detail. Paris, Musée du Louvre, Cabinet des Dessins.

Figure 2.6. Pietro Perugino, Pietà, c. 1493–­94. Florence, Gallerie degli Uffizi.

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Figure 2.7. Francesco Francia, Pietà from the St. Anne altarpiece, 1511–­17. London, National Gallery. Figure 2.8. Giovanni

Bellini, Pietà, c. 1505. Venice, Gallerie dell’Accademia.

depicted Pietàs from the mid-­fourteenth century to the High Renaissance (figs. 2.5–­2.7). The assignment baffled even Giovanni Bellini, though he did try, by giving the Virgin’s knees a capacious spread (fig. 2.8). Perhaps he had heard of Michelangelo’s feat, for this picture was painted in the first years of the sixteenth century. Others, knowing a solution to be hopeless, did not even make the attempt, but recruited supporters to underprop the

loose ends at the sides. And Renaissance sculptors faced the same defeating perplexity (fig. 2.9). The conclusion is inescapable: whatever the breadth of a woman’s lap, it will not bed the length of a man. Once you commit yourself to naturalism, and with it to a natural scale in the relative sizing of figures, the mother’s knees are inadequate to contain the sprawl of a son, age thirty-­three. Yet Michelangelo succeeded. But how? Since the task

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Figure 2.9. Giovanni della Robbia shop, Pietà, early 16th century. New York, Metropolitan Museum of Art; Frederick C. Hewett Fund, 1913.

is manifestly impossible, its accomplishment cannot be less than a miracle. What did he do to the Christ figure, and what to the Virgin? Let me consider the Christ figure first, since the decisions here were somewhat simpler. Three things he did. First, like many before him, Michelangelo underscaled the son’s body against the huge frame of the mother, and the wonder is that these contrived proportions produce no unnatural or disturbing effect. Why is it that we don’t notice? Perhaps because the slender proportions Michelangelo gave to the Christ suggest the long bones which, in a full-­grown adult, cannot but be associated with tall lanky stature. Thus the attenuation of Christ’s limbs turns out to be a structural, functional expedient—­it helps disguise the real diminution of the male body. But the reduction of the Christ’s actual size is only the easiest of the artist’s decisions.

Figure 2.10. Michelangelo, Roman Pietà, head of Christ.

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Figure 2.11. Michelangelo, Roman Pietà, from above.

Second. He further reduced its extension by exploiting the body’s every vital junction. Every major joint in the body is flexed to curtail its overall length from head to knee. To the head (fig. 2.10), he allowed only a minimal projection beyond the shoulders by letting it fall sharply sideways—­cutting deep folds—­at the base of the neck, and again under the jaw. The same at the waist—­but on the alternate side (fig. 2.2). At the lower end, extension is checked by genuflection. Less conspicuous but no less effective are the slight breaks both at groin and waist (we recall Ramdohr’s distress at the “overlong waist and hips”); they yield a requisite elasticity that allows the inward waist to crease about a deep fold (fig. 1.2). Thus every joint in the body contributes its play, like an articulated chain, loosely flung, changing direction from link to link; with the result that the total length of the body is abridged, imperceptibly, without indignity. But Michelangelo did something more, something

unprecedented: every other independent treatment of the theme, whether in drawing, painting, or sculpture, disposes the body of Christ parallel to the picture plane, stretched and arched in a two-­dimensional curve from head to foot (figs. 2.5–­2.9). And Michelangelo, as so often, honors tradition by making his Christ seem to do likewise. But in fact, the disposition of the corpse is serpentine, and only seems to preserve the plane by the drop of the arm and the return of the head (fig. 1.2). Yet the whole trunk forms a crescent; it plots a three-­ dimensional curve about the Virgin, while its bight dips, hammock-­like, between her thighs, and at the same time winding about her. The body bends like an accordion, compressed on the inside of the curve, tensed on its exterior. This remarkable crescent formed by the torso is best seen in bird’s-­eye view (fig. 2.11). Or, in terms of the agents engaged, the Virgin leans over him as his trunk winds about her, forming a reciprocity, like one’s two hands clasping, a close-­knit bond engineered for compactness.

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Now you may by this time have grown slightly irritated by my soulless descriptions of Michelangelo’s decisions from an engineering point of view. For it is surely obvious that the expedients discussed are more richly charged. As Christ’s body crescents about the Virgin and she canopies him, the figures enlace one another in a human love knot. The overt subject is a survivor’s grief mourning a corpse, a corpse from which active feeling ought to be drained along with its life. But here the dead body, itself enfolded, folds about a loved form. The mutual accord of the two figures in winding about one another expresses communion. So what Michelangelo has contrived—­to contain the two bodies within one instantly perceived unity—­is codetermined by the demands of emotional expressiveness. And if we ask which consideration came first—­ the need for the appropriate emotional charge, or the compositional need for containment—­the answer must be that we cannot tell, because the artist’s design is precisely the confluence of the two. And this design is codetermined by yet another necessity, no less pressing: the imperative to project the theological import of the event. This point deserves a few moments’ attention, because it is bodied theology we are looking at. The type of the Pietà emerged in Germany during the 1300s, spreading quickly westward and south, and one of its constant features was the requisite display of Christ’s wounds, the ostentatio vulnerum (figs. 2.12, 2.13, 1.64). I have looked at hundreds, marveling at the twists and turns which the sculptor or painter gives to the corpse to keep each stigma in evidence. We are presented with a fundamental argument of christology: this God who assumed a human body to die in, he retains on that body the man-­made marks of his Passion, and will show them again and again—­at the Resurrection and at the Second Coming. The five wounds are the believer’s assurance that this is that hurting flesh wherein incarnate godhead underwent sacrificial death. This is the Creed, and it informs the design of nearly every Pietà. The showing of the stigmata is simply part of the subject. This is why, in the Michelangelo, too, both hands and the hover-

Figure 2.12. Giovanni da Milano, Pietà. Formerly Le Roy

Collection, Paris.

ing feet appear so demonstrative, as if in gestures of mute assertion. A theological consideration accounts as well for Michelangelo’s uniquely inventive emphasis on the side wound, the stigma of special eminence; for, as St. Augustine says: “there flowed from it blood and water, and these we know to be the Sacraments by which the Church is ‘built up.’”10 Artists of the Trecento understood this doctrine well enough to make the Virgin attentive to the side wound, and the tradition they represent was part of Michelangelo’s immediate Florentine heritage, as of Catholic art generally (figs. 2.14, 2.15, 5.6, 5.12). He may have Figure 2.13. (opposite top) Circle of Konrad Witz, Pietà, c. 1440.

New York, Frick Collection; Gift of Miss Helen Clay Frick. Figure 2.14. (opposite bottom left) Neapolitan follower of Giotto,

Madonna and Dead Christ, 1330s–­1340s. London, National Gallery.

Figure 2.15. (opposite bottom right) Martin Schongauer, Man of

Sorrows, c. 1470–­75.

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Figure 2.16. Michelangelo, Roman Pietà, detail of the Virgin’s right hand and Christ’s side wound.

known the Schongauer—­the earliest recorded Michelangelo work was a painting after a Schongauer print—­or Robetta’s copy of it (Hind 39), and noted the Virgin’s splayed fingers as they bracket the wound (fig. 2.16). I call Michelangelo’s treatment of the motif “uniquely inventive” because, unlike Schongauer, he makes the splay of the Virgin’s fingers not an incident that one could conceivably alter or think away, but a determinant of the work’s overall structure. In his Pietà, Christ’s whole torso is flexed into an arc such as no dead body would perform on its own. We are given a tense circumflexion disguised as relaxation; therefore, despite all appearance of calm, we must presume a strong inward pull exerted by the Virgin’s right hand—­stretching, distending the right side of the chest, while displaying the wound. What transpires, then, when we notice the crescent curve of Christ’s body, is a threefold determination: it serves to reduce the body’s extension in

the interest of compactness; it conveys mutual love by the entwining of bodies; and it makes a requisite theological demonstration. I suspect that most of Michelangelo’s decisions are similarly overdetermined: by affect, symbolism, and the dictates of structure. And each of these factors alone may be conceived as sufficient, depending on one’s point of departure. If you believe that religion counts and that no decent Renaissance artist would scant the expectations of a high ecclesiastical patron, you will argue that a religious commission for a chapel adjoining St. Peter’s must have kept theological symbolism uppermost in the artist’s mind, outranking considerations of either facture or sentiment. But suppose your strongest suit is receptiveness to the expression of emotion in art, with a bias perhaps in the direction of love. Since amor vincit omnia—­ not excluding professionalism and the lore of the pulpit—­you will apprehend the Pietà as a Liebestod first, surpassing the love-­deaths of even Tristan or Juliet. In your perception, then, the sustaining force behind the artist’s concetto is the expression of love, with theology and sculptural craft instrumental at best. A steadfast formalist, on the other hand, might insist that an artist is always a maker first, and that the thing he makes must work as a structure. Before this overriding concern even religion and pathos retreat. Yet all three terms coalesce in Michelangelo’s thought and coincide in the solution. We have seen the coincidence operate in the design of the circumflexion, the dead torso’s swerve which, as it shortens extensions, encompasses the beloved and projects the chest wound. A comparable coincidence results again from what I coldly called the exploitation of the joints for the reduction of the body’s overall length. The effect of this loose-­jointedness is to suggest not only a physique of refinement and suppleness, but a state of relaxed repose. The very pliancy of Christ’s body—­ its intimate adaptation to the maternal lap—­conveys, beyond the apparent death, some profounder satisfaction of harmony. The body seems bedded down, resistless and sunk in the mother’s lap as on a yielding couch.

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Figure 2.17. Roman sarcophagus, Hector’s Body Returned to Troy, c. 180–­200. Paris, Musée du Louvre.

Whether Michelangelo was here moved by that mysterious metaphor of the Virgin as “couch,” I do not know; but the word “couch” had been an epithet of the Virgin, or of her womb, for almost a thousand years. St. Gregory had called Mary’s womb “the bridal bed of the royal spouse.” St. Bernard calls the Virgin “the Bridegroom’s chamber, the golden couch of the living Solomon.” And San Bernardino of Siena, whose collected sermons were published three years before the Pietà was begun, hails the Virgin as “Bride of God, Triple couch of the whole Trinity, and the special reclining couch of God’s Son.”11 This is not a point I would push in a literal sense, as if Michelangelo were a sort of illustrator of foregone poetics. But if we ask what might have led

Michelangelo to envisage the lithe ease of Christ’s corpse, we will have to answer by observing what this loose-­jointedness actually does accomplish, and assume that what it accomplishes was intended. We will then have to say, as a minimum, that this pliancy of the body serves, first, to check its extension—­let that go under the head of engineering. Secondly, that its relaxed abandon is emotionally affecting—­it speaks to that intuition in us which recognizes the erotic charge in the metaphor of the couch. And thirdly, that this same supple ease of the body conveys, once again, as in the instance of the stigmata, a crucial theological message. For what exactly is the condition of this body? Sixty years before the Pietà was carved, Alberti had formu-

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lated a rule for the representation of corpses. Make sure, he advised, to show every limb totally flaccid and lifeless. And he cited as praiseworthy an antique representation in which the dead hero, Meleager, weighs down those who carry him. In every one of his members he appears completely dead—­everything hangs, hands, fingers and head; everything falls heavily. Anyone who tries to express a dead body . . . knows how to make each member of a body flaccid. . . . The members of the dead should be dead to the very nails; of live persons every member should be alive in the smallest part [fig. 2.17].12

Does Michelangelo’s Christ pass this test? Is his Christ dead—­only dead? So apparently it seemed to the sixteenth-­century writers who refer to the matter, such as Vasari and Lomazzo. Lomazzo, a former painter turned theorist, writing in 1584, commends the figure to artists as a model of how to get a corpse right. The English translation of 1598 reads: Michelangelo in a dead Christ cut in marble in his mother’s lap, which is to been seene in S. Peters in the Vatican, wherein appeare the true motions of death; because all the limbs are made hanging, without any vigour or strength to sustaine themselves. Which we ought the more diligently to observe, lest we fall into the errours of such as give quicke motions unto dead parts, making them seeme as if they were able to support and sustaine themselves.13

So Lomazzo holds up this figure as a model of corpse-­like behavior. But Lomazzo was writing from memory, after he’d gone blind. Vasari, who had his sight, was able to say much the same thing only by putting on blinkers. He heaps praise on the Pietà, and observes among other things that “no corpse was ever more corpse-­like than this.”14 But Vasari likes things one way or the other, and dislikes ambiguity; ambiguity troubles him, and he tries to think it away, whether he finds it in the work or in the man. So, at the end of his life of Michelangelo, he reports: “In his conversation he tended to

be close-­mouthed and ambiguous, the things he said having almost two senses.”15 Vasari here is ill at ease, and it is interesting to find that the passage occurs only in the first, 1550 edition of his Lives. In the definitive, expanded edition of 1568, published four years after Michelangelo’s death and apotheosis, the hero’s image is, as it were, cleaned up; the passage is deleted, and there’s no further reference to any simultaneous “two senses” in Michelangelo—­not in the master’s speech, not in his works. And so the Christ of the Pietà remains for Vasari the deadest-­looking corpse ever made. This may tell us something about the shortcomings of sixteenth-­century art literature, especially when it praises, but does it tell us much about Michelangelo’s work? I once asked some pre-­med students at the University of Pennsylvania whether they thought this body was dead; they laughed. Because, like a sleeper, this body clearly displays muscle tone, especially in the bent right arm and the gesturing of the hands.16 And how can this be, since Michelangelo, who had dissected corpses, must have understood that there’s no muscle tone in the dead? Nor is it only a matter of muscle tone. Michelangelo must have known that at the moment of death the surface veins flatten out. Yet the veins on the feet, arms, and hands of his Christ are engorged (fig. 2.18). This anomaly of the blooded veins was noticed, and commented on, by one Dr. William H. Crosby of Boston in a 1972 letter to the Journal of the American Medical Association. Speaking of our Pietà, Dr. Crosby says: “Not only does the mother look younger than her son, but blood fills the veins of the Crucified Christ (what, no valves?).” He regards these features as “evidence of Michelangelo’s lack of concern for such anatomical niceties”—­and as proof that Michelangelo, as he puts it, was not “really with it.”17 Back in 1920, the same observation turned up in a French book, Les licences de l’art chrétien by Dr. G. J. Witkowski. “People have criticized the conspicuous veins on the arm of the Christ of the Pietà. . . . But they forget that the Redeemer is only apparently dead, since he is due to rise again on the third day.”18

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“Only apparently dead”? God forbid: Dr. Witkowski is getting warm, but he has carelessly lapsed into heresy. The orthodox Christian dogma is a more intractable mystery: as the incarnate Christ is wholly God and wholly man, so the death of his human body is to be understood as a true death. In the central mystery of Christ’s two natures, his death was the very death of the body, but his divine nature, still wedded to that dead body, remained awake and alive. In the words of St. Leo (fifth century), “Jesus Christ . . . mediator between God and man, was able to die in respect of the one, unable to die in respect of the other.”19 Before the age of Drs. Witkowski and Crosby, before the modern alienation from the mythical roots of Christianity, every Christian artist would have known

Figure 2.18. Michelangelo, Roman Pietà, detail of Christ’s right arm with engorged veins.

the mystery of the two natures of Christ, and might try to make the abiding vitality of the divine nature within the corpse his true subject. And some would have striven to render this mystery within their proper idiom—­by way of anatomic anomaly. Hence the assertively blood-­filled veins in numerous images of the late Quattrocento—­and so down to that arch-­ realist Caravaggio (figs. 2.19–­2.21). These features do not betray anatomical ignorance, but a Christian mystery understood and made manifest. In the Michelangelo, the mystery of divine life within human death is further confirmed by the unmistakable gesturing of the Christ: by the left hand—­ and by the right middle finger extended against the joint; and that right hand in a telling gesture, caress-

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Figure 2.19. (top left) Giovanni Bellini, Pietà, c. 1465. Milan, Pinacoteca di Brera. Figure 2.20. (bottom left) Antonello da Messina, Dead

Christ Supported by an Angel,

1475–­76. Madrid, Museo Nacional del Prado. Figure 2.21. (bottom right) Caravaggio, Entombment, 1602–­3. Pinacoteca Vaticana.

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Figure 2.22. Michelangelo, Roman Pietà, Christ’s left hand.

ing the hem of the Virgin’s gown—­like a child asleep (figs. 2.18, 2.22). Of course, Michelangelo knew that the dead have no muscle tone, as his dead Christ has. Did he then fail to heed Alberti’s prescription? I think on the contrary: he read it more imaginatively, less mechanically, than Vasari and Lomazzo did. For Alberti’s remarks on the requisite lifelessness of depicted corpses are introduced by the more general principle that in an istoria, a narrative representation, every limb should be consonant with its function.20 Michelangelo understood that the function of the dead body of Christ differs from all other corpses—­and that difference was his subject. Thus the image he created is not an inaccuracy; it is rather a direct expression within his metaphoric idiom of the Perichoresis—­the reciprocal inherence of the two natures of Christ in each other. Hence these clear signs of life in what Vasari admired as “the deadest-­ looking of corpses.” Michelangelo’s Christ is, in St. Paul’s phrase, “the firstfruits of them that slept.” Its inaccuracy as a corpse is the pledge of its waking—­ the promise of Resurrection, the Christian hope. And so the suppleness of the joints which served Michelangelo to diminish the body’s extension and thus to contain the two figures within one compact cone, and which conveys the feeling of intimate nesting against the maternal body—­this suppleness also projects that sense of relaxed slumber which denotes a central mystery of the faith. Again a coincidence of engineering, emotional charge, and theology.

What about the smallness of the Christ figure, along with the crescent bend and the multiple flexions, the third of those three expedients Michelangelo used to check the length of the body? Here again Michelangelo had a long tradition to draw on. For though his group was novel in many respects, the type of the Pietà, the grieving mother with the crucified son on her knees, had become increasingly common since its origins around 1300. The great French medievalist Émile Mâle, back in 1908, drew attention to the fact that in many of these Pietàs, the dead Christ was noticeably underscaled—­in German Vesperbilder of the fourteenth century and, most conspicuously, in French illuminations and carvings of the early fifteenth century (figs. 2.23–­2.25). Mâle writes: “By a singularity which at first seems inexplicable, this body is scarcely larger than that of an infant and fits entirely on the maternal lap. Is this a case of incompetence? By no means . . .”21 Mâle then offered an interesting explanation. He suggested that these artists were seeking to give visible expression to the Madonna’s subjective feelings; and he cited devotional texts that describe the Madonna’s painful memories at this moment, recalling the days in Bethlehem when she had held her son on her lap as an infant. Such as this from San Bernardino of Siena:“She thought that the days of Bethlehem had returned; she imagined that he was sleeping, that he was resting against her bosom; and the winding sheet in which he was enveloped, she imagined was his swaddling clothes.”22 Thus the smallness of the dead Christ—­still observable in German engravings and Italian paintings of the late Quattrocento (figs. 2.26, 5.42)—­was thought to be interpretable as an allusion to Mary’s subjective memory of his infancy. And this has long been found persuasive. But it does not seem entirely persuasive to me. Let me digress for a moment. Among the devotional images that emerged in the fourteenth century, the Pietà is but one. Another is the Trinity or Throne of Grace—­where God the Father holds the crucifix between his knees. By the latter fifteenth century, following the demands of naturalism, the figure of the Son came to be scaled to agree with that of the Father (fig. 1.45). But this had not always been so. The intention in earlier Trinities, such

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Figure 2.23. (top left) Pietà, late 14th century. Trier, Germany, Bischöfliches Dom-­und Diözesanmuseum. Figure 2.24. (top right) Rohan Hours, Pietà, 1410–­15. Paris, Bibliothèque Nationale de France, Ms. lat. 9471, fol. 41. Figure 2.25. (bottom left) Pietà, c. 1400. Saint-­André-­du-­Nom-­de-­ Dieu, Saint-­André-­de-­Cubzac (Gironde). Figure 2.26. (bottom right) Master E. S., Lamentation, 1460s. London, British Museum.

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Figure 2.28. Austrian, Trinity with Christ Crucified, c. 1410.

London, National Gallery.

Figure 2.27. Jacopo di Cione and shop, Trinity, from the San Pier

Maggiore Altarpiece, 1370–­71. London, National Gallery.

as figs. 2.27 and 2.28, is surely not to allude to the Father’s subjective memory of a littler Christ, but to reveal the Father in one particular role: as the Merciful Father receiving the “Acceptable Sacrifice” spoken of in the Petition of the Mass.23 The Father appears in willing reception of the sacrificed Son; in his character as the reconciled Father, the crucifix is his attribute.

And how big does an attribute have to be? As a general rule, any size, preferably portable. In a German engraving of five Old Testament Patriarchs—­from left to right, Adam, Noah, Moses, Abraham, David—­Adam’s apple at the far left is life-­size, but Noah’s ark, though it housed the entire animal kingdom, is no larger than David’s lyre at the far right (fig. 2.29).24 The principle holds for yet another devotional image evolved in the fourteenth century—­that of St. Anne with the Virgin Mary and the Christ Child. The subject is most familiar to us in High Renaissance works, where the grandmother’s lap has to accommodate her full-­grown daughter (figs. 2.30, 1.56, 1.57). But again, as we go back in time through the fifteenth century—­ especially in German art—­we find the Virgin and Child diminishing with respect to St. Anne (fig. 2.31). They can end up as small as St. Barbara’s attribute of a tower (figs. 2.32, 2.33). The same holds for Trecento Italy (fig. 1.47): we realize that the smaller scale of the Virgin and Child, or the relative oversize of St. Anne (which to the Renaissance might have seemed monstrous) was meant to characterize St. Anne—­with the progeny of the Virgin-­and-­Child as her attribute.25 And just so in our devotional image of the Pietà from

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Figure 2.29. (top left) Nicolas Hogenberg after Titian, The

Patriarchs, 1524. London, British Museum.

Figure 2.30. (top right) Girolamo dai Libri, Madonna and Child with St. Anne, 1510–­15. London, National Gallery. Figure 2.31. (bottom right) Israhel van Meckenem, St. Anne, the

Madonna, and Child. London, British Museum.

1350 to 1550 (figs. 2.23–­2.25): the subject is the bereaved mother’s sorrow, and the dead Christ, underscaled, is the attribute of the Mater Dolorosa; he is to her what she-­and-­her-­son are to St. Anne, what Isaac is to Abraham, the ark to Noah, the tower to St. Barbara. The symbolism of late medieval art could treat even the human figure, even the Christ, as the descriptive or defining attribute of another person; accepting the diminished scale of the attribute as part of the syntax. But to Renaissance artists, such violence done to normal human proportions became unacceptable. And this may explain a phrase in the contract for the Michelangelo Pietà, dated August 1498. The contract is famous for its last sentence, in which the young sculptor, through his agent, promises that “this will be the most beautiful

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Figure 2.32. Mechelen, St. Anne, the Madonna, and Child, c. 1520. Utrecht, Museum Catharijneconvent.

Figure 2.33. Northern French, St. Barbara, c. 1500. New York, Metropolitan Museum of Art; Gift of Mrs. Solomon R. Guggenheim, 1950.

work in marble that Rome has ever seen, such that no master today would make it better.” (It’s as if a twenty-­ three-­year-­old writer today were to sign a publishing contract, undertaking to produce the greatest book ever written.) But in the sentence preceding that final boast, we read that what the contract calls for is “a clothed Virgin Mary with the dead Christ in her arms”; and then, “grande quanto sia uno homo iusto”—­“of the proper size of a man.”26 This could be a routine indication of

scale; but I note that no dimensions are stipulated for the group as a whole, or for the Virgin. The contract says that the Virgin is to hold the dead Christ in her arms, but that his figure is to be of natural size. In other words, Michelangelo promised a miracle: to make the adult Christ figure fit on his mother’s knees, without reducing it to puppet or baby size. Reduce it he did—­ but with such tact and cunning that no one noticed. Among the criticisms the Pietà has suffered, one hears no complaint about relative proportions.

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clesia’s offering. One may doubt—­as perhaps some of you will—­whether Michelangelo considered this possible eucharistic meaning when he scaled the Christ’s body; we can never know this with assurance. But it is certain that such allusiveness is ruled out in those more realistically proportioned Pietàs of a later date, where the son’s body is allowed to outscale that of the mother (fig. 2.35). We may agree, at any rate, that Michelangelo’s diminution of Christ’s body was a success. Without giving offense or even attracting attention, it works on all levels. Thus the three major decisions Michelangelo made to accommodate the man’s body on the lap of the woman—­its crescent bend, its multiple flexions, its diminution—­all appear at least triply charged, promoting compactness, expressiveness, and incarnate theology.

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Figure 2.34. Giulio Bonasone after Raphael, Pietà. New York, Metropolitan Museum of Art; Purchase, Joseph Pulitzer Bequest, 1917.

However one interprets the disproportion, the subtle diminution of the son’s body in Michelangelo’s Pietà clearly honors an old tradition. And once again it satisfies on at least three counts. First: the reduced scale of the son is directly expressive—­whether of the bereaved mother’s subjective memories, or simply as an objective allusion to the order of mother and child. Second: the reduction is indispensable to the structural coordination of the unified group. Third: it is symbolic in making the dead Christ the attribute of the grieving mother. And symbolic perhaps in a graver sense. For in Catholic tradition since the Middle Ages, the Virgin is mystically equated with Ecclesia, the Church (fig. 2.34).27 And the Church, in the sacrament of the mass, performs, with respect to Christ, a maternal function, in that it perpetually engenders Christ’s sacrificial body. Thus the Christ in the Roman Pietà may be seen as Ec-

But these decisions are almost tame compared to what Michelangelo contrived for the Virgin. Remember, the question is still how he managed the miracle of integrating two disparate figures, supine against upright, in one intelligible, harmonious whole. We still see a grown man mysteriously fitted to a young woman’s lap. To enable this lap to contain Christ’s extended length, the sculptor keeps expanding the Virgin’s physique from the top down. The augmentation begins at her head, a small head enveloped in many layers of drapery. And this superfluity of cloth, rather than the head itself, scales the next phase. Those turbulent draperies mask a continuous escalation of shoulders, bosom, and waist; they luxuriate about knees and legs that seem measureless. Something amazing is happening here, and Milizia caught some of it when he recoiled from a “washerwoman’s shoulders.” Venturing beyond the sweetness of Mary’s face, he perceived, as none had before, that her head and shoulders were not of one measure. The sculptor has poised the head of a delicate girl upon the immense frame of an Earth Mother.28 The result is a solution to that problem of coordination which had baffled all previous attempts. The solution is found in the anatomic anomaly of continually escalating proportions—­plunging from an

t he roma n pietÀ

Figure 2.35. Attributed to Nicolas Legendre (d. 1671), Pietà. Paris,

Saint-­Merri.

exquisite summit down to the broad expanse of a terraced lap, bordered by thighs unimaginable. But this solution—­the joining of maiden or girlish features and pylon limbs fronting the God-­bearer’s womb—­this conjunction is only as anomalous as the paradox of maid and mother. Thus the dual proportionate system assigned to the Madonna’s body, an essential device in the engineering of the unified group—­imperceptible almost, being so subtly disguised—­this duality in the proportions affirms the central Christian mystery of virgin motherhood. Needless to say, nothing in Renaissance theory permits such affronts to the human measure. The sculptor’s discreet reordering of Mary’s body should have been intolerable. It flouts every standard of naturalism and rationality. Yet the work became a paradigm of High Renaissance style, because these grotesque anatomic distortions were so subtly disguised. They were masked by that opulent drapery which so disturbed the great Wölfflin, and which I, in my younger years, attributed to the young Michelangelo’s irrepressible virtuosity. Now, having tried to rethink

the problem Michelangelo set himself—­as structure, as expression of feeling, and as theological symbol—­I am beginning to understand how profoundly functional these luxuriant draperies are. What they mask is yet another of the artist’s secret decisions, one even more preposterous than the disproportions discussed so far. The sculpture was designed to rest on an altar. The approximate height of the original installation—­probably with the viewer’s eye level at the base of the sculpture or below—­is suggested by the way Christ’s body, more precisely his pelvis and thighs, rest on the Virgin’s lap—­not horizontally, but on an inclined plane.29 To make the whole of Christ’s body show from below, including even the averted left hand, the body’s supporting plane is tipped and banked toward the viewer—­an expedient which had long been standard practice in Italian tomb sculpture, as in Desiderio da Settignano’s effigy of Carlo Marsuppini in Santa Croce, the great Franciscan church in Michelangelo’s home parish in Florence, where the effigy is tipped 35 degrees to the horizontal (fig. 2.36). And this is Michelangelo’s recourse in the bedding he gives to the recumbent Christ. That’s why the left thigh of Christ rests so much higher than his right (fig. 2.2). Now my question is: how did Michelangelo get the Virgin’s left leg to provide that required slope, since she bends her knee at a right angle, which should keep her thigh horizontal? To understand the artist’s solution, we must look at the work from the right (fig. 2.37). The Virgin is seated on the flat upper surface of a wide rocky perch. And now I must ask you to try to imagine the Virgin’s body under her clothing, and to ask the irreverent question: what is the shape of her thigh from buttock to knee? Would you believe that her left knee falls below the right knee of the Christ? How on earth will it get there—­not surely by way of a normal thigh? What we find is a thigh that issues way up high from a dwarfed torso, and that proceeds with a sort of drop step, a drastic internal break, toward the knee, so as to allow the banking of the dead body; bringing the body down from an artificially raised lap and shortened torso

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Figure 2.36. Desiderio

da Settignano, Tomb of Carlo Marsuppini, 1459. Florence, Santa Croce.

Figure 2.37. Michelangelo, Roman Pietà, view from right.

to an artificially lowered knee. And this is an even more preposterous violation of Renaissance theory than the Virgin’s dual proportions. But only one group of people ever noticed this violation: they are the artists who were charged with making copies of the work—­like the little bronze replica in Baltimore (fig. 2.38).30 The copyists invariably correct that grotesque break in the thigh and that stunted torso—­because they would not believe that Michelangelo’s magisterial art could be guilty of such monstrous rule-­breaking. The rest of humankind never noticed, which is a measure of the artist’s success. I must say, I do love his courage, the independence of an artist at twenty-­three, who, beyond all expectation, satisfies the demands of his contemporaries for expressiveness, beauty, and realism—­by secretly breaking their most cherished rules. Some years ago, I was told by a mature artist that when she was studying in the 1950s and ’60s, the sculptor teaching her class would tell students to study Michelangelo by all means, but to keep away from the Pietà: it’s too sentimental, he said. Of course we can see what he meant. But if he and his students had looked long enough to get past the work’s sweetness—­its bait

t he roma n pietÀ

Figure 2.38. After

Michelangelo’s Roman Pietà, 17th century. Baltimore, Walters Art Museum.

of beauty—­they might have found that what makes the Pietà inimitable is its toughness, the bravery and the wildness of the decisions embodied in it. And don’t be misled by the Virgin’s face. To have made such delicacy, such tenderness, compelling enough to overwhelm the immensity of that hulk of body is nothing less than sheer power. I come at last to the most conspicuous of Michelangelo’s violations: the image of a mother manifestly younger than her son. The enormity of this solecism becomes the more apparent when we consider the tradition of the Pietà as an iconic type. The word pietà—­the Italian

for “pity”—­was assigned to it gradually from the late fifteenth century on.31 But the type, as I said before, originated in Germany after c. 1300 to represent the virgin mother, age forty-­seven, alone in her grief over her crucified son. Obviously, there was never such a historical moment. As the Gospels recount the story of the Crucifixion, the body had to be quickly taken down and laid in its sepulcher before the fall of the Sabbath. No time to indulge in private grief. And it was pointed out long ago that the type of the Pietà grew out of medieval devotional poetry.32 It arose from the need to provide a religious focus for personal sorrow, especially the sorrow

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Figure 2.39. Pietà, Salzburg, c. 1420–­30. Vienna, Graphische Sammlung Albertina.

of bereaved mothers. Hence the early Pietàs, which are almost invariably made of humble materials, small in scale—­stylistically somewhat naive in the way of folk art, though they can be fiercely expressive (fig. 1.10). Designed for private devotion, meditation, and solace, they tend to be inconspicuously placed in churches, sometimes three or four in one church. By the early fifteenth century, the subject is taken up in the new art of printmaking—­obviously for private domestic meditation; and it proliferates throughout the 1400s, the moods expressed ranging from resignation to wildest grief (figs. 2.39, 2.40). In painting, the type took hold particularly in Northern Italy, in the decades immediately preceding Michelangelo’s work (figs. 2.6, 2.41, 1.11). We have seen numerous other examples. Given this wide diffusion of the type, Michelangelo’s life-­size, marble Pietà is unexpectedly new. It is new in the preciousness of its material, in its scale and monumentality; in its

Figure 2.40. Hans Weiditz II, Pietà, c. 1522.

physical loveliness, and serene melancholy; but above all, in the extreme youth of the mother. Some modern critics refuse to make this a problem. Those still inclined to psychoanalysis point out that Michelangelo’s own mother died in her mid-­twenties, when her talented son was not yet seven years old; so the young artist’s personal image of motherhood must have been one of youth.33 But as an explanation this is inadequate. For the work was commissioned by a prominent cardinal for a public chapel, and no sane artist would inject an anomalous personal note, unless he felt it to be appropriate to the subject. So the question remains why the artist would have thought it fitting to make the mother younger than her son—­bringing them into harmony by closing the generation gap. You can see the sixteenth-­century copyists of Michelangelo’s work resisting: Lorenzetto in 1531 (fig. 1.4) in a life-­size marble adaptation made for Santa

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Figure 2.41. Cosimo Tura, Pietà, 1474. Paris, Musée du Louvre.

Maria dell’Anima, Rome, where the fainting languor of Michelangelo’s Christ gives way to the torpor of death; and the mother has left youthful beauty behind. You recognize a resistance again in the 1549 copy by Nanni di Baccio Bigio in Florence, whose comparative coarseness must to some extent be deliberate (fig. 1.9). The artist may or may not have responded, as Vasari did, to the “bellezza” of the original—­to the common intuition that what Vasari called its “sweet air and concordance” depends precisely on the pliancy of Christ’s limbs in adapting to Mary’s. Nanni’s copy, at any rate, emphasizes an unrelaxed, cramping rigidity, and in the Virgin’s head he replaces frail girlish beauty with mature fullness of cheek and neck to accord with the massive build of her frame. These alterations, in a copy that purports to reproduce a revered model, suggest a rebuke to the original; they correct its erotic appeal. One comes to similar conclusions in comparing Salamanca’s 1547 engraving, where the abandon of the original Christ figure is replaced in the upper body by an iconic uprightness, or in the copy of c. 1560 by Juan Bautista Vázquez in Avila (figs. 1.6, 2.42). What is implicitly criticized in all these copies is the

exquisite elegance of the youthful male body conjoined with the adolescent bloom of the Virgin. Michelangelo had erased the generation gap between mother and son. You remember that this was also the first explicit verbal reproach leveled at Michelangelo’s work. And no wonder; if one considers the “corrections” made by the copyists, and, on the other hand, the agonized Pietàs that prevailed in European art to the end of the 1400s, Michelangelo’s Roman Pietà stands forth as an interlude of disturbing beauty—­a moment wherein the subject’s traditional bitterness gives way to sweet sorrow, with the woman dear enough for a daughter, young enough to be widowed by the death of a lover. This anomaly, as I noted before, had come to be seen as a glaring fault by 1537, when Aretino referred to it. And ten years later, when Vasari was preparing his Michelangelo vita for its first edition, he felt it necessary to come to the master’s defense: “Though some fools say that he has made the Virgin too young, they ought to know that spotless virgins keep their youth for a long time, while people afflicted like Christ do the reverse.”34 Now Vasari meant well, but this defense of Michelangelo is irresponsible. The first part is common folklore, but what’s it doing here?35 He knew, as Mi-

t wo Figure 2.42. Juan Bautista Vázquez, copy of the Roman Pietà, c. 1560. Ávila Cathedral, Spain.

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chelangelo did, that there was a venerable tradition of depicting the grieving mother as old. And surely Michelangelo was not fantasizing a life of incontinence to grieving Madonnas, who do show their age in works by Masaccio, Mantegna, or Giovanni Bellini.36 Did Vasari think that these artists were fools—­unaware that virginity preserves the appearance of youth? Or that they were imputing unchastity to the Madonna in making her look old? Furthermore, Vasari’s antithesis is incoherent. He contrasts the youth-­preserving effect of virginity with the aging effect of affliction. But Christ too was a virgin and the Madonna too was afflicted. Her soul also was pierced by a sword (Luke 2:35). Vasari’s defense, then, brief as it is, is internally inconsistent. Its antithetical parts don’t agree. And this is why I suspect that Vasari garbled what he heard Michelangelo say.

Which may explain why Michelangelo repeated the argument—­at unusual length—­to his disciple Condivi, whose Michelangelo biography, published in 1553, was intended largely to rectify errors in the Vasari vita published three years before. On the question of the Virgin’s youth, Condivi quotes the master in a leisurely, discursive speech that reads as follows: Do you not know that chaste women retain their fresh looks much longer than those who are not chaste? How much more, therefore, a virgin in whom not even the least unchaste desire ever arose? And I tell you, moreover, that such freshness and flower of youth, besides being maintained in her by natural causes, may possibly have been ordained by the Di-

t he roma n pietÀ

vine Power to prove to the world the virginity and perpetual purity of the Mother. This was not necessary in the Son; but rather the contrary; wishing to show that the Son of God took upon himself a true human body subject to all the ills of man, excepting only sin; he did not allow the divine in him to hold back the human, but let it run its course and obey its laws. . . . Do not wonder then that I have, for all these reasons, made the most Holy Virgin, Mother of God, a great deal younger in comparison with her Son than she is usually represented. To the Son I have allotted his full age.37

Observe that Michelangelo’s statement consists of three parts, not two. The opening commonplace is cited—­and quickly surpassed. And what follows is a logical antithesis of parts two and three. Michelangelo’s argument does not, like Vasari’s, set Mary’s virginity in opposition to Christ’s affliction, as if Mary had not been afflicted; as if Christ had not been virgin. What he contrasts is the Madonna’s miraculously preserved youth as a symbol, a sign of perpetual virginity, with the natural aging of Christ as a sign of the incarnate God’s true humanity. On both bodies, we are to see the revelation of divine purpose. In other words, Michelangelo is arguing from theology, which Vasari, not untypically, drags down to the level of natural physiology. In the case of the Madonna, he says, it may have been necessary to prove her perpetual virginity by maintaining her in adolescent bloom through middle age. Whereas, in the case of Christ, it was necessary to prove his full humanity by letting him age according to human nature—­miraculous also, since, in the nature of things, a God does not age. This is sound doctrine; and it may have been good polemic. But I doubt its sincerity, if only because it does injustice to the exquisite youth of the Christ. Hardly a body that’s been subjected—­as Michelangelo says—­to “all the ills of man.” What, then, was Michelangelo, at twenty-­three, doing, as opposed to what, fifty years later, he said he’d been doing? St. Augustine wrote that “[Christ’s] flesh was mortal and subject to the changes of age, like the flesh of sin but without sin.”38 Is this a

depictable notion? Could it be that the task the young Michelangelo set himself was to make even this mystery visible? Would this account for the ideal precision of the body’s human anatomy, and at the same time, its high gloss, its gleaming whiteness, the childlike innocence of its sleep, and the ethereal lightness of limb; in short, an idea of cleanness in nature as never imaged before—­“ like the flesh of sin but without sin.” This, I think, is what we see, and the artist’s assertion that the process of aging and suffering in this figure had been allowed to run its natural course seems less than honest.39 We have to remember that the aged Michelangelo was offering his explanations to his biographers half a century after the Pietà had been conceived. His remarks belong to the 1550s, when he was past seventy-­ five; they do not necessarily reflect what he had thought, felt, and intended in his early twenties. Moreover, at the very moment that Michelangelo was offering his explanation to Condivi (i.e., the early 1550s), the Florentine Pietà was taking shape under his hands; and though the Madonna’s face remained unfinished, we can see that she would not have been young (fig. 1.14). Michelangelo at seventy-­five was allowing her also to age—­as scores of admired artists had done before him. I prefer to believe that when, under questioning, Michelangelo attributed the abiding youth of his early Mater Dolorosa to the preservative action of chastity, he was simply not being candid. As I now understand it, the statement he gave Condivi for publication was designed to explain something away without venting its secret. His “moralized physiology” served him as a defensive screen to justify the Madonna’s bridal radiance in mourning her son. For the Madonna, in liturgy and mystic theology, is the Bride of Christ, especially from the twelfth century on, when she began to draw to herself all the erotic imagery of the Old Testament Song of Songs. The Bridegroom of Canticles was long understood to be Christ and the Bride variously interpreted, most often as Ecclesia, the Church. But from the twelfth century on, Christ’s “Beloved” was also personified in the Madonna.40 This notion, however—­the Virgin as Bride of Christ—­was a mystic approximation, a poetic trope

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t wo Figure 2.43. Strasbourg school, Death of the Virgin, 1290–­1300, page cut from

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a martyrologium. Munich, Staatliche Graphische Sammlung.

that involved Mary and Church as interchangeable concepts. The woman whom these images designate as both mother and bride was, as it were, projected into preformed figures of speech. It was a poetic-­theological tradition that defined the Virgin mysteriously, in the words of the poet Petrarch: “Three dear sweet names are in thee combined, mother, daughter, and bride.”41 Vasari himself, at the end of the section devoted to the Roman Pietà, prints a madrigal written for the Santo Spirito copy (fig. 1.9). The closing words, addressed to the Virgin, invoke the Christ as “thy spouse, son and father,” and the Virgin as “thou his only spouse, daughter and mother.”42 Such formulations are orthodox in terms of the Christian creed. Insofar as the Trinity is one, and Christ is the Trinity’s Second Person, Mary is her Creator’s child, and in this sense the daughter of Christ. Yet, as the Trinity’s Second Person became flesh in her womb, she is his mother. But mystically, as Christ through his Incarnation is said to espouse the human condition, she, as exponent of human nature, is his bride, his beloved—­ and so she will be confirmed in heaven, where Mary becomes the consort of Christ. But this final symbolism has its dangers. Mary’s

mystic marriage to Christ must not be taken literally, lest it suggest the incestuous union of mother and son. Therefore, to avoid the least intimation of incest, the virgin mother as her son’s bride was visualized only in symbolic settings that were at the furthest remove from the life of the flesh: at Mary’s death, when a phantom Christ descends to receive her soul—­and the two of them fondly chuck one another under the chin (fig. 2.43); or at Mary’s Coronation in heaven, being joined to Christ by God the Father officiating (fig. 2.44). The late Tuscan Trecento produced a more daring image—­so daring that art historians did not face up to it until it was published recently in the Art Bulletin.43 We are shown the bridegroom’s embrace performed by the dead Christ, a motif revived in Northern Italy in the later Quattrocento (figs. 5.6–­5.13) When San Bernardino of Siena, c. 1420, described the Virgin at the Descent from the Cross as “rushing into his embraces and kisses, she could not be sated of her beloved, albeit dead,” I suspect that he was responding to such images. I call this a daring motif because here the embrace of the mystic bridegroom is retrojected to the historical moment of the Entomb-

t he roma n pietÀ

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Figure 2.44. Luca Signorelli, Coronation of the Virgin, 1508. San Diego Museum of Art.

ment. What nevertheless keeps such images safe and unsensual is the advanced age of the mother. And it is here that Michelangelo made his boldest decision. His Pietà evokes a terrestrial moment in which an adult Christ, in a body still warm from the Incarnation, enters the bridal symbolism. Michelangelo offers the Crucified as the beloved lover. In his vision, the ancient mystery of the mother as the bride of her son is sensualized—­charged with at least the possibility of desire. The mystical equation of mother and bride is neither relegated to heaven, nor to a labeling text, or to such disparity of age as would preserve a safe distance. Now both terms—­mother and bride—­ come to us fused in ambiguous simultaneity—­before the Incarnation had run its course. Here Michelangelo’s Counter-­Reformation critics and his cautious copyists might well feel their twinge of discomfort. And the artist, in the 1550s, confronted by the new wave of Counter-­Reformation censorship and suspicion of artistic freedom, had reason to disguise his original motives, for he had disturbed the traditional theme of the Pietà by conceiving it as a love tragedy.

I have been attacked for being scandalous on this point.44 But, looking at the Pietà, I see no reason to retreat. It was a deeply erotic conception which, I believe, inspired the Virgin’s youth. Michelangelo’s Pietà rendered the mother youthful enough to be mourning a lover, her bridegroom. The artist was offering—­in carnal embodiment—­what mystics had long expressed in the abstract idiom of words, as when Julian of Norwich, c. 1400, writes in her Showings: “Now the spouse, God’s Son, is at peace with his beloved wife, who is the fair maiden of endless joy.”45 For all its theological burden, Michelangelo’s Roman Pietà is ultimately, like the Song of Songs, a lovers’ dialogue. Half a century after its making, the artist himself shrank from admitting it; and others in every age have sought, and still seek, to deny it. But we all know. I think we have always known. One last word: I have called this talk “Michelangelo at Twenty-­Three” because it touches the turning point when a talented artist becomes a great artist: it is the moment when he forgets about what he can do to ask instead what art can do.

Three

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o Madonna earlier than the Medici Madonna sits with legs crossed.1 Michelangelo was either introducing a trivial motif from observation, or adapting a pagan precedent to the image of Virgin and Child (fig. 3.1). Pope-­Hennessy has observed that “the pose of the Virgin . . . derives from a Roman copy of a fifth-­century Greek statue of Penelope,” and he reproduces the well-­ known Vatican figure (fig. 3.5).2 But there is strong indication that a Hellenistic prototype closer to Michelangelo’s Virgin had been accessible, for the same type seems also to have inspired the first known antique borrowing in Tintoretto’s work. I refer to Tintoretto’s large Sacra Conversazione (fig. 3.3), his first dated work, inscribed 1540, when the artist was twenty-­two.3 The picture has not been known very long and has aroused little discussion beyond that of its attribution. For Pallucchini it merely “gave evidence of Mannerist and Michelangelesque elements.” James Stubblebine noted that “the Madonna recalls the sculptured Madonna in the Medici Chapel.” Most recently, Juergen Schulz described her as “copied from Michelangelo’s Medici Madonna.”4 The Tintoretto Madonna is indeed remarkably like the marble. Its early date shows the young Venetian

Figure 3.1. (opposite top left) Michelangelo, Medici Madonna,

1521–­34. Florence, San Lorenzo, Medici Chapel. Figure 3.2. (opposite top right) The Clio illustrated in fig. 3.6, shown in reverse. Oxford, Ashmolean Museum. Figure 3.3. (opposite bottom) Tintoretto, Sacra Conversazione, 1540. Private collection.

The Medici Madonna and Related Works

taking up Michelangelo’s innovation within a few years of the opening of the Medici Chapel to the public in the mid-­1530s. He produced his cross-­legged Virgin when the concetto must still have seemed unfamiliar and bold, and no one is likely to argue that the similarities between the two figures could be coincidental. On the other hand, it is probable that Tintoretto, who seems not to have visited Florence, never laid eyes on Michelangelo’s statue. My conviction that the marble was not Tintoretto’s immediate source derives first from the kind of difference that separates the two works. Michelangelo’s Madonna and Christ are one substance. Every impulse acted on by the mother is counterpointed by the will of the child. The mother presses forward to the child’s backward thrust. To the possessive grasp of his left hand she lowers a yielding shoulder, bows down as the child seems to rise. As his legs spread and his arms cross, her arms open and her legs close. And, most significantly, if we rethink the sculptor’s initial thought as it projects the two bodies into the block—­conceive them in plan as well as in contour and elevation—­then the child turns and swerves on his axis within the hard core of the stone, while the Madonna’s slow counter-­rotation, from her retracted right hand to the hovering tip of her foot, forms an encompassing orbit. Michelangelo did indeed use an antique type for the Madonna; but rather than imitating its formal action, he re-­created it as the consequence of its efficient cause. His two figures Originally published in the Burlington Magazine, 113 (March 1971), pp. 145–­49.

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Figure 3.4. (left) Hellenistic Muse. Plate 98 from Jan de Bisschop,

Signorum veterum icones (Amsterdam, 1669). Figure 3.5. ( right) Penelope, Roman copy of Greek original. Musei

Vaticani, Museo Pio-­Clementino.

exist together in a perpetual reaffirmation of complementarity; their every motion is responsive, reciprocal. And Tintoretto’s Madonna? Her child is visibly heaven-­sent, substantially distinct from her own body which, as in earlier iconic art, serves the child as throne, couch, or postament. Whatever similarity exists between Tintoretto’s picture and Michelangelo’s marble refers to the female figure alone, and to that figure as self-­existent. Whence it seems probable that his direct model was not Michelangelo’s symbiotic pair, but rather a single female figure to which Michelangelo’s example might have drawn his attention. Such a figure exists, though its early history cannot be traced back past the beginning of the seventeenth century. It appears among the etchings that compose Jan de Bisschop’s anthology of notable statues, the Signorum

veterum icones (Amsterdam, 1669). De Bisschop’s plate 98 reproduces the statue of a draped muse, seated like the Vatican Penelope on a stone pedestal and with legs crossed (fig. 3.4). But instead of the severe coordinates of the Early Classic Penelope (fig. 3.5), the etching indicates the more fluid animation of a Hellenistic model. The parallel folds that fall in ornamental striation over the Penelope’s upper body become, in the Hellenistic figure, a chiton gathered under the breasts. Remove her restored head and restored rising arm, and her kinship with Michelangelo’s Virgin, even to the stepped stone pedestal, becomes unmistakable.5 De Bisschop’s Icones was published more than 150 years after the Medici Madonna had been conceived. But the time lapse is reducible. To begin with, plate 98 is one of sixteen in his anthology that bear the monogram of Jacques de Gheyn. And the statue it represents is identifiable as a work formerly in the collection of Thomas Howard, Earl of Arundel. The de Gheyn in

t he medic i ma d onna a n d r el at e d wor k s

Figure 3.6. Clio. Roman copy of a Hellenistic sculpture, 1st–­2nd

century AD. Oxford, Ashmolean Museum.

question was Jacques de Gheyn III (1595/96–­1641), who visited Arundel’s collection in 1618.6 Since the acquisitions which Lord Arundel was making in Greece did not reach England until 1628, we are assured that any Arundeliana seen by de Gheyn in 1618 was purchased in Italy before this date. Their Italian provenance was not recorded. But the subsequent fate of a few of them can be traced. Our figure, after its first publication by de Bisschop in 1669, reappears as a line engraving in Richard Chandler’s Marmora Oxoniensa (1763, pl. VIII), then as a Clio Méditant in Comte de Clarac, Musée de Sculpture Antique et Moderne (Paris, 1839–­41, vol. 3, pl. 498A, no.

990A), and finally in 1882, in Adolf Michaelis’s important work on antiquities in Great Britain.7 The statue (fig. 3.6) is still in Oxford, exhibited in the Randolph Gallery of the Ashmolean Museum and now identified as the muse Clio, with scroll in hand. We also reproduce it in reverse (fig. 3.2) to make the comparison clearer. Michaelis’s description of the statue is generous, even though he is as unimpressed by its merits as he is generally by the Arundel antiques: “If we measure [the earl’s] aspirations by the results, certainly most of the sculptures of Italian origin which are still to be found . . . in Oxford, seem rather insignificant” (pp. 8–­9). Of our muse he remarks (p. 549) that “the execution of the statue is only decorative, but by reason of the motive (cf. the ‘Penelope’) the effect is good.” He tentatively accepts the traditional identification of the subject as the historical muse, because of the roll in her left hand “which is a common attribute of Kleio.” And he itemizes the parts restored (all of which, save the projecting foot, have since been removed). In one point, Michaelis’s description is of crucial interest. “The figure,” he remarks, “was intended . . . to be placed against a wall, for the back is perfectly smooth.” This smooth back characterizes the Ashmolean marble as a statue planned—­unlike the Vatican Penelope—­for a frontal view. For the Penelope is designed as a side elevation to be seen from the left. As Helbig observes, “its viewing aspect [Ansichtsseite] is unambiguously the left side worked as a plane.”8 And every ancient replica or adaptation of the Penelope, whether full figure, high relief, low relief, or vase painting, shows the body in profile.9 The Arundel muse, on the other hand, descends from a tridimensional Hellenistic prototype whose main aspect was frontal. This type—­which includes that of the Seated Girl in the Capitoline Museum (fig. 3.7; discovered in 1879)10 —­made its spectacular appearance in the early third century in the Tyche of Antioch (fig. 3.8), created by Lysippus’s pupil Eutychides.11 Michelangelo’s Medici Madonna is a frontal conception, like the Arundel Clio. But so is Tintoretto’s Madonna, whose similarity to the Arundel statue is in several respects too close and specific to be ignored. She

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Figure 3.7. Seated Girl, Roman copy of a Hellenistic original.

Figure 3.8. Roman copy of Eutychides, Tyche of Antioch, early 3rd

Rome, Musei Capitolini.

century AD. Musei Vaticani, Galleria dei Candelabri.

wears the same girdled chiton with the open curve neckline. And she displays two telltale features which argue for Tintoretto’s knowledge of our particular statue. His Virgin’s blue cloak, enveloping her from behind like a portable niche, denies the figure any conceivable continuity with the rearward space—­as though the painter were responding to the backlessness of the Arundel muse. And the disappearance of his Virgin’s left arm between shoulder and fingertips is best explained as imitating an antique statue whose corresponding arm breaks off under the shoulder. We can now summarize three alternative ways of conceiving the relationship between Michelangelo’s marble, the ancient muse, and Tintoretto’s painted Madonna. First: the young Tintoretto may have adapted

his Virgin directly from Michelangelo. Since he probably did not visit Florence in person, we would have to assume that he worked from an unrecorded sketch brought by a visiting colleague, such as Salviati. Against this hypothesis, the discrepancies between the two works loom very large. And the closer similarities of the painted Madonna to the Ashmolean muse remain unexplained. Second: Tintoretto may have come upon the same ancient muse independently, conceiving coincidentally the idea of adapting her cross-­legged pose to a Madonna. Such a coincidence within less than a decade would be hard enough to believe. More incredible still is the implication that Tintoretto at twenty could remain unaware of the Medici Chapel. One did not even have to be in-

t he medic i ma d onna a n d r el at e d wor k s terested to have heard of it. All the world knew that on May 6, 1536, the last day of his Florentine sojourn, the Emperor Charles V, having heard mass in San Lorenzo, visited the new sacristy to view Michelangelo’s sculptures. It was obviously no longer possible to reinvent any Medici Chapel motif in innocent independence. The third alternative, though it requires a longer chain of assumptions, is yet more economical in that it avoids gross improbabilities. We assume, first, that the Arundel muse came from Venice, where indeed Lord Arundel enjoyed lengthy stays during his most acquisitive years. In Venice too the young Michelangelo might have seen the statue during his visit in 1494. A Venetian provenance for the statue is entirely plausible since,

from the late fifteenth century onward, Venice was the chief importer of antiquities from the Roman East.12 To Marcantonio Michiel, writing in the early sixteenth century, antique statues in Venetian houses and palaces were a normal sight.13 Meanwhile the young Tintoretto, as Borghini tells us, “si diede con gran diligenza a disegnare tutte le cose buone di Vinegia.”14 One can imagine him looking at the Arundel muse with the knowledge that just such a cross-­legged posture, perhaps this very model, had served Michelangelo for a Madonna adored by saints. As an act of combined homage and challenge the young Venetian sets out to rehearse, in his own idiom, Michelangelo’s feat.15

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ere’s the face of Michelangelo’s Medici Madonna, which will be my subject today (figs. 3.1, 4.1). I find it beautiful, as I did at age ten, when I first saw a reproduction of it; and as I did in 1950, my first time in Florence, seduced by the actual marble; and as I did during my graduate studies, when I learned what theologians had been saying about the Virgin’s beauty. They faced a difficult problem. Of course, Mary had to be beautiful, for beauty is a perfection, and no perfection could be wanting in the Madonna. But here’s the dilemma. The Virgin was—­as the angel of the Annunciation put it—­“full of grace,” i.e., without sin, free not only of committed sins, but of the hereditary stain of Original Sin. Yet she was beautiful, and female beauty has been known to incite all sorts of feelings in men, including disagreeable ones, such as the itch of concupiscence. Could the Virgin, then, though herself free from sin, occasion a sinful reflex in others? Therefore, her beauty had to be defined as the kind that never stirs the least prompting of lust. And so the theologians explained that Mary’s beauty diffused a sort of cool, virginal dew which instantly stilled and froze all carnal desire. Beautiful yes, but no turn on. Well, it’s easier said than done. The theologians were performing a logical exercise—­ without having to visualize beauty that freezes desire. This, I think, was on Michelangelo’s mind. But I can’t imagine the matter being of much interest to, say, de Kooning, Jeff Koons, or John Currin. Would a dose of formal analysis help? Could the Medici Madonna be made a little more relevant in the light of a recent announcement from the Guggenheim Museum, advertis-

Body and Symbol in the Medici Madonna

ing their current Brancusi show? The final paragraph reads: “Highlights include The Kiss (1907–­08), the ground-­breaking work in which Brancusi first achieved a balance between recognizable bodies and the integrity of the stone block [fig. 4.2].”1 Here the words “first achieved” are ambiguous. Do they mean that the effect had never before been achieved, or that Brancusi had not managed it before this? His Kiss is indeed interesting. The sculptor tackles one compact block, and with minimal articulation of bonded arms, eyes, and lips projects into its core what is essentially invisible, namely, a kiss. You can see people kissing, but the kiss itself is their private affair—­and so Brancusi keeps it internal by preserving the mass and facets of the block. In this context, the Michelangelo statue could become interesting—­relevant to the problem of balancing “between recognizable bodies and the integrity of the stone block.” A rear view of the Medici Madonna shows the Virgin’s lower back and right arm still defining the corner of the original block (fig. 4.3). In the statue as he envisioned it, two sides, the right profile and the back view, still honor the block’s facets. And this Michelangelo does even where the frontal view of a figure makes it unobvious—­as in the allegory of Day, Il Giorno, one of the four Times of Day in this Medici Chapel (fig. 4.4). Some may think this pose somewhat mannered, contrived. But a bird’s-­eye view of A lecture first delivered in October 1985 as the second of the Gauss Seminars in Criticism at Princeton University; revised thereafter for another dozen lectures in universities and museums throughout the country. The present text, with some revisions, is that given at the New York Studio School, October 2004.

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Figure 4.1. (top left) Michelangelo, Medici Madonna, 1521–­34, detail. Florence, San Lorenzo, Medici Chapel. Figure 4.2. (bottom left) Constantin Brancusi, The Kiss, 1908/1916. Philadelphia Museum of Art; Louise and Walter Arensberg Collection, 1950. Figure 4.3. (top right) Medici Madonna, back view.

Il Giorno (fig. 4.5) shows how this posture was found in the original block, and freed with a minimum of wastage—­so as to achieve, like Brancusi, “a balance between recognizable body and the integrity of the stone block.” I’ll not be doing this kind of formal analysis, but wondering instead about the work’s meaning as I understand it, and asking silly questions, such as: why does this infant boy cross his arms—­which hungry babies don’t do; and why does the Virgin sit with legs

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Figure 4.4. Michelangelo, Day, 1526–­31. Florence, San Lorenzo,

Figure 4.5. Day, from above.

Medici Chapel.

crossed? If my attempts to answer such questions lapse into theology, some people may be put off. So she sits with crossed legs; why shouldn’t she? Half this audience probably sit this way at this moment. It’s natural, and perfectly harmless. But then, I’ve been hearing strange rumors, these last thirty years: French mothers, I’m told, still tell their small daughters, “Ne croise pas les jambes” (“Don’t cross your legs”) as a way of teaching them to sit like a lady. I hear that in some of our Catholic convent schools, the nuns tell their young wards never to cross their legs, because it makes the Virgin weep. Robertson Davies, in his memoir, The Rebel Angels, recalls his early schooling: “Like me to describe  ‘reverent and disciplined posture’—­it means

not crossing your legs in Chapel.”2 A Greek Orthodox friend, Diana Apostolos, tells me that her grandmother said such posture was disrespectful to Christ on the cross. And the painter Anthony Apesos, a scion of immigrant Greeks, tells me that his grandfather would say to him,“Don’t sit like that—­it looks like you have to pee.” As one goes further east, the prohibition grows increasingly stringent. My Islamicist colleague when I was teaching at Penn, Renata Holod, recalled that her grandmother, who grew up in Ukraine, always told her not to cross her legs. The posture, she assured me, never occurs in Islamic art. An American friend remembers a recent vacation trip to Turkey: sitting down on a low ledge in an Istanbul mosque, he was approached by the sacristan

b ody a n d s y m b ol in t h e medic i ma d onna and politely asked to uncross his legs. A student sent me a newspaper clipping in 1982 about the visit of Queen Sirikit of Thailand to Salt Lake City: “One hundred Utah women . . . watched their manners last Tuesday. . . . They were told not to extend their hands unless the Queen offered hers first, and not to cross their legs in the Queen’s presence.” Then—­from a Japanese-­American friend, Joan Shikegawa, I received this information on a postcard from Tokyo (October 26, 1988): “Dear Leo: I asked Japanese women your cross-­legged question—­and here is the answer: It is very rude to sit on the floor with one’s legs crossed. It is OK to sit on a Western style chair with one’s ankles crossed. It is marginally OK to sit on a Western chair with one’s knees crossed—­but I never saw anyone do it.” From TIME magazine, March 27, 1989 (p. 86) comes a news item about Princess Diana inadvertently breaching protocol in Kuwait by crossing her legs before the Crown Prince. Two years later, an American-­ schooled Omani woman, returning home to be married, offended society: “I had my legs crossed, which I didn’t know was inappropriate for a bride” (New York Times Magazine, April 15, 1991, p. 66). The matter can be more serious. I have before me a New York Times clipping from the Vietnam era, November 15, 1970. Colonel Norris Overly is recalling the treatment he received during his long imprisonment by the North Vietnamese: “He said he had been twice smashed across the side of the head with a rifle butt during interrogations because he had crossed his legs, which he learned [later] the North Vietnamese regard as a mark of disrespect.” Sixteen years on, the New York Review of Books published an account of police interrogations in Communist Poland, smuggled out of a prison (March 27, 1986, p. 4). The prisoner was Czesław Bielecki, thirty-­eight, a Jew, architect by profession, head of one of the largest Polish underground publishing houses, which for four years had managed to outwit the police. Then Bielecki was caught and jailed, went on a hunger strike, was force-­fed and, during interrogations, enraged his questioners by never saying a word. “The only decent thing to do is to keep silent,” he wrote, following his escape. He describes a session with his three interrogators:

“Number 1 sits quietly at his desk; Number 3 sits behind me [and yells]: ‘He just crosses his legs and sits there!’ He jumps up, grabs me, and puts my feet next to each other. . . . ‘Sit like that!’ he screams.” I’d love to know just how this Communist police officer in modern Poland would have rationalized his objection to that easy posture. Did he see it as a mark simply of arrogance? Did he sense in it a kind of unassailable self-­possession? Or do these two—­self-­sufficiency and disrespect—­overlap? As you see, I have wasted decades collecting references to crossed legs supplied by friends, or as they turned up in my reading. Like this snippet in George Eliot’s great novel Middlemarch (1871, last chapter). She describes a disagreeable snob objecting to what he thinks is an unsuitable marriage: “‘That is my opinion,’ Sir James ended emphatically, turning aside and crossing his leg.” And then there is this bit from the Philadelphia Daily Times of 1878. A woman writes a piece called “Man-­ With-­ His-­ Legs-­ Crossed.” “He infests the street cars of our cities. . . . His knees are his strong points. . . . Dumping himself down in any vacant seat, he hoists the offending leg,” and so on. But here’s an older one from Aristophanes’s comedy The Clouds—­datable c. 400 BC. The speaker is deploring the passing of the good old days, when boys still had decent manners: “At table, they would not have dared, before their elders, to take a radish . . . or steal the dill or parsley . . . or to cross their legs” (line 983). What is it about this innocuous posture that arouses such indignation over so much of the globe through so many centuries, irrespective of place, gender, religion? Is it merely the persistence of a social convention, which declares it unmannerly? But why, what’s wrong with it? Is it felt to be too self-­indulgent, too carnal? Or is some hidden power attributed to it? Consider this ancient myth about the birth of Hercules. Alcmene, the chaste wife of Amphitryon, was to become the mother of Hercules by Jupiter, who had been up to one of his dirty tricks: he had visited Alc­ mene in the form of her husband. Jupiter’s consort, Juno, madly jealous as usual, sought to prevent the child’s birth. Here is the story as the Latin poet Ovid has Alcmene tell it:

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For seven nights and as many days, tortured and worn out with agony, I stretched my arms to the sky, and cried aloud to Lucina . . . the Goddess of Birth. Lucina came, it is true, but she had been bribed beforehand, and was prepared to surrender my life to cruel Juno. Though she heard my moans, she sat herself . . . before the door. Crouching there, with her right leg crossed over her left, and fingers entwined, she prevented the baby’s birth. . . . [But] one of the servant maids noticed the goddess, . . . her arms crossed upon her knees. She spoke to her and said: “Whoever you are, send your congratulations to my mistress! Alcmene . . . is newly delivered of her child.” The goddess of birth leapt to her feet in consternation, loosening her clasped hands, and as soon as these bonds were slackened, I was delivered of my baby. (Metamorphoses, IX, lines 283ff., trans. Robert Graves)

As James G. Frazer retells the story in The Golden Bough: “The child could not be born until the goddess had been beguiled into changing her attitude.” And listen to Pliny, in his Natural History: To sit in the presence of pregnant women, or when medicine is being given to patients, with the fingers interlaced comb-­wise, is to be guilty of sorcery, a discovery made, it is said, when Alcmena was giving birth to Hercules. The sorcery is worse if the hands are clasped round one knee or both, and also to cross the knees first in one way and then in the other. For this reason our ancestors forbade such postures at councils of war or of officials, on the ground that they were an obstacle to the transaction of all business. (Natural History, XXVIII, xvii, trans. W. H. S. Jones)

Of course, this ancient knowledge survived into modern times. Here is the Renaissance scholar Pierio Valeriano, in his 1556 book on hieroglyphs and signs in general (fig. 4.6): The knees signify an impediment; if the hollow of

Figure 4.6. Pierio Valeriano, “Impedimentum,” from

Hieroglyphica (Basel, 1556), book XXV, ch. lvii, p. 258.

one knee is [shown] placed upon the opposite knee, which gesture alone [simpliciter] is considered an act of witchcraft (without a magic incantation); the religion of the ancients, as Pliny asserts, demonstrated this belief with decrees prohibiting the gesture, for by it childbirth could be delayed, and every action impeded.

A century later, Milton took this to be common knowledge. In his famous tract on the freedom of the press, he compares censorship to the preventive action of Juno trying to thwart the birth of Hercules. Until the Council of Trent, he writes, “books were ever as freely admitted into the world as any other birth; the issue of the brain was no more stifled than the issue of the womb; no envious Juno sat cross-­legged over the nativity of any man’s intellectual offspring” (Areopagitica, 1644). I think we have proof enough that locked knees in antiquity could be credited with a sympathetic magic effect—­an effect of closure—­and that this was known in the Renaissance. So there may be some justification for calling it, say, the foreclosing, or the preventive pose. We’ll see shortly that the pose may have various meanings, more than one at a time—­or none,

b ody a n d s y m b ol in t h e medic i ma d onna

Figure 4.7. Giulio Clovio, Madonna

and Child with Saints, c. 1535. Windsor

Castle, Royal Collection.

depending on context. The situation is full of methodological traps. Nevertheless, if Michelangelo at fifty, around 1525— i.e., after the Roman Pietà, the David, and the Sistine Ceiling—­carved the Medici Madonna in cross-­legged posture, such as had not been seen in more than twelve centuries of Christian art, he may have had a reason for doing it; and the question why no longer seems quite so silly.3 I once put the question to a young mother. She answered predictably that it’s a comfortable way to perch a baby, especially if he’s nursing. Helps to bring his lips

up to the breast. She thought the situation so natural that even an art historian should be able to tell when he’s not needed. But some of us are incorrigible. So I pointed out that, in the present case, the effect of the mother’s overlapping leg is not to bring the boy up to the breast, but to lift him too high, so that he overshoots and misses by ten or twelve inches—­making this the first and last Christian image to show a Christ missing his mark. Nor am I the first to have noticed this blasphemy. It was surely noticed by Giulio Clovio—­the foremost miniature painter of his generation and an ardent admirer of Michelangelo (fig. 4.7). Giulio carefully copied

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Figure 4.8. Medici Chapel, Medici Madonna in situ.

Michelangelo’s child, but lowered its perch. To correct the child’s aim, he uncrossed the knees of the mother; similarly in the drawings related, or preliminary, to the sculpture (possibly not all by the master himself ). They show the child actually nursing and the mother’s legs uncrossed (figs. 1.41–­1.43).4 In the sculpture as carved, Michelangelo sacrificed the literal contact of the child with the breast in order to satisfy some ulterior purpose—­probably a symbolic purpose, I thought, because I had learned long ago, from observations of other Michelangelo works, that the man tends to think in symbols. More than 150 years ago, Jacob Burckhardt defined the Renaissance as “the discovery of the world and of man.”5 I would define Renaissance art as the discovery

that the world and man offer the material fittest for the play of symbol and metaphor. Take the Roman Pietà, which Michelangelo completed at age twenty-­five, and which won instant praise not only for its sentiment, but for its realism. The Christ figure was declared the deadest-­looking body in all of art. And yet the veins of the right arm and hand are engorged, making the mysterious vitality within the corpse, the mystery of Christ’s two natures, the true subject. The Virgin’s right hand: it causes the dead body to swerve into an arc, such as no corpse would do on its own, even as it brackets the redemptive side wound that gave birth to the Church. Finally, the paradox of virgin motherhood is made manifest in the anomaly of the frail head of a girl set on the immense frame of

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Figure 4.9. Federico Zuccaro, Artists Drawing in the Medici Chapel. Paris, Musée du Louvre, Cabinet des Dessins.

an Earth Mother.6 In Michelangelo’s hands, anatomy becomes theology. Given such habits of thought, I think it likely that Michelangelo had compelling, probably theological reasons for crossing the infant’s arms along with the mother’s legs in the Medici Madonna, she who was to receive perpetual, round-­the-­clock prayers for the dead of the House of Medici, and who is watched Night and Day and from Dawn to Dusk by the deceased Medici princes Lorenzo and Giuliano (fig. 4.8). What they contemplate—­crossed legs included—­must be somehow consonant with Michelangelo’s faith, no matter what he thought of the Medici. One reason I began thinking about this Madonna is the way she is slighted by the daily thousands who

visit this sacristy in San Lorenzo, Florence. She is here one of nine statues, but a bit of a wallflower, never the star attraction. I felt, in charity, that she needed attention—­the attention withheld from her even in 1575 in Federico Zuccaro’s drawing, where she is cropped out of sight (fig. 4.9). So, too, modern visitors to the chapel find the allegorical Times of Day, the Princes Lorenzo and Giuliano, perhaps even Michelangelo’s architecture, more absorbing than this Madonna. For this, I think, there are several reasons, of which I’ll mention just four. The first is easy: those other presences offer some tough competition. The second is more complex: the statue stands on a makeshift shelf, leaving it exposed on both sides (fig. 4.10). Yet we know from Michel-

Figure 4.10. (top) Medici Madonna flanked

by Sts. Damian (Raffaello da Montelupo) and Cosmas (Giovanni Montorsoli). Figure 4.11. (bottom) Michelangelo, David-­ Apollo, c. 1530. Florence, Museo Nazionale del

Bargello.

b ody a n d s y m b ol in t h e medic i ma d onna

angelo’s drawings that the figure was meant to fill an architectural niche, no side views available. The way his Madonna now sits dis-­housed, Michelangelo would have hated it. When he designs a sculpture to be seen in the round—­such as the David-­Apollo in the Bargello (fig. 4.11), intended as the centerpoint of a court—­he makes each aspect effective. But when he conceives a figure for one aspect alone, as in a painting, he’ll do wild things to drive projection/recession to contrasting extremes. So, in the Jeremiah on the Sistine Ceiling: head and shoulders press forward, the torso recedes, knees forward again, and the withdrawing feet way back, producing a posture impossible to sustain without keeling over (fig. 4.12). Under this beetling mass of upper body,

Figure 4.12. Michelangelo,

Jeremiah. Sistine Ceiling.

the feet, to prevent collapse, would have to advance. This much Michelangelo knows—­and knows better. In his Jeremiah, the quick alternation of fore-­and rearward—­in a figure ostensibly at rest—­becomes marvelously expressive of energy, here the energy of deep thought. Or the energy of attention: conceiving his alerted Giuliano in the Medici Chapel to be set in a niche, he gives parts of the figure, from head to foot, maximum salience—­which looks great from in front, but grotesquely distorted if you dislodge the statue, or look at a plaster cast of it from the side (Pushkin Museum). And this is what the installation inflicts on our Madonna (figs. 4.13, 4.14). Not Michelangelo’s doing. He had left Florence in 1534, never again to set

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Figure 4.13. Medici Madonna, seen from the left, plaster cast. Moscow, Pushkin State Museum.

Figure 4.14. Medici Madonna, seen from the right.

foot in his native city. A command from the pope to start painting the Last Judgment in the Sistine Chapel he could not disobey. And what he left behind in the Medici Chapel was a mess. Only one of the sculptures had been put in place; five others littered the floor; two more had to be executed by other sculptors. The unfinished Madonna statue was not even on the scene; Vasari, commissioned to get the chapel shaped up, had to transport it from Michelangelo’s Florentine studio. The result is unfortunate; it allows us to ogle the Madonna in a profile, which Michelangelo never expected to show. He would have thought of what you are seeing in figure 4.13 as a hidden reserve, the engine that prods and positions the frontage. Wrongly exposed, this profile looks awkward and fussy, compared to the grand sweep of the intended

front view. So the second reason for the neglect of this statue is the meanness of its installation, lacking its architecture frame. A third reason for the relative disregard of the Madonna is its unfinished condition—­more disturbing here than in Michelangelo’s non-­finito elsewhere. One regrets the strut under her hovering foot; to say nothing of the unfinished right hand, which (if noticed) looks vapid, somewhat like an empty glove. And lastly, the company she keeps. Since the patron saints of the house of Medici, Sts. Cosmas and Damian, must necessarily preen in any Medici Chapel, their statues, commissioned from Michelangelo’s former assistants, were emplaced to flank the Madonna (fig. 4.10). But they are depressingly feeble and jittery. The recoiling St. Damian on the right always looks to me as if he

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Figure 4.16. Attributed to the Oedipus Painter, red-­figured Attic

kylix, Oedipus and the Sphinx, c. 480–­470 BC. Musei Vaticani, Museo Gregoriano Etrusco.

the pose had almost never been taken by women, and never by a Madonna.

Figure 4.15. Medici Madonna, detail.

were thinking, “What’s she doing here?” It is dispiriting to see this mountain woman so ill-­companioned. Accordingly, most visitors to the Medici Chapel disregard the Madonna—­unless they see someone look at her for a long time. And then they too look, wondering what he sees in her. The longer I gazed at this work, the wilder it grew. There is the obvious anomaly of the baby’s physique, boasting the strength of that other son-­of-­a-­god, the infant Hercules, only more so (fig. 4.15).7 Matching this wonder are the mother’s giant proportions; given the ratio of head to body, she’d have to be eight feet tall. And then, her cross-­legged posture—­a bold transgression, since (as I said before) during the previous twelve centuries of postclassical Western art,

So I started to think about the cross-­kneed or cross-­ legged session. It turns out that the motif has quite a history, one sufficiently interesting to have produced a small literature, and to have held my interest for some thirty years—­collecting god knows how many examples—­in the service, always, of this Michelangelo figure. My first objective was to determine where and when the motif does emerge, in what contexts, and with what associated meanings, if any. Female figures assume the pose in Minoan art, but by Early Classic Greek art, c. 450 BC, it appears in representations of Penelope, the chaste wife of Odysseus or Ulysses—­to her I’ll attend in a moment.8 Let me say first that the pose, in Classic Greek art, is never taken at random—­as it is by people having to sit through a lecture. It is a pose reserved, nearly always, for certain ranks, occupations, or psychic conditions. I’ll deal with the male figures first, so as to get them out of the way. The first male to fall into this posture sits in the Vatican on a famous kylix of c. 480–470 BC: it shows Oedipus seated before the Sphinx, trying to solve her riddle (fig. 4.16). I nominate this the earliest attempt

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Figure 4.17. (top left) Lycurgus Painter, volute krater, Ransom

of the Body of Hector, detail of Achilles, c. 350 BC. St. Petersburg, State Hermitage Museum.

in art to represent inward mental activity, and it is done by negation, by deactivating the body—­thwarting the normal male impulse to change place. To sit this way is to stay put. Hence the rarity of the pose in ancient art for male figures. The exceptions are telling: on a volute krater by the Lycurgus Painter in St. Petersburg, depicting the ransom of the body of Hector, the unarmed warrior in this pose is Achilles, mourning the death of the warrior he has slain (fig. 4.17). Elsewhere, other mourners—­ fathers, husbands, or brothers—­may adopt the pose,

Figure 4.18. (bottom left) Muses and Philosophers, sarcophagus of L. Pullius Peregrinus, c. 260 AD, detail. Rome, Museo Torlonia. Figure 4.19. (top right) Ivory diptych of a poet and muse, 6th

century. Monza, Museo e Tesoro del Duomo di Monza. Figure 4.20. (bottom right) Vision of Ezekiel, detail of Habbakuk, late 5th century. Thessaloniki, Hosios David.

but then mourning, like thinking or refusing to fight, does not show a man at his macho best.9 In Hellenistic and Roman art—­and again from the sixteenth century on—­the pose is assigned to musicians, or listeners; and it is given to authors and philosophers, such as the

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Figure 4.21. (top left) Walther von der Vogelweide, Weingartner Liederhandschrift, c. 1300. Stuttgart, Württembergische Landesbibliothek, HB XIII, 1, fol. 139. Figure 4.22. (bottom left) Book of Kells, c. 800, Matthean

Summaries, fol. 8r, detail. Dublin, Trinity College.

sage in a Roman sarcophagus of the Muses (fig. 4.18). Throughout, the pose denotes the unphysical type. By 500 AD, in Byzantium, the pose is taken by poets and prophets (figs. 4.19–­4.21), later on by Evangelists (fig. 4.22)—­a tradition Caravaggio honored when he posed his St. Matthew in 1602.10 Finally, a close variant of it becomes the prerogative of rulers and judges—­throne and judgment seat impose an appropriate posture on the incumbent (figs. 4.23, 4.24). A famous medieval sketchbook ac-

Figure 4.23. (top right) Villard de Honnecourt, sketchbook page with seated king, c. 1230, detail. Paris, Bibliothèque Nationale de France, Ms. fr. 19093, fol. 18r. Figure 4.24. (bottom right) Antependium from Königsfeld with scenes from the life of Christ, Christ before Pilate, c. 1340–­50. Bernisches Historisches Museum, Switzerland.

tually diagrams the proper sitting of a king—­a pose which a French scholar dubbed attitude royale.11 It’s intriguing to trace this attitude through the Middle Ages; and astonishing to find representations of David before King Saul, produced two hundred years

Figure 4.25. (top left) Tickhill Psalter, David before Saul, c. 1310. New York Public Library, Spencer Collection, Ms. 26, fol. 16r. Figure 4.26. (bottom left) Lucas van Leyden, David before Saul, 1508. Amsterdam, Rijksmuseum, Rijksprentenkabinet. Figure 4.27. (top right) Polidoro da Caravaggio, Two Seated

Youths. London, British Museum.

Figure 4.28. (middle right) Stefano della Bella, Diverses têtes et

figures, 1650, title page. New York, Metropolitan Museum of Art; Bequest of Phyllis Massar, 2011. Figure 4.29. (bottom right) Adamo Scultori after Giulio Romano,

Hercules at the Crossroads. New York, Metropolitan Museum of Art; Bequest of Phyllis Massar, 2011.

b ody a n d s y m b ol in t h e medic i ma d onna apart, yet both defining royalty by the cross-­legged posture (figs. 4.25, 4.26). Clearly, medieval and Renaissance art until about 1500 restricted the pose to certain activities and to certain ranks. Not until well into the sixteenth century, in the general explosion of naturalism, does the pose become merely convenient and commonplace (figs. 4.27, 4.28). And yet even then, and even in early modern art, artists continually regain the intuitive insight that the pose—­in context—­suggests physical inactivation. So a Renaissance Hercules at the Crossroads shows the bemused hero trying to decide whether to follow the call of duty or pleasure (fig. 4.29). The cross-­legged seat may be used in a purely negative sense, to express impediment, inhibition, or irresolution, i.e., a moment when action is stalled. In a once famous handbook of emblems, Cesare Ripa’s Iconologia (1603), the allegorical image of Irresolution takes the form of a seated figure holding up a bird in each hand—­and seated with legs crossed (fig. 4.30). Did Daumier, two centuries later, use that handbook, or did he rediscover the symbol by intuition (fig. 4.31)? And what of James Tissot, fifty years after the Daumier, in an etching entitled “How happy he could be with either, / Were t’other dear charmer away” (fig. 4.32).12 In these instances, the state of baffled inaction is dramatized by the crossed legs of a figure trapped between two equally attractive alternatives. So much for the sign of crossed legs to denote irresolution. But even as an index of rank it survives into modern times. The pose is given to one who no longer acts physically—­he acts by commanding others (fig. 4.33). And here it is again, in a news photograph published May 10, 1990 (fig. 4.34), Bush the Elder conferring with Democrats at the White House: the president is not learnedly acting out a traditional iconography, Figure 4.30. (top) “Irresolution,” from Cesare Ripa, Iconologia

(Rome, 1603), p. 235. Figure 4.31. (middle) Traviès de Villers after Daumier, Ah!

Séductrice tu frottes la bosse à Mayeux, 1830. Paris, Musée Carnavalet.

Figure 4.32. (bottom) James Tissot, “How Happy I Could Be with

Either,” 1877. London, British Museum.

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Figure 4.33. (top left) Edward Savage, The Washington Family,

1789–­96. Washington, DC, National Gallery of Art; Andrew W. Mellon Collection. Figure 4.34. (bottom left) George Bush and Democratic leaders,

published in the New York Times, May 10, 1990.

Figure 4.35. (top right) Salvator Rosa, The Academy of Plato, 1662. London, British Museum. Figure 4.36. (bottom right) George Healy, Abraham Lincoln, 1869. Washington, DC, White House Collection; Bequest of Mrs. Robert Todd Lincoln, 1939.

but exercising the habitual prerogative of the chief; and inadvertently repeating the posture of Plato among his disciples, as imagined by Salvator Rosa (fig. 4.35). In the cropped White House photograph, one man in left foreground may have sunk into that pose; but, as you can see, he’s been taken out—­so there’s one Democrat the fewer. And how about cerebration, preferably with advanced upper body—­as fitting for Lincoln or Lenin as it had been for Oedipus, or Hercules at the Crossroads,

b ody a n d s y m b ol in t h e medic i ma d onna Figure 4.37. Isaak

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Israilevich Brodsky,

Vladimir Lenin at Smolnyi, 1930. Moscow, State Tretyakov Gallery.

Figure 4.38. (left) Jacques Gamelin, “Quanto ci deve dare pensieri,” from table 10 in Nouveau recueil

d’ostéologie et de myopie, dessiné d’après nature (Toulouse, 1779).

Figure 4.39. (right) Barney Tobey, cartoon published in the New Yorker, October 20, 1975.

or the sulking Achilles (figs. 4.36, 4.37). The canonic character of the pose is confirmed in a great work on human anatomy dated 1779. In the volume on bones, the engraved plates by Jacques Gamelin parade skeletons in various attitudes. What Gamelin calls the “Pensive Posture”—“Quando ci deve dare pensiere”—displays the skeleton crossing its legs (fig. 4.38). One more male figure I can’t resist showing: a

New Yorker cartoon, where the use of crossed legs is most sophisticated in that it alludes at once to poetry, music, and art (fig. 4.39). The caption reads: “Don’t you know anything but ‘Afternoon of a Faun’?” The cartoon evokes Debussy’s setting of Mallarmé’s poem about the faun who dreams of chasing nymphs, but can’t be bothered to get off his ass and do it. And the poor nymph frustrated by the faun’s want

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of enterprise—­conveyed through the traditional, unmanly, self-­inhibiting posture. Which brings us back to the female type. It seems that some anonymous genius in Early Classical Greece applied the pose to a Penelope figure, that is, for the supreme instance in Greek story of the

chaste wife, who describes herself in the Odyssey as “I who pass my days in mourning” (figs. 4.40, 4.41, 3.5).13 Penelope grieves for a husband she fears dead, yet waits against hope, and, against the onslaught of thirty suitors, guards the integrity of her body.14 To express waiting, mourning, and steadfast chastity, the artist arranged the limbs as they had never before been conceptualized. The concept was an immediate success—­many copies and adaptations survive; and soon enough the Penelope posture was transferred to other mourners, such as the goddess Demeter on the Parthenon frieze, brooding on the abduction of her daughter by Hades; or to Andromache, Hector’s widow, as her husband’s corpse is dragged around the walls of Troy lashed to Achilles’s chariot (fig. 4.42). Two further points about the female cross-­legged pose. One concerns a powerful Early Hellenistic invention: the figure designed for a frontal view. The in-

Figure 4.40. Penelope Painter, red-­figure skyphos, Penelope and

Telemachus, c. 440 BC. Chiusi, Museo Archeologico Nazionale.

Figure 4.41. Melian, Return of Odysseus, c. 460–­450 BC.

New York, Metropolitan Museum of Art; Fletcher Fund, 1930.

b ody a n d s y m b ol in t h e medic i ma d onna Figure 4.42. Roman sarcophagus, Achilles



Dragging the Body of Hector around the Walls of Troy, 2nd century AD. Providence, Rhode Island School of Design; Museum Appropriation Fund 21.074.

ventor’s name is preserved—­Eutychides, c. 300 BC—­ and his creation was the colossal city goddess of Antioch, wearing the civic crown, with the personified river Orontes at her feet. The original colossus has perished, but the type is known in small-­scale Roman replicas (fig. 3.8), souvenirs made for tourists, like miniature Eiffel Towers or Statues of Liberty. And then comes the rapid diffusion and trivialization of the motif in Hellenistic genre art, such as the so-­ called mass-­produced Tanagra figures (fig. 4.43). Here Figure 4.43. (left)

Aphrodite Kuorotrophe, early 2nd century BC. Veroia, Macedonia, Archaeological Museum. Figure 4.44. (right) Tickhill Psalter, David Spying on Bathsheba, c. 1310, detail. New York Public Library; Spencer Collection, Ms. 26, fol. 70v.

at last the pose becomes common, and the expression—­ though still meditative at times—­is more often frivolous, flirtatious, and adorably feminine (fig. 3.7). Good reason why the gravity of Late Antique art spurns the motif, especially in the representation of women; and why, during the next twelve hundred years of Christian art, the cross-­legged posture as a female attitude disappears—­with one intriguing exception: in an English illuminated psalter of c. 1310, Bathsheba, a virtuous wife, bathing and spied upon by King David, king of voyeurs, crosses her legs (fig. 4.44). The illuminator understood that the pose, in this instance, needed reviving, or reinventing. For the rest, female figures in Christian art seated with their legs crossed hardly exist before about 1510. And then, when the pose as a female posture at last returns on a wide scale, the use of it is nearly always semantic. Archaeologically minded artists of the Raphael School assign it to allegorical figures—­personifications of Peace or of the Church (figs. 4.45, 4.46). More often,

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Figure 4.45. (top left) Tommaso Piroli after Giulio Romano, Sala

di Constantino, Pax, 1803–­7. Blanton Museum of Art, University of Texas at Austin; The Leo Steinberg Collection, 2002.

Figure 4.46. (top right) Tommaso Piroli after Giulio Romano, Sala di Constantino, Ecclesia, 1803–­7. Blanton Museum of Art, University of Texas at Austin; The Leo Steinberg Collection, 2002. Figure 4.47. (bottom left) Heinrich Aldegrever, Sofinisba Drinking Poison, 1553. Amsterdam, Rijksmuseum, Rijksprentenkabinet. Figure 4.48. (bottom right) Andrea Riccio, Satyr Uncovering a Nymph. Washington, DC, National Gallery of Art; Samuel H.

Kress Collection.

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Figure 4.49. Jörg Breu the Younger, Susanna and the Elders, 1540,

detail. Philadelphia Museum of Art; Charles M. Lea Collection, 1928-­42-­722.

the posture speaks directly of female virtue. A loyal wife, Sophonisba, drinks the poisoned cup rather than outlive her husband. A refusing nymph fends off a satyr’s advances. The chaste Susanna, surprised at her bath, wards off the two lecherous elders, as told in the Book of Daniel (figs. 4.47–­4.50). And here’s how knowingly the Baroque masters will employ the motif. A Rubens painting (here engraved) gives us the chaste Susanna, surprised by the Elders, legs crossed (fig. 4.51); similarly, Nuvolone (fig. 4.52). And so again in paintings of the subject by less famous Dutchmen.15 Rubens assigns the pose as well to the reformed Mary Magdalen: to the delight of her good sister Martha, she swears off her life of sin, and closes her body off by crossing her legs (fig. 4.53). And then there’s Bathsheba—­in a Rubens drawing and in Rembrandt (figs. 4.54, 4.55).16 In both pictures, the posture may seem merely functional, since the woman is having her feet dried by a maid. But the Rubens figure turns

Figure 4.50. Heinrich Aldegrever, Susanna and the Elders, 1555. Amsterdam, Rijksmuseum, Rijksprentenkabinet.

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Figure 4.51. (top left) Lucas Vorsterman after Rubens, Susanna and the Elders, 1620. Amsterdam, Rijksmuseum, Rijksprentenkabinet. Figure 4.52. (bottom left) Carlo Francesco Nuvolone, Susanna

and the Elders, 1640–­60. Milan, Biblioteca Ambrosiana.

Figure 4.53. (top right) Rubens, Penitent Magdalen and Martha, c. 1620. Vienna, Kunsthistorisches Museum. Figure 4.54. (bottom right) Rubens, Bathsheba Receiving David’s Letter, 1613–­14. Staatliche Museen zu Berlin, Kupferstichkabinett.

to receive David’s letter—­which Rembrandt’s Bathsheba holds in her hand—­a letter from a king inviting, or commanding, her to commit adultery—­and she crosses her legs. For these seventeenth-­century painters, working some hundred years after the Michelangelo, the woman’s posture—­whether Mary Magdalen, Susanna, or Bathsheba—­was still meaningful as an index of chastity. They understood the pose as a sign of the woman’s sexual nature, or present sexual predicament, and that may make it appropriate to a penitent harlot or

b ody a n d s y m b ol in t h e medic i ma d onna

an adulteress; but you don’t refer to a respectable woman’s sexuality. You surely don’t when you celebrate the Madonna. This consideration explains the following from a Spanish contemporary of Rubens and Rembrandt, Francisco Pacheco—­the teacher and father-­in-­law of Velázquez, and author of a book which, in 1649, lays down the official position of the Church on matters of iconography. Pacheco writes: What can be more foreign to the respect which we owe to Our Lady the Virgin, than to paint her sitting down with one of her knees placed over the other, and often with the sacred feet uncovered and naked.

Figure 4.55. Rembrandt, Bathsheba at Her Bath (Bathsheba with

Let thanks be given to the Holy Inquisition which commands that this liberty should be corrected.17

King David’s Letter), 1654. Paris, Musée du Louvre.

Corrected it was, in absentia. During the sixteenth century, only the young Tintoretto, just once, and during the seventeenth century, only Rubens, had the nerve to follow Michelangelo in this outrage (figs. 4.56, 3.3).18 By and large, until the eighteenth century, cross-­legged Madonnas remain unacceptable—­as they had been before Michelangelo.

Figure 4.56. Rubens, Holy Family with Sts. Elizabeth and John the Baptist, c. 1615. Art Institute of Chicago; Major Acquisitions

Fund, 1967.229.

So if an artist of Michelangelo’s serious turn of mind assigns the pose to a monumental Madonna—­suddenly around 1525, after twelve centuries of proscription, to be followed soon after by renewed prohibition—­it is, I trust, not impertinent to suspect him of a compelling symbolic intention. In this Virgin and Child, I think we are to see the will of the mother and the will of the son at one, agreeing to preserve her loins, in permanent closure. Of course the pose imports more than that. Most of those other connotations of the cross-­legged posture converge in Michelangelo’s body language: the dignity that accrues to the figure by its evident descent from antiquity; the intimation of royalty; the implication of mourning; wisdom and inward thought expressible through the body and appropriate to the one woman who was, since the Middle Ages, named a Doctor of the Church. And then, above all, the affirmation of

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chastity—­but here in a special sense, which, unfortunately, requires a large dose of theology. In March 1971, I published in the Burlington Magazine a small portion of an essay I’d been working on about this unfinished Madonna (ch. 3). The better part of it I held back on the advice of a friend, who warned me that the piece would never make it into a British journal if it presumed to probe the work’s meaning, the more so since the subject—­the Virgin nursing her child—­is plain to see. Nothing here that needs interpreting or explaining. Following my friend’s advice, I leaked only that part of the essay which identified the work’s probable antique source in a Hellenistic muse, now at the Ashmolean Museum (fig. 3.2). The sort of thing art historians find irresistible. What I’m discussing here is the suppressed bulk of the essay—­why Michelangelo adapted an antique model, why the matter seemed worth pursuing. The probability that Michelangelo had used this childless muse as a model for his Madonna and Child thrilled me because, once the relationship is established, it demonstrates better than any example I know the creative imagination Michelangelo brings to the business of adaptive borrowing. It reveals something of what the concept of “renascence,” rebirth, could mean to a Renaissance artist. Let me repeat: monumental, draped female figures, seated with knees crossed, and designed for a frontal view, were not common around 1500. And Michelangelo followed the rare antique prototype not only in disposing the lower limbs, but as well in the turn of the upper body, the tilt of the shoulders, the retraction of the supporting arm, even the two-­step base. But he added the child—­not as an addendum, but as a cause, as if whatever impelled the child prompted the mother’s response. Though the adult figure was given and the infant invented, Michelangelo’s group is interactive, every maternal motion complementing the will of the child. Years later, I tried to describe it: “The mother leans forward, meeting the boy’s backward thrust. To the eager grasp of his left hand she lowers a willing shoulder, bows down as he strains

upward. As his legs spread and his arms cross, her arms open and her legs close.”19 But when I reread this three-­sentence paragraph, it seemed thin; whereas the thing described was all power and density. More was needed to fortify that slim paragraph. So I kept looking, and then tried to rethink the sculptor’s initial thought as he projects these bonded bodies into the original marble block—­conceiving them in plan as well as in contour and elevation: ah, yes, now the child’s body swerves anticlockwise on its upright axis within the core of the stone, while the mother’s slow counter-­rotation, from her withdrawing arm to the hovering tip of her foot, forms an encompassing orbit, a matrix. Matrix equals mother—­and the stone envisioned as both core and protective shell. So then, the two figures join in perpetual complementarity; their every motion is mutually responsive, reciprocal. Michelangelo did indeed found his Madonna on antique precedent; but rather than imitate the given action of the Greek muse, he reconceived her action as a consequence, rehearsing the ancient pose only to cause it anew. This makes it a true re-­creation. The pagan statue is reborn as Christian—­and it is the incarnate Christ who makes it happen. All of which persuaded me that I was seeing a deeply pondered work, worth thinking about at every level, including the theological, even at the risk of overinterpreting. The doctrinal issue here is not the virginal birth of Christ, which no one contested, but Mary as the Ever-­ Virgin, her continuing virginity during her married life with Joseph. I’m not sure how many these days worry about this matter, or whether you believe that Michelangelo cared. But in Early Christianity, the doctrine of Mary’s perpetual virginity was hotly debated, and so again with the rise of Protestantism, at the very moment that Michelangelo’s Madonna was carved. Since the New Testament refers to Jesus’s “brothers” (Acts 1:14), some Early Christians took the word literally and argued that Jesus was the firstborn of Mary’s several sons. Their motive was to uphold the sanctity of marriage against what they perceived as an excessive exaltation of celibacy and virginity. And since Mary was the model of perfect womanhood, they wanted her to be leading

b ody a n d s y m b ol in t h e medic i ma d onna a normal married life after the Incarnation. She was to be virgin before giving birth, virgin in giving birth, but not after the birth of Christ. Thus wrote Helvidius in a tract which, of course, was destroyed by the victorious Orthodox party. We know of it from St. Jerome’s indignant rebuttal, entitled “Of the Perpetual Virginity of the Blessed Mary (Against Helvidius).” Scorning the impious Helvidius, Jerome writes: “You have set fire to the temple of the Lord’s body, you have defiled the sanctuary of the Holy Spirit, from which you would have issue four brothers and a host of sisters.”20 The loudest of the miscreants was the fourth-­century monk Jovinian, who again denied Mary’s perpetual virginity. Against this manifest falsehood, Pope St. Siricius (348–­398/99) directed an impassioned epistle affirming the correct view. Surely, he writes to Anysius, Bishop of Thessalonica, in 392:

You had good reason to be horrified at the thought that another birth might issue from the same virginal womb from which Christ was born according to the flesh. For the Lord Jesus would never have chosen to be born of a virgin if he had ever judged that she would be so incontinent as to contaminate with the seed of human intercourse the birthplace of the Lord’s body, that palace of the eternal king.21

Accordingly, the Bible’s phrase “brothers of Jesus” was explained as a generic term for kinsmen or cousins.22 And Mary’s perpetual virginity became an unshakable dogma of Catholic faith.23 So the doctrine had to be formulated, since Mary’s life was said to anticipate the chaste life of the angels; had her virginity not been maintained in perpetuity, she would not have been fit to become Queen of Heaven.24 For a loyal Catholic in the 1520s, the dogma of the Ever-­Virgin, then nearly a thousand years old, was not a debatable issue; though the Protestants just then raised it again, giving the matter a renewed urgency. Of course, Michelangelo was not a theological controversialist; what would have exercised him as an artist was the expressibility of the dogma in visual form:

can perpetual virginity be made apparent? That this question interested him is suggested by the explanation he gave to his biographer Condivi when asked why he had made the Virgin of the early Roman Pietà younger than her son. The final reason, he proposes, is that “such freshness and flower of youth . . . may possibly have been ordained by the Divine Power to prove to the world the virginity and perpetual purity of the Mother” (see pp. 86–87). Now the Medici Madonna faces the altar of a mortuary chapel. It functions within a liturgical context, that of the mass and the Requiem Mass, wherein the Virgin is invoked—­wherein this Madonna would be addressed—­not simply as the Virgin Mary, as in the Reformed Church, but as Beata Maria semper Vergine, “ever virgin.” So the question—­Michelangelo’s question—­returns: can you give visual expression to the idea of a person’s abiding virginity? Virginity as a present condition may be indicated (like widowhood) by some outward token of dress—­such as the wreath worn by Greek maidens or the veiled hood of Venetian virgins. As an intention, it is symbolized by the wedding ring worn by nuns in token of their marriage to Christ. But how would you visualize the biographical fact of sustained lifelong continence? Can sculpture do it? I think Michelangelo had this in mind, relying not simply on characterization, but on the interaction of the two figures; and making that interaction—­ specifically their legwork—­allude to the one Old Testament text in which the Church read a prophecy of Mary as virgo perpetua. The prophecy comes in the Book of Ezekiel. Michelangelo was a lifelong Bible reader, and all his life, he said, he remembered the voice of the preacher Savonarola, whom, in his youth, he had heard expound Ezekiel’s prophecies.25 Fifteen years before carving the Medici Madonna, he had escorted the Prophet to the Sistine Ceiling. Out of the seventeen Old Testament Prophets in the Catholic Bible, Michelangelo’s Ceiling depicts just seven, including Ezekiel. Why him? For this compelling reason: according to Catholic doctrine, Ezekiel alone had foretold Mary’s perpetual virginity. From chapter 40 onward, Ezekiel describes his vision of the Temple rebuilt—­

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newly filled with the glory of the Lord; he describes the parts of it, its courts, chambers, sanctuary, and altar. Finally, he is returned by an angel to the gate of the outward sanctuary which looked toward the East; and it was shut. And the Lord said to me: This gate shall be shut [porta haec clausa erit], it shall not be opened, and no man shall pass through it; because the Lord the God of Israel hath entered in by it, therefore it shall be shut [quoniam Dominus Deus Israel ingressus est per eam, eritque clausa]. (44:2)

The Prophet did not spell out the symbolic meaning of this closed eastern gate (porta clausa). The Church Fathers took care of that. St. Jerome’s Commentary on Ezekiel argued triumphantly that Ezekiel’s porta clausa proved Mary’s perpetual virginity.26 And so St. Augustine: This closed gate in the house of the Lord is Mary. . . . Oh how marvelous is the Prophet’s vision, but more wonderful still is the fulfillment of the prophecy. For what is the gate in the House of the Lord but Mary, who remained ever virgo intacta. And what is it that remained forever closed but Mary who was virgin before giving birth and virgin in giving birth, and virgin after giving birth?27

That’s the recurrent formula: virgo ante partum, virgo in partu, virgo post partum. Later authors both East and West produced similar statements in abundance. “Thou, O holy Virgin,” writes St. Bonaventure in one of his hymns, “art the closed gate that shall not open, the gate whereof the Prophet speaks, forbidden to men. God alone hath entered into thee . . . without violating, without defiling; thy virginity resting intact.”28 The most impressive of these medieval texts comes from a twelfth-­century work by Honorius of Autun, The Mirror of the Church, which has been described as the Middle Ages’ most popular handbook of sermons, so that these words were repeated over and over from thousands of pulpits:

Ezekiel the Prophet prophesied concerning this Virgin filled with every grace. The spirit of the Lord led the Prophet up on a mountain where there was, as it were, the structure of a city, and there he saw a gate closed with an eternal lock. And thus the Lord spoke to him: “This gate will be forever shut, and the King of Kings alone will have passed through it.” The city which the Prophet saw on the mountain is the Church. . . . The gate never opened is the holy Mother of God, who never knew a man. Through her, Christ the King of Kings alone in birth passed into the world, and he left her closed in perpetual virginity.29

Finally, to bring us closer to home, St. Antoninus, archbishop and most influential preacher of fifteenth-­ century Florence (d. 1459). In his collected sermons, he sees Mary figured in the miraculous city “which Ezekiel beheld in his last vision, by which the Lord alone entered and issued, and whose gate remained closed.”30 Now I mention all this not to argue that Michelangelo studied such texts, but to recall that there was no need to. He went to church and heard the sermons. He may have seen one of the miracle plays that put the Prophet’s vision on stage. The symbol of the closed gate was common culture, familiar to any medieval or Renaissance artist. What sets Michelangelo apart is the way he embodied this symbol. More art history, alas. I’ll try to trace the trajectory of the closed gate idea, reducing it to just seven stops—­ from the Middle Ages to Michelangelo. In medieval art, references to Ezekiel’s closed gate appear at first as an explanatory circumscription—­as in a mid-­twelfth-­ century Rhenish Madonna relief (fig. 4.57). The image of the Virgin and Child is framed by Ezekiel’s words—­ “Porta haec clausa erit . . .” etc. Then, by the later twelfth century, the Prophet himself appears, symbolically present, holding his scroll, center left, in a field adjoining the central Madonna, with the locked gate at center below (fig. 4.58). In fourteenth-­century polyptychs, he occupies one of the pinnacles, displaying his message on a scroll.31 More insistently physical, more pictorial, is another

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Figure 4.57. (left) Virgin of Dom Rupert, 1149–­

58, from the Abbey of St. Laurent, Liège. Liège, Musée Curtius. Figure 4.58. (right) Nativity in the Stammheim Missal, 1170s. Los Angeles, J. Paul Getty Museum, Ms. 64, fol. 92.

type from shortly before 1400, as in a German embroidery (fig. 4.59): at right, Moses before the burning bush; at left, Ezekiel before the closed gate—­and the scroll overhead becomes secondary. Then, in later altarpieces, the words become almost dispensable, relegated to thin ribbons of text (figs. 4.60, 4.61). The Nativity scenes are surrounded by four Old Testament events that were thought to prefigure the Virgin’s conception: her womb was bedewed like Gideon’s fleece (lower left); enkindled like the burning bush seen by Moses (upper left); budded without cultivation like Aaron’s rod (upper right); and mysteriously entered, like Ezekiel’s closed gate (lower right), through which thereafter no man shall pass. Again, only this last refers—­beyond the

virgin conception and birth—­to Mary’s perpetual virginity. And the verbal text recedes behind the Prophet’s physical presence at the depicted gate. Visualization is displacing quotation. Meanwhile, in mid-­fifteenth-­century Florence, Domenico Veneziano introduced the closed gate into the familiar image of the Annunciation (fig. 4.62). Now the energy of focused perspective targets, at the far end of the enclosed garden, the mystical porta clausa of Ezekiel’s temple—­seen, as it were, f­ rom inside. The closed gate has become part of the Virgin’s personal space. The sequence so far shows a progressive tendency to embody the doctrine, passing from word to image. First came Ezekiel’s verse circumscribed on a frame. Then,

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Figure 4.59. Ezekiel and Moses, detail of an embroidered hanging with typological scenes, Lower Saxony, late 14th century. New York, Metropolitan Museum of Art; Gift of Mrs. W. Murray Crane, 1969.

Figure 4.61. Circle of the Master of the Wolfgang Altar, Epitaph of Friedrich Schön, c. 1464. Nuremberg, St. Lorenz-­Kirche.

Figure 4.60. Lower Rhenish, Nativity with Moses, Aaron,

Gideon, and Ezekiel, c. 1470. Mönchengladbach, Münster St. Vitus, Schatzkammer.

in Trecento polyptychs, the Prophet himself in one of the pinnacles, remotely attending the Virgin and holding the written scroll of his text. Around 1400, Ezekiel appears in more carnal presence before the gate of his vision—­and the words recede ever more, so that the doctrine of Mary’s perpetual virginity is wholly translated into pictorial terms, though still as a separate image, collateral to the Nativity. Next, in Domenico Veneziano’s Annunciation, the prophetic speaker retires as his symbol enters the pictorial structure; the closed gate becomes part of the Virgin’s ambience, a space conceived as the symbolic extension of her nature. But even Domenico’s symbolism remains ultimately extraneous. Though the subject is the integrity of Mary’s body, that body is not directly engaged. I believe that Renaissance artists perceived this as a problem, edging the doctrine ever closer to Mary’s person. And because I tried to rethink their problem, I was able to identify the subject of a little-­known altar-

Figure 4.62. (top) Domenico

Veneziano, Annunciation, c. 1442–­48. Cambridge, Fitzwilliam Museum. Figure 4.63. (bottom) Niccolò di Bartolomeo Pisano, Holy Family and Saints, 1520. Worcester (MA) Art Museum; Theodore T. and Mary G. Ellis Collection, 1940.64.2.

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piece I once saw in Worcester, Massachusetts, when it emerged from years of restoration (fig. 4.63). The artist is an obscure Tuscan, Niccolò di Bartolomeo Pisano, and his picture is dated 1520, five years before Michelangelo started work on the Medici Madonna. The painting shows Mary raised on a dais. On his knees before her is St. Joseph, presenting the child, who offers his mother an enormous lily, which she accepts. As the angel Gabriel at the Annunciation had offered Mary this same emblem of purity, pledging virgin conception and virgin birth, so now, with the Incarnation accomplished, Christ himself delivers the lily’s veto—­Joseph and Mary jointly consenting. The crux of the picture is Mary’s perpetual virginity at the will of her child. And the symbol of it, though dispensing with the closed gate, is closing in. But the full coalescence of body and symbol was achieved by the one artist in whose hands robust physicality transfigures into all meaning. Disdaining outward signs, such as saints’ halos, or angels’ wings, or even the language of flowers, Michelangelo demands that meanings be wholly incorporated—­in physique, posture, gesture, drapery, or the interaction of persons. Remember the Church pronouncements I quoted before: they do not claim Ezekiel’s closed gate as an apt analogue to Mary’s perpetual purity, but that she is the closed gate. This is what, I believe, we are to see here—­Mich­el­ angelo thinking theologically within his own idiom. His Madonna’s pose renders her the closed gate of the prophecy, closed because Christ has passed through it. And I see it this way not only because her legs close, but because the child’s stride rides that foreclosing thigh like a clamp—­clamping down to seal what is already self-­sealed by volition. Two wills are involved, and both wills in unison. And this revelation of Mary’s eternal virginity—­this is what keeps the Medici princes alert—­ from Dawn to Dusk, through Night and Day. Let me finally turn to what I think the four arms are doing, lest you think me fixated on legs. First, as to the mother’s: the right arm is retracted, resting on her stone seat (fig. 4.13). The left supports the child under the shoulder (fig. 4.14). These are not two distinct gestures, but accents within a continuous rotation that

Figure 4.64. Simon Bening, Christ Child Surrounded by the

Instruments of the Passion, Prayerbook of Cardinal Albrecht von Brandenberg, 1525–­30. Los Angeles, J. Paul Getty Museum, Ms. Ludwig IX 19, fol. 31v.

involves the entire body, from shoulders down to the toes. Try once again to think the statue in plan: the limbs—­all the limbs as well as the torso—­rotate together like the parts of a steering wheel. The retracted right hand may hark back to antique precedents, such as the Oxford muse, but here it’s one two-­handed gesture, from the right hand fingering the supporting stone to the left touching the flesh of the child. So the reach of her hands runs from stone to flesh, like the reach of Michelangelo’s hands, the outmost poles of his sculptor’s conscience: flesh into stone—­from stone to flesh. There may be more to the Virgin’s gesture, for she touches the child protectively where his side will be pierced at the Crucifixion. We cannot be sure that this was intended, but compare a contemporaneous miniature by the Northerner Simon Bening (fig. 4.64): it

b ody a n d s y m b ol in t h e medic i ma d onna

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Figure 4.65. Michelangelo School, Medici Madonna drawn from the

Figure 4.66. Michelangelo School, Medici Madonna drawn

left. Paris, Musée du Louvre, Cabinet des Dessins.

from the right, detail from a sheet of studies. Paris, Musée du Louvre, Cabinet des Dessins.

shows the Christ Child surrounded by angels and by the instruments of the Passion, the central action being that of an angel pointing to the locus of the future side wound. It seems just possible that Michelangelo’s Madonna—­aggrieved by the foreknowledge of her son’s mission—­lays a shielding hand over that place. It’s a remote possibility, and I wouldn’t insist on it. Some will protest that her hand had to go somewhere. And these same skeptics will surely deny any purpose to the strip of cloth that meanders about the child’s body. This band winding about the infant looked interesting to me, as it did to the draftsman who depicted the Madonna from two sides, as Raffaello da Montelupo’s Sts. Cosman and Damian would see her (figs. 4.65, 4.66).32 He tracked the itinerary of this fabric,

which turns out to be devilishly intricate. Down from the right shoulder and athwart the child’s back, it retreats behind the left hip, reemerges in free fall on the far side, wraps over the left thigh and drops to pass under the sole of a foot that seems to step out of it. From any one vantage, this three-­dimensional trail presents such defeating complexity that it’s best left unnoticed. Or else, you draw it from various angles, and later that night, in your hotel room, you lash together the belts of your trousers and bathrobe and, then, poised on the corner of your bed, you assume the pose of the child, festooning yourself as your drawings direct. (So now you know what art historians do when no one is watching.) Doing it, I sensed that these bands were falling away—­as might swaddling, or shrouding, which, in the

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Figure 4.67. Adamo Scultori after Giovanni Battista Scultori,

Madonna and Child, reversed. London, British Museum.

Renaissance, always comes in thin strips. Michelangelo, I thought, was once again employing a future tense in the grammar of representation, as if to say, this is he who will shed the garment of death. You may wish to restore these strips to oblivion, and dismiss my hunch as too purely subjective—­but not this next observation. The boy sits forward and from toe to top rotates through 180 degrees to bring his arms into vigorous double action. In a baby, such torsion is so improbable that most adapters of Michelangelo’s group toned it down. The Cinquecento engraver Giovanni Battista Scultori tries to simplify and to clarify (figs. 4.67, 4.15). If the child is to suck, he says, then give him the breast, for Christ’s sake. And if he must take that straddling pose, then a 90-­degree twist is enough; 180 degrees is overkill. But for Michelangelo, this double action of the child’s arms is crucial and indispensable. For as the child straddles the mother’s thigh, and swerves, his right hand seeming to grope for the breast, his left hand—­ with a power inconceivable in an infant—­shoots out

from under to seize the Madonna’s shoulder. And this is what, among other things, the Virgin’s crossed legs accomplish: they hoist the child high enough to reach her left shoulder. Actual contact with the breast could be dispensed with, since the child’s eager rotation and right-­handed reach would suggest it sufficiently. But why the other hand on the shoulder? With a strong manly grip, he performs the gesture of appropriation, known from Roman antiquity, when a woman betrothed was said to be in manu (see pp. 157–66). This possession-­taking motif was revived in sixteenth-­and seventeenth-­ century secular marriage portraits (figs. 5.25, 5.26). By the early fourteenth century, however, it had begun to infuse Christian iconography, where the child lays a hand on his mother’s shoulder (figs. 5.27–­ 5.39). Such works allude to the sacred marriage of Christ and the Virgin—­to Mary’s election as bride by the Infant Spouse. The intimation of mystic spousehood even invested images of the Pietà (figs. 5.6–­5.13, 5.41, 5.42). In the Medici Madonna, the gesture is part of a dual action, which exactly defines the dual nature of Christ: the child turns to the breast—­impulsively asserting his need of milk, i.e., his humanity; and with equivalent energy, grabbing the Virgin’s shoulder, elects her, in his divinity, for his bride and heavenly consort. The fusion of the man-­God’s two natures was never so organically embodied because in Michelangelo’s hands, anatomy once again becomes theology. And now it occurs to me that both characters appear in three dimensions of time: present moment, sequel, and ultimation. The Christ is shown in his robust Incarnation; his Passion foreshadowed; and in his mystic nature as the heavenly spouse. The Virgin appears in her present motherhood; her subsequent steadfastness as Ever-­Virgin, the closed gate of the prophecy; and—­by virtue of the hand on her shoulder—­in her bridal eternity. So that’s my take on this Michelangelo—­expecting it to be widely dismissed as overinterpretation. But since, in my discipline, we have no precise definition of what constitutes “overinterpretation,” let me offer one: an overinterpretation is any interpretation which the skeptic hasn’t thought of himself.

Five

The Florentine Pietà

The Missing Leg Twenty Years After I never will have peace of mind till all honest men are of my opinion. —­Jonathan Swift to Alexander Pope, September 29, 1725

I. The Nays Have It

T

his paper concerns the afterlife of a ten-­page article, perpetrated by me and published twenty years ago in these pages. The subject was Michelangelo’s Florentine Pietà, about which the article said some alarming things that were promptly discredited—­and to such good effect that the need to renew their discredit has been felt ever since. As an instance of art-­historical irritability, the case is not without interest—­at least to the author, who is still alive and keeps watching with fascination. The occasion for the present retrospect is the appearance of yet another summary of Steinberg’s thesis in Jack Spector’s recent survey, “The State of Psychoanalytic Research in Art History” (Art Bulletin, 70 [March 1988], p. 65). Following is Spector’s paragraph in its entirety, footnote and all. Leo Steinberg wrote on “Michelangelo’s Florentine Pietà: The Missing Leg,” an iconographical interpretation of Michelangelo’s breaking of Christ’s leg in the sculpture. According to Steinberg, the sculptor acted in a fit of rage provoked by the recognition that the leg “slung” over the Virgin’s thigh displayed a repugnantly and sacrilegiously direct sexual metaphor: responding to external pressures (potential criticism), he “destroyed it in despair.” As is often true for Steinberg, Freudian ideas (for example concerning sexual repression) seem to have inspired him and to have provided him with the framework or background for controversial theories.85 85. See John Pope-­Hennessy, Italian High Renais-

sance and Baroque Sculpture, New York, 1985, I, 329: “‘The outright carnality of the symbolic slung leg’ is discussed . . . and is related, implausibly, to a ‘vast mediaeval tradition concerning the erotic association of Christ and the Magdalene.’”

What is striking here is the appeal to authority. Spector’s footnote quotes just one sentence, but that very sentence, unknown to him, had been the subject of a pleasant, hitherto unpublished transatlantic exchange sixteen years earlier. A letter Steinberg wrote to its author, dated August 7, 1972, reads in part: Dear Mr. Pope-­Hennessy, I hope you will permit an old admirer to draw your attention to a modest oversight in the catalogue section of your Italian High Renaissance and Baroque Sculpture (2nd ed., 1970, notes on Michelangelo’s Lamentation in the Florence Duomo, p. 339). . . . Your sentence reads: [as above, from “outright carnality” to “association of Christ and the Magdalene”]. In my article, however, the symbolism of the “slung leg” was clearly related to the association of Christ and Mary. . . . Originally published in the Art Bulletin, 71 (September 1989), pp. 480–­505, addressing responses to Steinberg’s “Michelangelo’s Florentine Pietà: The Missing Leg,” Art Bulletin, 50 (December 1968), pp. 343–­53. The 1968 essay is reprinted here (pp. 9–28) in the slightly revised version it took in “The Metaphors of Love and Birth in Michelangelo’s Pietàs” (ch. 1). Page references to the original article are included as necessary.

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I do not wish to attach undue importance to your inaccurate summation. We all read hastily at times. . . . But I cannot help noticing that a substitution of the Magdalen for the Virgin when an erotic association with Christ is under discussion has occurred before. A Rilke poem of 1906, in which the Madonna mourns the dead Christ as her lover, was printed by the publisher under the title “Mary Magdalene” and the poet had to republish it under the correct title “Pietà.”1 I was reminded of this a few years ago when Albert E. Elsen published a friendly reference to my Art Bulletin piece and again substituted the Magdalen for the Virgin in the slung-­leg situation.2 You have furnished the third instance of the identical error. I trust, however, that this is no more than coincidence, and that your oversight was a simple matter of haste and not an unconscious resistance to dwelling on the mythical son-­lover motif in the Christological context. . . .

Pope-­Hennessy’s reply, dated September 25, 1972, was brief and, I think, not unkind. It began: “Dear Mr. Steinberg, So sorry for this Freudian confusion. . . .” Irony nicely matched. Better still, a lapse understood to derive from unconscious resistance is freely acknowledged. But the gaffe reappears uncorrected in the book’s third edition (1985, p. 329), and with a gain in authority sufficient to furnish Spector’s note 85. Quoting Pope-­ Hennessy’s bull, Spector saw neither the blunder in it, nor its source in “Freudian confusion.” Let me, before moving on, summarize the argument of that luckless Art Bulletin article. The four-­figure Pietà of c. 1547–­55, now in the Museo dell’Opera del Duomo in Florence, was Michelangelo’s largest, most complex carving (fig. 5.1). It was intended for his own tomb. It crests in a bowed, beetling self-­portrait. It is the only sculpture the artist tried to destroy. The following points were made. 1. Christ’s left leg is missing.3 2. The leg, integral to the concetto, had been carved, at least in the rough.

3. The general course of the now missing leg from hip to toe across the Madonna’s lap is ascertainable. (No disagreement so far.) 4. High Renaissance artists revived an antique symbolic form, wherein divine, mystic, or sacred marriage (the hieros gamos) is indicated by one partner’s leg slung over the lap or thigh of the other. The “slung leg” motif. (No quarrel yet.) 5. Michelangelo’s concept of the Pietà as a sacred-­divine sposalizio employs the symbolism of the slung leg to intimate Mary’s union with the crucified Savior. (Here the ways part. Some deny that the posture of Michelangelo’s Christ conforms with the slung-­leg motif. Steinberg had no such qualm and proceeded to claim certain gains accruing from his interpretation. Among them:) 6. That the symbolism of the slung leg lent a closer thematic and formal coherence to the entire group. 7. That the Magdalen in Michelangelo’s composition stood for the redeemed sinner—­“the counterpart of the Virgin in a bilateral scheme, . . . personifications respectively of penitence and immaculacy . . . bracing and being embraced, . . . a communion of lovers . . . folded within the limbs of Christ’s body,” etc. 8. The final point came late in the argument and in the form of a question: whether the nuptial meaning here assigned to the “slung leg” could help explain Michelangelo’s rageful attack on the sculpture in 1555. The tentative answer was arrived at as follows—­I quote the concluding paragraph of the relevant section:4 Michelangelo’s figurative use of the human figure recalls the poetic idiom of those earlier mystics and preachers who described the ultimate religious experience in figures of physical love. . . . But poets and mystics had the freedom of figurative speech as an ancient charter. It was another matter to claim such poetic license in the concretions of palpable sculpture. Now, with the reformist atmosphere settling on Rome, Michelangelo may have felt certain resources of confidence failing: confidence that his intent would not be pruriently misunderstood, and confidence in the tran-

Figure 5.1. Michelangelo, Florentine Pietà, c. 1547–­55. Florence, Duomo.

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scendent eloquence of the body—­in the possibility of infinitely spiritualizing its anatomic machinery while still respecting its norms. Perhaps it was simply the vulgarization of his metaphorical idiom in the work of others that crowded and threatened his confidence. Or, more specifically, that the accelerating diffusion and coarsening of the slung-­leg motif during the very years of his work on the Pietà rendered the pose increasingly unacceptable. Such musings—­for there seems no way to move them beyond conjecture—­ suggest alternative or additional motives for Michelangelo’s destructive act. They keep open the possibility that he shattered his work . . . in despair: that he saw himself pushing the rhetoric of carnal gesture to a point where its metaphorical status passed out of control; that he felt himself crossing the limit of what seemed expressible in his art. His demolition then would be a renunciation, comparable to that which sounds again in the final lines of his sonnet: To paint or carve no longer calms the soul turned to that love divine Who to embrace us on the cross opens his arms. The date of the sonnet falls within the year of the destruction of the Pietà.

So much for the original article. And now I gaze in perplexity at Spector’s admittedly briefer summary. The article, he writes, is “an iconographical interpretation of Michelangelo’s breaking of Christ’s leg.” Not so. The article sought to interpret the work, and the speculation concerning Michelangelo’s reasons for removing the leg was presented as one possible consequence of that interpretation. Similar misapprehensions by noted scholars have bedeviled that Art Bulletin article ever since its appearance. They make a bulging file from which the following ten issue herewith to defile in procession: Athena Tacha Spear, 1969; John Pope-­Hennessy, 1970 and 1985; Benedict Nicolson, 1975; Frederick Hartt, 1975; Juergen Schulz, 1975; Robert S. Liebert, 1976; Philipp Fehl, 1978; Alessandro Parronchi, 1981; Charles Dempsey, 1984; Jack Spector, 1988.5

Athena Tacha Spear’s 1969 letter to the editor contained valuable observations on the work’s present condition, observations deserving of more attention than they have received.6 But the thrust of her attack came from the position of formalism. “For an artist,” she wrote, “a sculpture can be only a sculpture.” Therefore no symbolic charge ought to be looked for, and considerations of symbolism could have no bearing on the artist’s destructive act. “Michelangelo eliminated Christ’s leg for the improvement of the composition.” Which Steinberg answered as best he could.7 The following year brought Pope-­Hennessy’s authoritative dismissal of the article as “implausible.” He was right in a sense: it would indeed be implausible for Michelangelo’s Christ to position a left leg on the lap of a Magdalen crouched at his right. The year 1975, a jubilee for Michelangelo, was a good year for the slung-­leg hypothesis, earning it three condemnations. An unsigned Burlington Magazine editorial, written by the then editor, Benedict Nicolson, hailed “Michelangelo’s 500th birthday this month” in dismay: The avalanche of publications about the artist is unlikely to pause. Indeed, there seems little hope of any appreciable slackening until the world has run out of trees and all possible substitutes for paper have been exhausted. To express the wish for some diminution in printed offerings of Michelangelo in an issue of The Burlington Magazine containing three of these may seem a paradox. Yet those unlucky enough to be caught in the endless flow . . . would probably agree that things have got out of hand. . . . If neglect of what [past literature] has still to offer is one feature of contemporary Michelangelo studies, a craving for novelty is another, as academic advancement comes increasingly to depend on the manufacturing of  “new” contributions. Some of the least appealing of these are “iconological,” as authors strive to extract ever more “layers” of meaning from the artefacts (an exercise no more difficult—­indeed less painful—­than the skinning of an onion). . . . We have now reached a

t he m is s in g leg t we n t y y e a rs a f ter

point in time when we can be informed with academic gravity that Michelangelo’s Pietà in Florence Duomo is a deeply erotic work of art and that its “outright carnality” may have led the artist to smash the left leg.8

Frederick Hartt’s twofold objection to Steinberg’s paper appeared in Michelangelo’s Three Pietàs.9 Since the technical side of his argument will be discussed below, I cite for the moment only his coup de grâce (p. 87): Steinberg goes both too far and not far enough. Images of erotic derivation used to characterize Christian love can be found by the thousands in any period of Christian art and thought, and no one seems to have condemned them, least of all Michelangelo himself, in whose poetry these images abound. They were intended—­and should be regarded—­not literally but as metaphors. Any overt erotic interpretation of the relation between Christ and the Virgin (or between Christ and the Magdalen, as Steinberg also proposes on the basis of literature recording her intense desire for Him) is tantamount to regarding the Eucharist as a cannibalistic feast.

Here, it seems, the author is charged with regarding Michelangelo’s motifs of embrace and enjambment as a “literal” representation of—­well, of what exactly? We are agreed that the Pietà’s protagonist is a dead man and a deathless God. So the surge of his vital gestures cannot but bespeak his divinity. Had Steinberg proposed to read the Pietà “literally” as a moment of incestuous necrophilia à trois, with a hooded pander abetting, he should have been put away instead of being allowed to disgrace the Art Bulletin. Juergen Schulz’s 1975 survey, “Michelangelo’s Unfinished Works” (Art Bulletin, 57 [September 1975], pp. 366–­73) managed a fair, one-­sentence summary of the contested thesis in half a footnote (n. 26): “Steinberg suggests that the missing leg of Christ functioned as a symbol of Christ’s union with Mary, and that Michelangelo tried to break up the group because he recoiled from the carnality of the symbol.” This is exemplary—­gallantry

before the kill: “It seems illogical, however, that in a work intended for himself, Michelangelo should first have chosen, then repudiated what was a very esoteric motive, and then, still later, given the ‘carnal’ work away for resale to a third party.” Comment: What Michelangelo gave away was a ruin from which Christ’s left leg had been stripped. If indeed that slung leg offended, then the offending feature was no part of what Michelangelo “gave away for resale.” As for the illogic of positing a Michelangelo who first chooses and then repudiates what he had chosen, it agrees well enough with the artist’s explanation to Vasari of “why he had ruined such a marvelous work.” It was, says Michelangelo, “because of the importunity of his servant Urbino, who nagged at him daily that he should finish it; and that among other things a piece of the Virgin’s elbow had broken off, and that even before that he had come to hate it, and he had had many mishaps because of a vein in the stone; so that losing patience he broke it.” We gather that Michelangelo could come to hate what he had previously cherished. Meanwhile, since Schulz thinks it “illogical” to ascribe such inconstancy to the master, one would expect him to offer a more steadfast model. But in fact Schulz’s Michelangelo is guilty of worse vacillation. After citing the artist’s complaint that flaws in the stone (Michelangelo mentioned only one troublesome vein) had caused a piece of the Virgin’s elbow to break off during the carving, Schulz speculates that multiple flaws “may also have cost him the left leg of Christ,” a conjecture which has the advantage of removing the loss of Christ’s leg from the sphere of motivated destruction to that of accident. If it just happened, one need give it no further thought. Schulz adds that “a separate leg for the group did exist at one time.” How does he know? An entry in the posthumous inventory of Michelangelo’s studio (1566) lists “un ginocchio di marmo della Pietà di Michelangelo”—­ which Steinberg had taken for a relic of the original limb. Schulz, however, assumes that an unrecorded mishap deprived the original block of the mass from which to carve or recarve the left leg of Christ. Michelangelo, he thinks, then “intended” to supply the missing limb from

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a separate piece to be slotted into the hip, and surely the inventoried “ginocchio di marmo” indicates, indeed, proves the one-­time existence of this “separate leg.” The latter would then have been smashed in a subsequent change of heart, for Schulz goes on to cite the familiar Renaissance aversion to “piecing.” “Piecing was . . . considered a sign of technical incompetence. To an artist like Michelangelo, with his almost mystical conception of the integrity of the block, it must have seemed a defeat and a crime. Hence this final rage and rain of blows: Michelangelo could not abide the compromise that circumstances had forced on him.” Thus Schulz’s Michelangelo accidentally botches the left leg of Christ, proceeds—­in violation of inner conviction and professional standards—­to carve a replacement for piecing, and then recoils from an operation so foul and criminal.10 It is gratifying to report that some years after this publication, Professor Schulz informed me of his own change of heart: he no longer believed that Michelangelo ever considered piecing a separate leg into the block. The late Robert S. Liebert’s critique of the slung-­leg hypothesis was launched at the CAA Convention in Chicago in January 1976. His talk, delivered at Howard Hibbard’s session, “Non-­Art Historians Look at Art,” was entitled “Michelangelo’s Mutilation of the Florentine Pietà: A Psychoanalytic Inquiry and Alternative to the ‘Slung Leg’ Theory.”11 Setting aside Steinberg’s “iconographic explanation,” Liebert (I quote from his CAA abstract) proposed to answer the specific question “why the mutilation occurred at that time” (late 1555), and to respect “Michelangelo’s own explanation—­that he was so vexed by the nagging to finish it of Urbino, his beloved servant and companion for twenty-­six years.” Liebert speaks of the artist’s anxiety during the five months of Urbino’s terminal illness, and of his grief after Urbino’s death in December. “It is unlikely,” he writes, “given Michelangelo’s state of mind at the time, that he dwelled on the esoteric meaning of the ‘slung leg.’” Liebert continues: Michelangelo’s explanation of irritation with Urbino is related to the uniform clinical observation in people

who have lost the objects of their love either recently or early in life; namely, unconscious and unexpressed rage toward the abandoning loved one. The dynamics of this process explain the paradoxical blame that Michelangelo directed toward Urbino. At a deeper level, Urbino was an unconscious representation of Michelangelo’s lost mother, who died when he was six years old. To the extent that Michelangelo both identified with the Christ in the Pietà . . . and identified Urbino with his mother, the manifestly beatific union of Christ and His Mother also aroused his associated latent feelings of rage and sadism. These were forced to the surface by the frightening circumstances in the eighty-­year-­old Master’s life.

As a welcome relief from the leg-­struck hypothesis, Liebert’s CAA paper was warmly reviewed in the Art Journal.12 It seems also to be Spector’s preference, since (following Liebert’s 1983 book, p. 399, n. 12), he contrasts Steinberg’s “external” causation with Liebert’s “psychodynamic ‘internal’ explanation of the destructive act.” And this gives us the third attempt in eight years to explain Michelangelo’s maiming of the Christ figure by way of an alternative motive. In the formalist view, Michelangelo removed Christ’s left leg because, as anybody can see, the work looks better without it. The fury that accompanied the adjustment is not taken into account.13 In the technico-­biographical sequence propounded by Wilde and early Schulz, it was the indignity of a paltry pieced leg that infuriated the artist, whether that leg had been from the start of a different marble (Tolnay) or a substitute for an original that had come to grief. Finally, in Liebert’s intra-­psychic alternative, the Pietà en bloc (the missing leg now no longer privileged) is attacked in “rage and sadism” as the dying of a dear servant reactivates the artist’s rage over his abandonment by his mother seventy-­four years before. Comment: Liebert claimed for his thesis that it respected “Michelangelo’s own explanation.” But Michelangelo’s explanation came in three parts. To Urbino’s nagging it added the frustration of toil and mischance and, says Michelangelo, “even before he had come to hate it.” So the eighty-­year-­old sculptor felt pestered

t he m is s in g leg t we n t y y e a rs a f ter to finish a work which, for whatever reason, he now wished to disown. It was to this loss of inward conviction that Steinberg’s argument tried to address itself, while dismissing, perhaps too lightly, Urbino’s nagging. Liebert, on the other hand, slighted parts two and three of Michelangelo’s explanation, discounting the artist’s declared aversion from what he had made. In the end, Liebert’s campaign to make the Michelangelo case confirm modern clinical findings about the traumatic effects of childhood bereavement traduces the content of the artist’s creation. A diagnosis that finds Michelangelo’s images of the Madonna expressing—­“at the deepest level”—­unconscious sadistic rage against the abandoning mother seems simply wrong. Charles Dempsey’s review of Liebert’s 1983 Michelangelo book advised readers to get “a second opinion.”14

It was at another CAA session (New York, January 1978) that Philipp Fehl took his stand, hoping to say the last word on the subject: On occasion scholars have remarked how very little, if at all, we miss, when we stand in front of the work, the missing leg. The work seems much more in keeping with itself without it (and that would explain Michelangelo’s removal of the leg), and there, by and large, the matter rested until Professor Leo Steinberg, in a keenly reasoned inquiry, put the missing leg into the limelight of scholarly attention, so that for readers of the Art Bulletin at least it is no longer possible to stand in front of the work without worrying about the leg that is not there. For this, I take it, we are all sorry and no one, I think, more than my friend Leo Steinberg, whose concern was really on a quite different order. If I return to the subject it is with regret and apologies, but also in the hope, a paradoxical hope, admittedly, of putting the missing leg to rest [applause & laughter]—­how else could one hope to do it—­but by talking about it once more?15

Unlike Tacha Spear, Wilde, and Schulz, Fehl argued that the still visible preparations for a new leg (the

square slot at the hip and the receptive depression on the Madonna’s thigh) are not Michelangelo’s work; that they show only what Tiberio Calcagni, the short-­lived disciple who patched the work up, had in mind. Fehl believes that Calcagni changed the design by arranging to widen the angle formed by Christ’s legs, and that this change injected a dramatic emphasis which “conflicts with the silence of the scene and its decorum.” It is generally taken for granted that the new leg was intended as a reconstruction and completion of the leg Michelangelo had destroyed. A close study of the marble makes it appear more likely that Michelangelo’s left leg of Christ came forward at a much gentler angle, quite near, if not touching, Christ’s hand—­ the legs close to one another, more like those in the Rondanini Pietà and in a number of Michelangelo drawings.

Comment: There are strong objections to Fehl’s hypothesis; they are restrained by the fact that he never published the paper. And his hope of putting the missing leg to rest was not gratified.16 On the contrary, la gamba mancante was suddenly missed even in Florence, whose population, one would have thought, was inured to truncated marbles. On June 5, 1981, it was reported in La Nazione (p. 12) that the Pietà, newly installed in the Opera del Duomo, “presented a sort of mutilation,” the artist having smashed the Redeemer’s left leg because its position across the knees of the Virgin belied the work’s spirituality. The consequent deficit at the hip had stirred enough public interest to moot an international competition for the spare part; the winning entry (slated for separate display nearby “per non tradire la volontà di Michelangelo”) to be rewarded with substantial prize money (“con un premio sostanzioso in denaro”). Five weeks later, the Michelangelo scholar Alessandro Parronchi, writing in the same Florence daily ( July 21, 1981), took up the subject in a tone appropriately ironic—­his title, “Toh, le manca una gamba.” Parronchi proceeded nevertheless to debate where and how the original leg would have

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lain; suggested that Michelangelo must certainly have wanted to shorten it to produce “una posizione sospesa”; and ended by piling his compost of scorn on that jejune Art Bulletin article of thirteen long years before: This little problem hasn’t deterred some scholars, who capriciously indulge themselves in conceptual interpretations, among them Leo Steinberg, who reads into the placement of Christ’s legs [sic] crossed over those of the Madonna, an erotic meaning very much in keeping with our times. Using a similar method, one can put forward in vain whatever one wants.17

His conclusion: “la ragione che mosse Michelangelo fu certo soltanto formale, dettata da un senso dell’armonia regolato da leggi ferree.” It is not clear whether the ironclad laws that regulated Michelangelo’s sense of formal harmony determined the leg’s final removal, the preceding effort to alter it, or its original disposition. All three perhaps. But that considerations other than “ragioni formali” never clouded the artist’s mind, that’s for sure.18 December 1984: the slung-­leg hypothesis now sixteen years old, but not off the hook. So when Charles Dempsey reviewed a new Steinberg product,19 he noted with satisfaction that it “differs significantly from Steinberg’s earlier . . . studies of the art of Michelangelo,” where “the unfortunate result was the creation of a Michelangelo capable of genuine blasphemy in the Florentine Pietà (of which Steinberg argued that Christ the bridegroom literally consummates his marriage to Mary as the Church).” No comment. “The Missing Leg” article had been excerpted (as its final note indicated) from a longer essay, which appeared in 1970 as “The Metaphors of Love and Birth in Michelangelo’s Pietàs.”20 This complete version was generally overlooked until 1985, when Pope-­Hennessy cited it in connection with Michelangelo’s Roman Pietà: “dealt with in a perverse study by L. Steinberg.”21 The essay’s nine-­word title was then reproduced in extenso and very nearly verbatim—­except that Pietàs appeared in the singular and “Metaphors” was altered to “Metamorpho-

sis.” The procedure here is fairly subtle, and students of Pope-­Hennessy’s polemical style will register it as an advance. For where he would formerly hurl an epithet such as “truck driver” at a scholar he differed from,22 now the Knight of Billingsgate deftly garbles a title, as if to intimate, by example, how perversity should be met. It is heartening to see a scholar in the ripeness of years still refining his gifts. There followed a three-­year lull during which, so far as I know, Steinberg’s article escaped further censure—­ until Professor Spector remembered. To a summary of the excerpted Art Bulletin version in the context of “psychoanalytic research in art history” (wrong context, I think), he appended the requisite execration.23 I revert to Professor Frederick Hartt. His argument—­ that the posture of the Pietà’s dead Christ bears no relation to the slung-­leg motif—­seems so radical that it must be presented in full. Hartt writes: We come inevitably to the recent contention of Leo Steinberg that the crossing of the now-­missing left leg over the Virgin’s left knee was an attribute of sexual possessiveness, that it was increasingly so recognized in the sixteenth century, and that this was the reason why Michelangelo started to destroy the group. It is undeniable that the slung left leg had the meaning Steinberg claims in the instances he cites; it is equally clear that all his examples prior to Michelangelo’s own time show a leg thrown by a living figure [italics original] over the knee of another in such manner that the foot is free from the ground and points toward the observer. According to an engraving by Cherubino Alberti [fig. 1.15], presumably based on Michelangelo’s group before its attempted destruction, the missing leg ran parallel to the outer plane of the original block of marble and the toes of the foot rested on the ground. More important, the leg is that of a dead person [italics original] and was not thrown, but sank, into this position. (pp. 86–­87)24

Comment: Hartt objects that the slung-­leg thesis equates dissimilar things. He observes that the left leg

t he m is s in g leg t we n t y y e a rs a f ter of the Pietà Christ must have touched down, whereas the slung legs of living lovers keep the foot “free from the ground,” which is true in most cases. But Hartt overlooks the relative proportions of the figures involved. Normal partners to a slung-­leg alliance share one human scale. The Christ in the Pietà is at least one and one-­half times life-­size, and it is his exceeding stature—­ marvelously disguised by acute bends at the joints—­ that also brings down the foot. Thus Steinberg’s interpretation of that missing limb, though still dismissible as conjecture, may not be dismissed because the foot fails to hover.25 As for Hartt’s perceptive discrimination between the quick and the dead, the distinction fades when we summon an insight from another part of his text (p. 80): that Michelangelo’s Christ is “mysteriously alive in death as in all great Pietàs.” Indeed; and what is it that vivifies these dead Christs? Is not gestural capability—­the sense of a living will at work in those defunct members—­part of their mystery? Hartt would distinguish a living leg thrown or slung from “that of a dead person [which] was not thrown, but sank into this position.” Yes, because dead persons, true to their human nature, make lifeless corpses. But the Trinity’s Second Person in its humanation does not produce a corpse of that kind. Why, then, invoke the flaccidity of normal cadavers to deaden, on paper, a Michelangelo limb which none of us ever saw? Why declare this missing member to have conformed to legs of all corpses, rather than to its own body with its puissant embracing arm? Is it because that leg in place would accost the Madonna’s lap? A protest not unlike Hartt’s was raised against my more recent observation—­that the dead Christ is frequently represented laying a demonstrative hand on his groin. Such Christs, it was said, since they are represented as dead, cannot be held responsible for where their limbs fall; the hand in question must have been put there by one of the mourners. To which I replied that a posture contrary to Christ’s intention would be unacceptable to his corpse.

Christ in his dual nature . . . undergoes nothing but what he wills. . . . The very doctrine of the Incar-

nation demands it: it requires that everything done to Christ be attracted, that it be suffered and at the same time elicited or commanded, so that passive and active concur in unison with Christ’s concurrent natures. . . . Few, admittedly, had Michelangelo’s imaginative resources in making a deposed Christ seem both expired and vital. But . . . every [Renaissance] artist understood that no member of the crucified body rests or falls except by the acquiescence of Christ’s other nature.26

Concerning the dead Christ of the Florentine Pietà, Hartt might be answered: yes, this leg that “sinks” into position to concede its mortality, it also, at the same time, assumes the posture that enfolds the beloved. The literalism that wants a man either-­or, dead or alive, is “the letter that killeth,” inappropriate to Christ’s dual nature and to “all great Pietàs.” Furthermore: Hartt’s objection that the Christ’s posture fails to resemble earlier models of the slung leg rests on a misunderstanding. Steinberg’s argument does not claim similarity of appearance (what we call “look-­alikes”—­which is not what Michelangelo seeks). At stake is the identity of an action, its feel and import. It has to be danced to be known. Whether the foot in question does or does not plant its ball on the ground, whether the toes point hitherward or away, is irrelevant. If no standard slung leg resembled the pose of Christ in the Pietà (as indeed nothing could!), the dissemblance would not affect the case, which states simply enough that if one of two adjoined seated adults drapes a leg over the other’s thigh, an erotic connection is forged. The argument holds irrespective of external appearance. Offered to intuition, it addresses a level of understanding apart from and beneath art-­historical methodology. Was it this lowly appeal to bodily empathy that led some protesters to fend it off with the dismissive term “esoteric”? The slung leg esoteric? In our context, the term means no more than that the motif had not been previously catalogued. But yield to intuition—­better still, stage the motif with an obliging friend—­and you know instantly that it’s not esoterica you’re exploring, that the posture of the slung leg forms an erotic bond

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no matter how angled or by whom performed, whether the actors are Groucho Marx or Dionysus, whether we are shown fabulous lovers or even Christ.

II. What Seems to Be the Outrage? The explicit objections to Steinberg’s thesis come down to two: first, that the erotic tenor of the standard slung leg is falsely imputed to the Pietà; and second, that the “esoteric” significance of the motif, even if correctly imputed, would not account for the final mayhem. But supposing the author wrong on both counts, why twenty years of recrimination? Is it customary in the humanities to keep exorcising a wrongheaded thesis, the way orthodox theologians used to denounce bygone heresies? What was it that had brought on the trauma? Not, surely, the base appeal to bodily intuition? Was it the sting of the word “carnal” Steinberg had used? Several of his critics single it out, as if such vile usage were enough to incriminate. Let us take the word under consideration. Tracking the entry “carnal” through dictionaries of the past hundred years is intriguing sport: you can watch slippery connotations being sorted and shuffled as lexicographers try to protect a root meaning from millennial abuse. The twenty-­four-­volume Century Dictionary of 1889 segregates four distinct senses of  “carnal,” but lumps “pertaining to the flesh or the body” together with “lustful; gross; impure.” The finer breakdown in the OED (1928) yields six meanings, of which half are opprobrious. Passing from Webster I (1925) to Webster III (1961), one detects a renewed slippage in the word’s moral reference. In 1925, “carnal” meant: 1. Fleshly; bodily; as carnal interment; the carnal mother of Christ. Obs. or R. 2. Pertaining to the body as the seat of the appetites; sensual, hence, material; . . . opposed to spiritual . . . 3. Flesh-­devouring; bloodthirsty. Obs.27

In Webster III, the range of meanings is amplified by pejoration:

1a. Bodily, corporeal. b. consanguineous and bodily in relationship (the carnal mother of Christ) c. obs. Bloodthirsty 2a. marked by sexuality that is often frank, crude, and unrelieved by higher emotions b. . . . given to crude bodily pleasures 3. Unspiritual, etc.

Faced with these multiple shadings, how do we ever know which applies? When a given phrase attaches “carnal” to the mother of Christ, or affirms “the carnal presence of the Eucharist” (OED as fifteenth-­century); when “the sword which was set before the Gate of Paradise” is called (by Durandus) “a carnal observance”; when St. Bernard (in modern English translation) calls the love of Christ “in a way carnal because it especially moves the human heart to be attracted to Christ’s humanity,” what tells us to exclude Webster III, 2–­3? And if the answer is context, then how were “carnal” and “carnality” contextualized in that 1968 Art Bulletin article? Does not an argument that addresses the symbolism of multiple mystic marriage to the deposed Crucified preclude debased connotations? Yet as the word is haled into polemics, you hear it plummet on Webster III’s scale, from 1a to 2–­3. In Steinberg’s article, that scare word strikes twice: once where “the rhetoric of carnal gesture” in sculpture is contrasted with the abstractness of verbal tropes; and again in a subhead framed as a question about “the outright carnality of the symbolic slung leg” (pp. 22 and 20). Needless to say (correction: it now needs saying), the Pietà itself is nowhere labeled a “carnal work.” It is in the context of the hieros gamos that a metaphorical gesture and a symbolically disposed limb are called “carnal,” and this for good reason, since carnality admits of degrees. So, among available tokens of conjugal union, some—­like the joining of hands, the placing of a ring on a bride’s finger, or of a hand on her shoulder—­project a symbolism less carnal than that of laying a leg over her thigh. Yet all are symbolic nuptials, signs that stand for the becoming “one flesh” which marriage (we speak in symbols) is said to effect. None literally stage or pres-

t he m is s in g leg t we n t y y e a rs a f ter ent marital consummation.28 If the phrase “the carnality of the symbol” brings a contextually absurd “literal consummation” to a reader’s mind, then that mind is the troublemaker. But Steinberg wrote “outright”—­outright carnality—­ and this was unwise. The phrase irked his censors to the point of forgetting that the article’s first two pages make a half dozen explicit statements harping on the mystic significance of the motif, and call the slung leg exactly ten times “a symbol,”   “a symbolic form,” a “purely symbolic action,”   “a token gesture,” a “conventional sign”; and thereafter repeatedly a trope, metaphoric, figurative, etc.29 In the dim view, that looming “outright” emphasizing   “carnality” overwhelmed context and sense. If only Steinberg had written the sheer physicality of the symbol, all might have been well, and the article, caught up in the sludge of unwanted Michelangelo publications, would have gone the way of all trash. But alas, he wrote “outright carnality,” which I, his gray senior, have often reproached him for—­encountering no resistance, since his temperament is the sort that delights in being critiqued. Why did he do it? I knew him well at the time, and I remember his motives. His “carnality of the symbolic slung leg”—­and with the added emphasis of “outright”—­was intended to honor Michelangelo’s daring in suffusing a hallowed context of death and grief with erotic energy. The words Steinberg used were a measure of his amazement at what Michelangelo’s art dares to do. If in 1968 he thought it correct to recognize a willed tenderness in the dead Christ’s communion with his supporters—­in the arm that endears the Magdalen, in the “delegated caress of the shroud,” in the tilt of the head that knows upon whom it falls, and finally in the leg that had twined with the Virgin—­ seeing a mystical connotation borne by a gestural sign of outright carnality—­then he was carried away by the boldness of Michelangelo’s thought.30 Meanwhile, the possibility that the nuptial symbol in the Pietà might be mistaken for libidinous congress (or that his text might be taken to so construe it) never entered his mind. He even resisted saying that the posture is not sexually functional, for this seemed self-­evident

and therefore too condescending to say. He assumed that Michelangelo’s bonding motif in all its directness would be understood as a metaphor. Perhaps it was so understood by some, or even by a majority of Art Bulletin readers. We’ll never know, since the published record only bristles with opposition—­some of it reasoned, some almost instinctual and vehement in wanting the slung-­leg hypothesis quashed. And the reason why still eludes, so I press on. Implicit in the hypothesis are two threatening provocations that may well cause honest folk to recoil. One touches the incest taboo, the other, our disapproval of lively corpses. Both issues are serious enough to be squarely faced.31 Did the resistance spring from a primitive fear of incest, a scruple that would reserve the Bride-­of-­Christ epithet for the human soul, or for Ecclesia (or for Sts. Mary Magdalen, Lucy, and Catherine, as well as all nuns), but deny it to Christ’s carnal mother? Modern consciousness has been slow to retrieve the medieval concept of the Madonna as preeminently the Sponsa of the Song of Songs. What had once been a commonplace was being resisted.32 But those of us who read iconography in the 1950s took it for granted that, from the twelfth century onward, the Virgin as Bride of Christ was interchangeable with Ecclesia. The message is explicit in Rupert of Deutz’s commentary on Canticles: The pious reader may apply this exposition of the Canticle to our Lady Saint Mary, not thereby contradicting the fathers of former days who rather interpreted the Song with regard to love for the Church, but on the contrary, completing their interpretation, since the present exposition gathers together the loving voices of the great worldwide Body of Christ, and unites them in the single and unique soul of Mary, beloved of Christ above all. For there is nothing that cannot be applied to her, which has been said or can be said of the Church.33

And compare the terse wording which Panofsky liked to quote from the Canticles commentary of Honorius

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of Autun: “Everything that is said of the Church can also be understood as being said of the Virgin herself, the bride and mother of the bridegroom.”34 Accordingly, in twelfth-­century manuscript commentaries on the Song of Songs, the inhabited “O” of the opening “Osculetur me oscula oris suo” (“Let him kiss me with the kiss of his mouth”) may show either the mothered Christ Child, or else the adult Christ embracing Mary-­Ecclesia, his ordained bride and consort (figs. 1.38, 1.39). The famous apse mosaic at Santa Maria in Trastevere, Rome (before 1143), shows the royal couple enthroned, each holding a scroll inscribed with verses from Canticles as adapted to the liturgy of Assumption Day (fig. 5.32). The scroll held by Christ reads: “Come, my chosen one, and share my throne.” The Virgin’s scroll quotes: “O that his left hand were under my head and his right hand embraced me”—­and the right arm of Christ actually does embrace.35 Thereafter, until the mid-­fourteenth century, the graphic motif of the embrace, sanctioned by Canticles, persists in manuscript illuminations displaying Christ and Mary-­ Ecclesia as Sponsus and Sponsa. But though the Virgin’s bridal status was now assured, artists continued to treat her symbolic bridehood under one general caution. Since, in a literal sense, a mother-­son marriage must be incestuous, pictorial allusions to Christ’s mystic espousal of Mary were confined either to allegory and eschatology or to narrative situations that excluded Christ’s adult ministry. Renaissance artists might introduce a marital symbol in Infancy scenes, but only because the child’s tender age guaranteed innocence. In Filippo Lippi’s symbolic setting of the Incarnation (fig. 5.34), the “Infant Spouse,” adduced by angels, affiances himself to the Virgin by laying a hand on her shoulder—­rehearsing, as he often does in Madonna icons, an ancient rite of marital appropriation.36 Like-­tending symbols that address the nuptial sense of the Incarnation abound in Renaissance Annunciation scenes. Some of these portents are still unidentified, or subject to excited conjecture. Back in the late 1950s, one such conjecture stirred the excitable graduate student who, ten years later, published our irksome Art

Figure 5.2. Parthenon, east frieze, Hera and Zeus. London, British Museum.

Figure 5.3. Aureus of Herennia Etruscilla, wife of Decius, 249–­51

AD.

Bulletin piece. Observing that the antique ceremonial manipulation of the bridal flammeum recurred in some sixteenth-­century Annunciations, he reasoned that when Mary is shown lifting the veil from her face, the artist must be referring to the velation that once defined ancient spousehood. The gesture is known from classical Greece, where it may identify Hera as the consort of Zeus (fig. 5.2), or a mortal wife on an Attic grave stele. In imperial Rome it defines Pudicitia, the goddess who personifies the chastity of the univira—­wife or widow who has known only one man (fig. 5.3). And it is surely with this meaning of sacred marriage that the gesture is given to the Virgin Annunciate: by Titian in the 1560s and by Tiarini sixty years later (figs. 5.4, 5.5).37

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Figure 5.5. Alessandro Tiarini, Annunciation, 1620–­25. Bologna, Pinacoteca Nazionale.

Figure 5.4. Titian, Annunciation, 1559–­64. Venice, San Salvatore.

More commonly, nuptial symbolism marks the distal end of the narrative; it may occur at the Virgin’s Assumption, as when she is welcomed by Christ bearing a banderole with a legend from Canticles, “Veni, Electa mea”; or at Mary’s coronation in heaven, being joined to Christ by the Father officiating; or when, following her Assumption and Coronation, she shares Christ’s majesty as queen of the angelic host. These are what we may call “safe” situations. They polarize the symbolism of the son’s spousehood at the state of the neonate and the resurrected. But what of historic or quasi-­historical moments such as Entombment, Lamentation, Pietà? Do such istorie offer occasion for the forbidden nuptials of son and mother? Would

even Michelangelo dare to trap such a fine-­spun trope in still earthbound bodies? In 1968, Steinberg wondered to see the sculptor so bold: in the Florentine Pietà, the sign of mystic espousal, instead of being retained at the incarnational moment or deferred to eschatology, was implanted in historical time and assigned to a body still warm from its humanation. But now I find that Michelangelo, here as often elsewhere, was drawing on precedent, specifically on a tradition deriving from the Tuscan Trecento. The daring new iconography, which allows the dead Christ a clear spousal gesture, appears to be the invention of Taddeo Gaddi’s late years. Gaddi’s Pietà panel at Yale (fig. 5.6) shows the Christ between John and Mary, held up in his coffin. Of his deadness we are to be in no doubt. His eyes are closed, he is canopied by weeping angels, and his posthumous wound is fingered by the Virgin’s right hand. Yet he returns Mary’s embrace, his right

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Figure 5.7. Pseudo-­Jacopino di Francesco, Pietà, 1360s. Bologna, Pinacoteca Nazionale.

Figure 5.6. Taddeo Gaddi, Entombment, c. 1360–­66. New Haven, Yale University Art Gallery; University Purchase from James Jackson Jarves, 1871.

arm extended in an autonomous gesture such as no corpse performs.38 How should this anomaly be received? There are, theoretically, three ways to respond. The first—­an unrealized option—­is to shudder at the grisly predicament of a woman in a cadaver’s embrace. But no such response is likely to have occurred, because the picture does not invite it. The second way is to overlook the motif—­one pretends it’s not there. This is the course taken hitherto by writers on Trecento art. Even where the Gaddi panel or its ample progeny are discussed, the motif of the embracing corpse is passed in silence. The third way is to acknowledge a mystery. Assume that these defunct Christs, instead of projecting the historical Jesus forward to his last earthly moments,

Figure 5.8. Florentine, Pietà, late 14th century. Florence, Marcello Guidi Collection.

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Figure 5.9. Niccolò di Pietro Gerini, Pietà, c. 1377. Philadelphia

Museum of Art; John G. Johnson Collection, 1917.

were retrojected from the Trecento image of the Man of Sorrows. It is as though the imago pietatis which shows the Crucified standing erect in his tomb, unsupported, sometimes open-­eyed, earnestly displaying his wounds, had prompted the Pietà painter to ask: if the dead Christ can be alert enough to show his stigmata, he surely can show his love. So then, instead of protesting that a dead body cannot will an embrace, we allow a symbolic function. On the contrary, we say, it is precisely the expiration of Christ’s human nature that permits demonstrative action to the godhood still in the body. What we see is the bridegroom’s embrace, proper to the celestial Christ, but now assigned to the auspicious corpse hastening the theophany; so that the Virgin, chosen mother and bride-­elect, becomes the recipient of the love of a Christ still enfleshed. And this new motif must have met a religious need, for the dead Christ’s embrace of the mother is repeatedly reenacted during the latter Trecento and down to the 1420s (figs. 5.7–­5.10).39 During most of the fifteenth century, the symbol of the animate corpse is withheld; it would have offended

Figure 5.10. Lorenzo Monaco, Madonna and Saint John with the Man of Sorrows, 1404. Florence, Galleria dell’Accademia.

the rational naturalism advocated by Alberti and practiced by the great Florentines he admired. When Alberti speaks of the proper way to depict the dead, he commends a Roman relief representing the slain Meleager, because “in the dead man there is no member that does not seem completely lifeless; they all hang loose; hands, fingers, neck, all droop inertly down, all combine together to represent death.” There follows a general rule: “To represent the limbs of a body entirely at rest is as much the sign of an excellent artist as to render them all alive and in action. So in every painting the principle should be observed that . . . the members of the dead appear dead down to the smallest detail.”40 Surely this admonition was not meant to exempt—­if it was not actually aimed at—­images of dead Christs who embrace.

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Figure 5.11. Carlo Crivelli, Pietà, from the Montefiore Polyptych, 1470. Detroit Institute of Arts; Founders Society Purchase, General Membership Fund.

But just such images may have positively inspired Alberti’s older contemporary San Bernardino of Siena. In his sermon “On the Passion of Christ,” the preacher visualizes the Mater Dolorosa at Christ’s descent from the cross: “Rushing into his embraces and kisses, she could not be sated of her beloved, albeit dead” (“In eius amplexus et oscula ruens, de suo dilecto, licet extincto, satiari non poterat”).41 NB: not the bereaved mother but her crucified son; it is he, the dilectus of the Song of Songs, who, in despite of death, bestows kiss and embrace. The conceit is audacious, because a continuous tradition of exegesis, Jewish and Christian, had warned against reading the amorous verses of Canticles in a physical sense. When Origen, initiating the Christian tradition, comments on Canticles 2:6—­“ his left hand is under my head and his right hand shall embrace me”—­he insists that the carnality of the wording yield to spiritual interpretation. “The picture before us in this drama of love is that of the Bride hastening to consummate her union with the Bridegroom. But turn with all speed to the life-­giving spirit and, eschewing physical terms, . . . do not suffer an interpretation that has to do with the flesh and the passions to carry you away.”42 Of course, Bernardino respected such warnings. But in crediting the expired Christ with amative capability, he was relying on the deadness of him to ensure the metaphoricity of “his embrace.” And a like confidence

Figure 5.12. Carlo Crivelli, Lamentation, 1485. Boston, Museum of Fine Arts; Anonymous Gift and Julia Bradford Huntington James Fund.

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Figure 5.13. Attributed to Bernardino Luini, Lamentation, c. 1507. Budapest, Museum of Fine Arts.

must have guided Taddeo Gaddi and those Trecento painters who followed Gaddi’s example. In their pictures, the anomaly of the nimble corpse was to be understood as heuristic—­outright carnality overruled by the palpable paradox. But what of Alberti? It seems unlikely that he missed the visionary intention of those earlier painters. But he would have counseled a practitioner of his day to learn how to make a corpse look convincing, before putting it through its metaphorical paces; a corpse that could buss and caress would be nothing to marvel at if it never looked dead. In other words, in Alberti’s view, spirituality of intention could only redouble the need for rigorous verisimilitude.

Before long, a handful of painters in Northern Italy felt ready to try again. If Alberti had wanted the motions of the body to reveal those of the soul, and if Christ’s divine soul lingered in his mortified body, then Christ’s was a case special enough to suspend the order of death. Thus, by about 1470, the dead Christ’s caress of the Virgin reappears in pictures by Crivelli, Butinone, Luini (figs. 5.11–­5.13).43 Each of these fervid realists seeks to endow the corpse of the Crucified with a mysterious vitality signaled by its faculty of embrace. And this is precisely what Michelangelo, in that 1968 article, was said to be doing—­urging naturalism into the furthest reaches of metaphor. All this seems to me orthodox, even obvious. What

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then accounts for those slurs of perverseness, blasphemy, implausibility, far-­fetched exotica, and so on, which still pursue the slung-­leg hypothesis? The suggestion that Michelangelo’s Christ might configure the heavenly bridegroom seems innocuous enough, for even if the spousal motif had gone unnoticed in earlier Pietàs of the Gaddi or the Crivelli type, it had been recognized in the Florentine Pietà itself: Tolnay long ago had described the work as “a kind of ultimate sposalizio.” As for the élan of its protagonist corpse, Frederick Hartt, in the very essay that attacks Steinberg’s thesis, sees Christ’s right hand, “powerful as if it were still alive, . . . press into [the Magdalen’s] back between the shoulders.” He stresses “the special favor indicated by this embrace,” and observes on the Magdalen’s diadem a “winged amorino—­symbol of love.”44 Clearly, neither Christ’s alleged spousehood (Tolnay) nor his bestowal of a posthumous “favor” by dint of gesture (Hartt) disturbed anyone. Ah, but these blameless scholars steered clear of the lower body. Tolnay saw “the heads of Christ and Mary . . . fused together: they penetrate each other as do their feelings.” Hartt observes an embracing arm and cites a love symbol worn on a brow. Perhaps Steinberg trespassed in not respecting the lower limits of iconology.45

III. In Praise of Legs I think we have arrived at the crux. What Steinberg’s critics found unacceptable (though they never came out with it) was the scandalous notion that Michelangelo would involve an inferior limb in christological symbolism. Is it thinkable? Can such high emprise be entrusted to legs? We know legs to be serviceable appendages, adapted to the drudgery of maintenance and locomotion. For the rest—­especially where devotional art is concerned—­the less said about them the better. In an age when good taste abounded, Bishop Guglielmus Durandus praised Byzantine bust portraits of saints for showing the figures “only from the navel upward, and not below it, in order to remove all occasion for foolish thoughts.”46 And in modern times, Goethe, writing on

Leonardo’s Last Supper, asserted that “all ethical expression pertains only to the upper part of the body.”47 Now this is serious. Suppose it were true: then the very idea of a Christ addressing a nether extremity to the Virgin would amount to charging Christ with unethical conduct! And then indeed it becomes the duty of honest men to cry blasphemy. (And they have.) But with all due disrespect to his eminence, Goethe’s dictum, served up as a universal, is silly. Delivered in the context of an essay on Leonardo’s Last Supper, it belongs properly whence it derived, i.e., to the lesser universe of table manners. And no such decorum (Tischzucht in German) inhibits Michelangelo’s management of the human physique. His bodies don’t hierarchize at the girdle. Think of Sebastiano del Piombo’s remark about Michelangelo’s statue of the Risen Christ for Santa Maria sopra Minerva: that the knees alone were worth more than the city of Rome.48 A fellow artist said that. People who do not habitually draw or dance rarely conceptualize at this level. They quarantine spirituality at the top. That Christ’s corpse can stir, that one of his undead arms may hug the Magdalen or the Virgin, that his hand may fondle, his head turn to console, his lips adjoin the Madonna’s in a kiss of his mouth—­all these motions, once they are shown to occur in Pietà imagery, will be gladly indexed s.v. “Iconography,” provided that such posthumous symptoms pertain only to the superior moiety, the loftier portion, that better half whose tenders of amplexion and osculation have been so long in service to metaphor that they glide effortless into given figures of speech. “Diesen Kuss der ganzen Welt,” writes Goethe’s most illustrious colleague; and Joyce, gently mocking, has this same item, die ganze Welt, folded in a summer evening’s “mysterious embrace,” such being the tropological aptitude of lips and arms. But legwork? Would a Renaissance artist have stooped to engage the apparatus beneath the waist in the symbolism of divine love? This is a rhetorical question and not one for sedentary savants. Better to ask a dancer, a gymnast, or one who habitually draws—­anyone whose perception of the human body is not predetermined by the divisive effect of a tabletop. For a dancer, as for Michelangelo, limbs

t he m is s in g leg t we n t y y e a rs a f ter

Figure 5.14. Michelangelo, Risen Christ, c. 1532. Windsor Castle, Royal Collection.

function in an egalitarian system of thoroughgoing expressiveness. Structure is unitive, not rank-­ordered. Or say that the body is divisible in more ways than one: equatorially, if you like, as in common speech when we sort arms and legs; bilaterally, if you want to part right from left; or bendwise, chiastically. In a famous Michelangelo drawing of Christ resurrected (fig. 5.14), one axial surge, symbol of the ascent, aligns a raised arm with an opposite leg, each in extension; leaving two foreshortened members to form a meandering counterpoint. Here, as again in the Florentine Pietà, each leg pairs with an offside arm. But whether we parse along crossed diagonals, or flanking a median, or at the waist to segregate base from noble, the parcels are our making.

Michelangelo’s habit is rather to think the body from center out; power generated at the midriff sends forth equivalent vectors, which we call limbs. Is it likely that such choreography would denigrate legs in emulation of Goethe’s bisected diners or to forestall Durandus’s “foolish thoughts”? Before returning to the Florentine Pietà, it may be well to consider some of Michelangelo’s other religious works with regard to the lower members—­to see just how the artist makes them participate in structures of meaning, the goal of this exercise being not so much to argue that legs are important, but that the unity of the body is. To avoid overkill, I cite only seven examples. The Bruges Madonna of 1504 (fig. 1.53) shows the divine boy held between Mary’s knees, i.e., in manifest filiation (p. 33). His pose is curious, at once eager and hanging back, one tiny hand squeezing the mother’s thumb, while the other clutches her thigh. Yet his legs, like his lowered glance, point the direction to go—­though again not without equivocation, since the dipping toes seem irresolute. One would think of a foot testing waters were it not for the load of foreseen sorrow that weighs from the apex down. Mother and son know that the pending step is not lightly taken. So the contrapposto of the sleek naked child, whose head and legs overrule hesitant hands, arms, and shoulders, compounds the whim of an infant, clinging and wanting out, with the will of one whose native childishness sways with foreknowledge. The contrapposto is both psychologized and theologized. Hence the conflicted stance, the smooth glide of the lower body drawn by its leading limb to produce a posture that both relucts and performs; a posture ambivalent even at this unstable footing, where a heel lingers in a hammock fold of the mother’s skirt, as if the wavering between safety and venture could be epitomized in one foot.49 What we see is protectedness at the steep of a precipice, and a compositional system aimed at a ripple of infant toes about to touch down. As the boy issues, his condition ex Vergine becomes his visible attribute. Call it “whence­ ness”; it defines his incarnate nature as Mary’s issue.

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Figure 5.15. Michelangelo, Doni Madonna, 1506. Florence, Gallerie degli Uffizi.

The overt derivation from these maternal loins and the imminent footfall are as doctrinal as the Creed. In the Doni Madonna (fig. 5.15)—­the first Madonna to show a bare arm and shoulder—­the crouch of legs is pure Martha Graham. Michelangelo’s Virgin sits lower than any previous Madonna humilitatis, lower than any sedent figure had ever sat; her legs so disposed that they define the plane of the earth as a lily pad defines a surface of water. And then she leans back at ease between the parted knees of the father, whom we are content to call simply St. Joseph, without questioning this

unspeakable intimacy. There is action here for which we have no apt wording. For though common speech allows for a person resting in, or falling into, another’s arms, no idiomatic expression permits falling into another’s legs, or resting enjambed. Yet this is what the Doni Madonna would give us to see if our glance were uncensored: a Madonna enjambed, whose upper arm reposes on a familiar masculine thigh. But there is no reason to flinch, for the picture is orthodox. I have long pleaded that this St. Joseph is a transparent mystery, meant to be understood as sur-

t he m is s in g leg t we n t y y e a rs a f ter rogate father and surrogate husband. In both capacities he stands in God’s place. And the interposition of the young mother in the fork of his legs defines her as daughter and bride of God. What Petrarch had called “the three sweet dear names” that unite in the Virgin—­ those of mother, daughter, and bride—­the picture blazons as her triune predicate; not one by one, but in one sensible grasp.50 No compression of language attains such instantaneity. Yet this instantaneity is the heart of the mariological creed. Whereas all women who become brides and mothers relate severally to father, husband, and child, Mary alone, affianced to the whole Trinity, was his daughter whom she bore and espoused—­“figlia del tuo figlio” and Sponsa Dei. And the tondo sees her in the totality of her nature: as the child’s cherished mother, as beloved consort reclined at a husband’s thigh, and as favorite daughter nestled between fatherly knees. The legs of this more-­than-­Joseph, and those of the Virgin, and those of the Christ Child as he mounts from the father’s bosom into the mother’s arms—­these lowly limbs pace an entire theology. And why does the Virgin in the Medici Chapel support the child on crossed legs (fig. 3.1)? No earlier Madonna had been cast in such posture, and after the Counter-­Reformation the pose was pronounced improper.51 May we suspect that Michelangelo had some meaning in mind? I have suggested that—­given the gravity of the work and the setting—­the pose was less likely to be a casual genre motif than a symbol of closure, of the Virgin as the closed gate of Ezekiel’s vision, the single scriptural proof of her perpetual virginity. “This gate shall be shut,” says the Prophet; “it shall not be opened, and no man shall pass through it; because the Lord the God of Israel hath entered in by it, and it shall be shut” (Ezek. 44:2). St. Augustine comments: “This closed gate in the house of the Lord is Mary . . . who remained ever virgo intacta.” The interpretation became canonic and was repeated unceasingly, down to St. Antoninus of Florence, for whom Mary is the miraculous city “which Ezekiel beheld in his last vision, by which the Lord alone entered and issued, and whose gate remained closed.” In the Medici Madonna,

the child rides Mary’s foreclosing thigh like a clamp. Two autonomous wills are involved, and both wills at one. Clamping down, the child seals what is already self-­sealed by volition.52 As for the late Michelangelo cartoon at the British Museum, known as the Epifania (fig. 1.62), Ernst Gombrich has beaten me to it. In a paper published in 1986, he showed that its subject was Mary’s perpetual virginity, an interpretation, he writes, “clinched by the strange gesture of the Virgin, who is represented pushing St. Joseph away. . . . There could be no clearer way of indicating the doctrine . . . that Mary never had intercourse with Joseph. Once we see the group in this light we may also notice the strange ambiguity of the gesture of Mary’s right hand and her relation to the Christ Child, whom she appears to be holding by a leading string.” “Her relation to the Christ Child”: the phrase succeeds in evading (with a delicacy shaming the present paper) any direct mention of Mary’s legs. We are merely alerted to how these members further the definition of an article of faith.53 The Pietà for Vittoria Colonna (fig. 1.63 and pp. 39–­ 43): once again we are offered a vision of Christ ex Vergine—­but of a Christ aborning and sepulchered in one act. The image is eucharistic. At the verge of Christ’s grave, Mary as Church sits upright as on a birthing stool and, with midwifing angels cooperating, engenders the sacrificial body. And then there is Michelangelo’s ultimate and most private work, the uncommissioned Rondanini Pietà (figs. 1.68–­1.71 and pp. 43–­46), a marble on which he was still engaged two weeks before his death at eighty-­nine. Here the Madonna’s vesture exposes the knee and is slit to mid-­thigh—­an affront to traditional inhibitions which no art historian has yet faced up to, and that includes me. I am awed by it, but I don’t understand. One final instance: Christ’s posture in the Last Judgment fresco (fig. 5.16). In the literature of the past 150 years, almost every account of the subject states in no uncertain terms what this Christ is doing. But some see him seated; others as standing; others again as rising or springing up; and some as advancing with a vigorous stride. And each writer is sure of the reading, confident

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fiv e Figure 5.16. Michelangelo, Last Judgment,

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detail of Christ. Sistine Chapel.

that a body cannot perform more than one of these acts at a time. The writers are being as reasonable as had been the many sixteenth-­century copyists and adapters of Michelangelo’s figure, some of whom would adjust the posture into a stance, others into a sitting position or forward stride. Meanwhile, the evidence of Michelangelo’s few extant sketches for this part of the fresco is of no help; it only indicates that the concetto was not always equivocal and that the artist must have striven for a definitive mystification—­a figure interpretable in at least three distinct phases, three concerted postures that are anatomically incompossible, inexpressible in word or phrase, and, as the copyists were to discover,

inimitable. Yet this triple allusiveness of the pose makes lucid sense. As presiding judge, holding session, Christ sits in the judgment seat. As the Christ of the Advent, the Second Coming, he must advance. And (this is Jack Greenstein’s insight) since the Last Judgment fulfills what had been prefigured at the Transfiguration—­ when Jesus rose upright between Elijah and Moses (of whom Sts. John and Peter are the New Testament antitypes)—­he must stand.54 Does such thinking seem too far-­fetched? Though Renaissance writing on art is rarely hospitable to multivalence, we do find its like in the symbolic thought of the Middle Ages. Thus Adam Scotus: “Lo the Son of

t he m is s in g leg t we n t y y e a rs a f ter Man walking, behold him seated, and see Him stand. Walking in his mortality, seated in glorification, standing in eternity.”55 The motive pattern is similar to Michelangelo’s image, except that the theologian arrays his triplicity in neat sequence, the painter in coincident manifestation. A God-­man at once striding, sitting, and standing—­a lode of doctrine in one pair of legs, because the artist habitually vests his vision of Christian mysteries in a corporeal symbolism that comprehends the body from top to toe. In the 1968 Art Bulletin article (p. 349), Freud’s famous maxim “anatomy is destiny” was quoted and followed by: “In Michelangelo’s hands, anatomy became theology.”56 No wonder Steinberg found mystic spousehood in a slung leg. And though his hypothesis has been ten times dismissed these last twenty years, I continue to find it sound in doctrine and even persuasive, for it completes the body of Christ not anatomically only, but as a coherent concetto. Michelangelo was carving a body which, in the words of Leo the Great, was “able to die in respect of [its human nature], unable to die in respect of the other.”57 This radical paradox is the foundation of orthodoxy, and it was within this paradox that the sculptor of the Florentine Pietà defined his task—­to incorporate death with survival, mortality and undeathliness without contradiction. The result is a revelation: a body of Christ, wherein the estranged natures of man and God reconcile in cross-­rhythm and each limb sustains the theophany. And I do mean each limb, and all in concert. They need to be itemized lest one of them escape the mind’s eye. Item. Left arm. Sequent to the fall of the head, it strays like a twisting tag from the shoulder, drifting backhand against a collapsing knee. We recognize its crippling pronation as an ancient indicator of death, for this is how slain Niobids on Roman sarcophagi relinquish their done-­with arms. But Michelangelo reenacts the motif with an exacting, demonstrative torsion. Along with the flagging head, Christ’s left arm signals not simply cessation, but death achieved: consummatum est.58 Item. A broken reed—­the right leg. A wasted limb

thinned to its skeleton, fit partner to the abandoned arm grazing the knee. Item. An empowered right arm, strong in the circling sweep that embraces the penitent. Sprung from a corpse, it testifies to an ulterior nature, touching but incomprehensible. This leaves one extremity unaccounted for, to wit, the left leg, which is lost to us and which, to one scholar’s regret, keeps Art Bulletin readers worrying about what is not there. But what ought to concern us is the sense of the whole. Just what is the detriment of that loss? Shall we mutter “good riddance” because we admire the residue? Or did the now-­missing leg play an integral role in this body drama, in which cross-­paired lifeless and deathless limbs interweave and two piteous members cave in together against the others’ outreach? In the opening paragraph of his 1968 article, Steinberg wrote: “Michelangelo planned a whole, and whatever that whole was meant to embody he lived with for some eight years. . . . And any thought that Michelangelo entertained for nearly a decade is worth thinking again.” To which the critics reply that no Michelangelo thought, other than formal and anatomical, ever invested that nether region, hence no symbol to ponder. A leg is a leg, and a corpse’s leg is dead weight, and “for an artist, a sculpture can be only a sculpture,” and so on. Anything rather than admit a leg into a structure of meaning. Yet this much must be said in fairness to Steinberg’s critics—­they probably feel protective of Michelangelo, as if the man had been meanly maligned, as if the bid to charge the absconded leg with significance brought shame to the artist. In their perception, the slung-­leg hypothesis would accuse Michelangelo of parading eroticism, albeit symbolic, in naked show—­ad oculos rather than to the ear. And this, in a monumental devotional work, must not be allowed. Molanus, the stern Counter-­Reformation censor, warned in 1570 that if lascivious books were justly outlawed under the Tridentine rule, “how much more important that pictures of this sort be prohibited.” “Language,” Molanus continues (with an apt bow to Horace), “speaks to the ears; pictures speak

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to the eyes . . . and often descend more deeply into the heart of man.”59 From this doctrine—­which would apply a fortiori to sculpture—­it follows that an erotic bond presented to sight titillates more perniciously than even the frankest verse from the Song of Songs. And we might add that visual images lack the safeguard of deniability; they cannot say and gainsay in one breath. The preacher who invokes the joy of the bride—­“my Beloved  .  .  . shall lie all night betwixt my breasts” (Cant. 1:13)—­adds the instant assurance that the phrase is mysteriously meant, since she who is speaking is the human soul offering her bosom to the Logos, the Word. It takes a lot more persuasion to subtilize an embrace carved in perdurable marble. If that embrace is performed by a leg, it can take twenty years. The Pietà was begun sometime in the latter 1540s, that is to say, under a friendly pontificate. Paul III (reigned 1534–­49) was an art-­loving patrician who defended the artist against all carpers and kept their latrations subdued. It was during these sheltered years that the septuagenarian Michelangelo conceived his tomb monument, conceiving it as a wished-­for communion with Christ, expressible through carnal means. That he was aware of his symbolism should be taken for granted. To think otherwise is to beggar Michelangelo’s understanding of body language and pronounce him subliterate in his own idiom. It serves no purpose to imagine him blind to what we finally notice. But latelings are better than no witness at all. So Tolnay (1960) perceived an implied sposalizio in the meeting of Christ’s head with Mary’s; Hartt recognized a love motif in the right arm’s “embrace”; and Steinberg, expatiating on one ardent leg, observed incidentally that a sling loosed from the dead man’s chest passes between the Magdalen’s breasts to cascade down her belly—­the “delegated caress of the shroud” (cf. p. 189, note 29). The consistency of these inventions argues a confidence that cannot be other than willed. But during the half decade following the death of his papal champion—­as the murmurs against the Last Judgment grew loud and the Inquisitor Pope Paul IV pressed to have the offending fresco de-

stroyed, while zealots decried the artist as an “inventor of obscenities”—­during these years, 1552–­55, Michelangelo did a number of strangely negative things that betray faltering confidence. He sought to deny the “caressing shroud,” lamented his former “error” in making art his “idol and sovereign,” promised to abjure sculpture and painting (sonnet, 1554; Girardi no. 285), confessed misgiving about the rightness of his concetti (see below), and finally smashed the Pietà, most effectively and irremediably the left leg of Christ. Are not these actions—­disclaimers, renunciation, doubt, demolition—­interpretable as symptoms of inward change exacerbated by a changed climate? Undoubtedly, the artist’s attempt to destroy the Pietà was overdetermined, as one gathers from the multiple explanations that gushed from him as soon as Vasari asked. No doubt, the exceptional obduracy of the stone was an irritant. The loss of “part of the Virgin’s elbow” must have come as a shocking humiliation. Perhaps, too, the nagging of his dying servant Urbino got on his nerves. And we know from Vasari that something in the actual shaping of that slung leg had gone awry, whence the sculptor’s attempt to alter it. But let’s not discount the possibility that some of these mishaps occurred because he had “come to hate the work even before,” or rule out his apprehension that the meaning of Christ’s leg entwined with the Virgin—­originally a pagan symbol and the last of its kind to appear in his oeuvre—­might disqualify the work as intrinsically unsound and render it offensive to fellow Christians. A dead Christ, still incarnate, marrying all within reach by way of arms, legs, and drapery—­this is how the scoffers who were scandalized by the Last Judgment might have interpreted the Pietà had they looked with attention. So little is needed to rob symbols of their mystique, as the artist had learned to his cost. No longer was the intended spirituality of his symbols guaranteed by reliance on poetic traditions enshrined in indefectible Scripture and liturgy. These could not be misguided; but no inerrancy attended his own concetti, so that the risk he was running in offering to express mystic union by stark carnal means became insupportable. The 1968 Art Bulletin article suspected a failure of confidence at

t he m is s in g leg t we n t y y e a rs a f ter the very center of Michelangelo’s creative will, despair about the validity of painted or carved figuration as a vehicle of divine knowledge and service. In 1552, even as he was laboring on the Pietà and three years before he moved to destroy it, Michelangelo penned three lines of verse (Girardi no. 282) to vent his anxieties. He feared for the state of his soul and deplored his perhaps misguided temerity as pretender to divine mysteries:

Con tanta servitù, con tanto tedio e con falsi concetti e gran periglio dell’alma, a sculpir qui cose divine. (In such bondage, with so much vexation and with false notions and great peril of soul, here to carve things divine.)

False, possibly perilous notions in chiseling divine things? Though we cannot be sure to what he refers, we do know what sculpture Michelangelo was then working on. Is there nothing in the Pietà that might have troubled the artist’s mind as a “falso concetto”?

Appendix A: Response to Athena Tacha Spear, 196960 To repeat Spear’s final argument: In the Rondanini Pietà, Michelangelo proved his “disregard for anatomical accuracy” by retaining a suspended fragment of arm for its visual effect—­because it made beautiful sculpture. Just so in the Florentine Pietà, he eliminated one of Christ’s legs—­“for the improvement of the composition.” The analogy seems to me verbal, not visual. Unlike the mysterious arm whose presence adds to the breathtaking beauty of the Rondanini Pietà, the leg whose absence is said to improve the design of the Florentine group is not Michelangelo’s work. No one alive ever saw what Michelangelo carved in that place. To judge whether the group gains or suffers by replacing the missing leg, we restore it from our own (or from Cherubino Alberti’s) imagination. We imagine a leg in that slot, and it is hardly surprising if a leg of our

imagining fails to measure up to the master. Thus it is perhaps only an unconscious modesty on Spear’s part when she declares, in effect, that Michelangelo’s group is better off without her own imagined substitution. Since the lost leg seems expendable to Spear on aesthetic grounds, it is appropriate that she should doubt its symbolic importance. “It seems unlikely,” she writes, “that a single gesture within a tightly knit formal whole was conceived primarily with an iconographic symbolic intention.” But why should this seem unlikely? Is one pointing finger on a St. John less likely to have been “conceived primarily with an iconographic intention” because no such intention can be demonstrated for the remaining fingers and toes? Furthermore, my interpretation of the missing leg did not make it a “single gesture.” The contacts I discussed between Christ and the Magdalen, the touching faces and interlaced arms of the mother and son—­all these are no less charged with “symbolic intention” than, I believe, the missing leg was. And my article quoted Tolnay’s conclusion, reached without the legwork, that the “essence of the concetto is a kind of ultimate sposalizio.” My analysis tried to show that this essence pervaded the whole. Spear may be an unwary victim of what Richard Brilliant calls “appendage aesthetic”—­the tendency to regard the extremities of the body as discrete units. Hence her demand that such limbs either convey a distinct iconographic meaning or else confess that they have none at all. In this spirit her opening paragraph enumerates certain “gratuitous” Michelangelo gestures, beginning with the Medici Madonna’s right arm. These gestures seem to Spear to be so obviously without iconographic meaning or purpose that the mere mention of them should suffice to prove Michelangelo’s single-­mindedness about form for form’s sake. When she asks, “Why does the Madonna Medici place her dexter arm unnecessarily behind her?” we are supposed to concede that Michelangelo normally disposed and contorted his figures without regard to the subject. I see two errors in this formulation. First, the assumption that a given Michelangelesque gesture contains a fixed and presumably knowable quantum of

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symbolic significance. And second, that we can preconceive the units of meaning within a Michelangelo structure, so that we can question the meaning of a right arm just as, in a poem, we can question the dictionary meaning of a particular word. Yet there is little in Michelangelo to justify such preconceptions. Even when he conceives a limb that is clearly engaged in symbolic action—­even then we tend to misapprehend it if we see it alone. The most conspicuous right arm in Michelangelo’s oeuvre, perhaps his single most famous gesture, is usually misunderstood precisely because it is taken to be merely single. In the Sistine Creation of Adam, God the Father does not simply extend his right hand. Both his arms are extended and as one forefinger animates the first man, the other, with equivalent power, designates the New Adam. There’s a theology of difference between seeing a one-­handed and a two-­handed gesture. Nor does God sail within a host of undifferentiated angels. Crouched under that same trailing left arm is a virgin girl whose glance and coiled posture relate her at once to the man, to the Father, and to the child. I suggest that her implicit compound identity exceeds even that of First Eve.61 Who then would dare to say that there was ever a moment when the artist thought of God’s right hand alone? Michelangelo’s figures are ambidextrous. Spear’s rhetorical question concerning the arm of the Medici Madonna can be met in several ways. First, by pointing out that the Virgin’s right arm was not so much “placed” as found where it is; it runs in the angle of the original block, so that the block predetermines the gesture just as the gesture now harks back to the block. Second, the retracted arm on a draped female figure, seated, pensive, with her legs crossed, is part of a classical prototype (cf. the several versions of the so-­ called “Penelope,” fig. 3.5). This affinity for an antique model may or may not be meaningful; the symbolic value that accrues to a Renaissance figure by allusion to ancient stone is not measurable. In Michelangelo’s figure, the antique form of the retracted arm is modified in three ways: the arm is more emphatically withdrawn; it bends at the elbow, indicating a gesture rather than a supportive role; and finally,

the right hand does not lie flat but fingers the side of the seat.62 None of these modifications is insignificant. The emphatic withdrawal of the right arm, drawing the shoulder with it, serves to unfurl the entire right side of the body, while the left side is as emphatically sealed off. The action of the right arm must then be felt in unity with the other. Perhaps the rotation of both shoulders and arms should be imagined in plan, for one begins to realize that the Virgin’s right arm works like one side of a wheel. Its retraction—­which includes the corresponding indrawing of the right leg—­propels the left limbs forward and inward: the left leg over the right, the left hand over the child. It has to be danced to be seen. When you have held the pose till the strains of it become an inward intuition, then you discover that the Virgin’s two hands rest on different surfaces, that both hands make their respective contacts with a delicate consciousness of sensation, and that there is every conceivable contrast between the left hand in touch with the child, and the hidden hand, shrinking back, timid and groping to recall its support. The hands of the Virgin are a two-­handed action running its course through her body from stone to flesh. Stone and flesh in their mutual convertibility are of course the poles of Michelangelo’s creative thought. Coincidence, I suppose. Stone also tends to be the symbolic form which Michelangelo gives to the earth. The Madonna’s left hand thus enfolds the Christ Child even as her receding hand maintains its grasp on the stone seat rising from stony ground. It is not going far beyond the visual data to say that the concerted right and left limbs of the Virgin mediate between earth and incarnate divinity. I would not claim that such hypothetical readings are “true.” But if they are merely possible, they remind us that the elements of Michelangelo’s works are not classifiable under form, expression, meaning, etc. They are so interfused that the very distinction of form and symbol, insofar as it suggests different things, appears as an imposition, a projection from habits of language. Spear’s notion that Michelangelo at any time “prized the formal and expressive elements of his work, at the ex-

t he m is s in g leg t we n t y y e a rs a f ter pense of the representational and symbolic ones,” seems to me to misjudge his integrity. “To cite Freud again,” Spear writes, “there are times when a cigar is just a cigar. And for an artist, a sculpture can only be a sculpture.” As regards the integrity of cigars, Spear’s quotation from Freud was new to me. The one I know is from Rudyard Kipling and goes like this: “A woman is only a woman, but a good cigar is a smoke” (The Betrothed, stanza 25).

Appendix B: The Specter of the Impossible Leg (or The Phantom at the Opera del Duomo) The formalist explanation of the artist’s destructive act emerges early from a passage in Henry Thode’s great work, Michelangelo und das Ende der Renaissance.63 Thode begins by asking what motives might have led the artist “to destroy this sublime work.” He proceeds to list what he takes to be several compositional flaws, arriving at last at the work’s principal fault. Here the argument is so dense, and at the same time so evasive, that it needs to be quoted in full. (My translation is followed by the original German.) For the left leg of Christ there is no room at all; it would have had to pass through Mary’s lap. The only way to accommodate it would have been to let it hang down in front over Mary’s leg. One sees in what predicament the artist was placed. A short stump of the leg is indeed visible [and] a hole at its center shows that the master had considered this expedient. But this would have yielded a posture both unattractive and impossible. Unattractive because the compressed bunching of the leg, Mary’s arm, and Christ’s arm would have produced a confusing effect. Thus it was a matter of specific inadequacies, indeed, of irremediable faults, which threw Michelangelo into such despair that he himself laid a destructive hand to the work. (Für das Linke Bein Christi aber ist überhaupt gar kein Platz vorhanden; es müsste durch den Schooss

der Maria hindurch gehen. Die einzige Möglichkeit, es anzubringen, wäre die gewesen, es vorne über Marias Bein herabhängen zu lassen. Man sieht, in welcher Verlegenheit der Künstler sich befand: in der That ist von dem Beine nur ein kurzer Stumpf sichtbar. Ein Loch in dessen Mitte verräht, das der Meister an jenen Ausweg gedacht. Dies aber hätte eine nicht nur unschöne, sondern unmögliche Stellung ergeben. Unschön, denn das Bein, der Arm der Maria und der Arm Christi hätten in ihrer Zusammendrängung den Eindruck des Gehäuften und in den Linien Verwirrten hervorgebracht. Ganz bestimmte Unzulänglichkeiten, ja unverbesserliche Fehler also sind es gewesen, welche Michelangelo in solche Verzweiflung versetzten, dass er selbst zerstörend Hand an sein Werk legte.)

The above passage, dominated by resistance to the action of Christ’s left leg, is psychologically interesting. Thode makes the implicit assumption that Michelangelo conceived Christ’s body piecemeal, or at least one leg short, the artist discovering, when he finally got around to completing the figure, that the grouping simply did not allow for a two-­legged Christ. Thode next observes the prepared stump at the hip and concludes that the master briefly considered adding a separate leg to hang over the Virgin’s thigh, which, however, would have yielded an ungainly and impossible posture—­“unschön” and “unmöglich.” The argument, then, runs no-­yes-­no: there is, says Thode, no possible place for that leg, because the only possible place for it is impossible. But what makes it “impossible” (apart from looking “unschön”) remains unexplained. Coming from one of the finest minds that ever strayed into the field of art history, this tortured sequence of perception-­ evasion-­denial seems profoundly revealing. In the end, Thode’s troubled resistance to the leg’s posture shows more sensitivity than the nonchalance of later writers who contemplate Christ’s leg slung over the Virgin’s thigh and think nothing of it, dismissing it either as a failed compositional feature, as the effect of gravitation (Hartt, p. 136–37 above), or as a convention (Parronchi, p. 135 above).

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Thode’s surmise that a leg hung over the Virgin’s lap would have disfigured the work was followed by Herbert von Einem, who thought it unquestionable that the leg’s absence was an artistic plus.64 Convinced that the leg in its original position must have looked gauche, he concluded that this might explain why the work was abandoned; he did not say, however, that the leg was destroyed to improve the design. Indeed, in an earlier essay, von Einem stated explicitly that the removal of Christ’s left leg could not be ascribed to aesthetic preference since this would entail a disjunction of form from content incompatible with sixteenth-­century attitudes: “Ob das Fehlen des linken Beines Christi künstlerische Absicht ist, darf füglich bezweifelt werden. Eine solche Loslösung der ‘Form’ vom ‘Gegenstand’ würde der Kunstauffassung des XVI. Jahrhunderts völlig widersprechen.”65 It was Tacha Spear (p. 132 above) who took the next step. Writing in the last flush of formalism, she asserted that the artist removed the leg “for the improvement of the composition,” wherein she was to be seconded by Philipp Fehl and Parronchi (p. 135 above). To my mind, an argument that declares the work to be bettered by amputation has little merit. It may as well be applied to the Winged Victory or the choir of Beauvais. As Steinberg wrote in answer to Tacha Spear’s letter to the Art Bulletin (p. 153 above): “The leg whose absence is said to improve the design of the Florentine group is not Michelangelo’s work. No one alive ever saw what Michelangelo carved in that place. To judge whether the group gains or suffers by replacing the missing leg, we restore it from our own imagination. We imagine a leg in that slot, and it is hardly surprising if a leg of our imagining fails to measure up to the master.” Now it is entirely possible that as the carving progressed from 1547 to 1555 something went wrong: an accidental loss, perhaps, or the frustration of an intended shift which the available mass of marble could not accommodate. We shall never know. But we do know that the now-­missing leg satisfied the sculptor for some eight years. Some virtue it must have had—­even if it finally disappointed the most self-­critical genius in the history of art.

Appendix C: The Slung-Leg Hypothesis, Gathering Notoriety Overseas, Enters upon Its Third Decade Last year [1988], Professor Andreas Prater of the University of Giessen published a short scholarly monograph on Cellini’s saltcellar in Vienna.66 Discussing the confronted personifications of Terra and Neptune and their overlapping extremities, the author explained the interlaced footwork as symbolic of the marriage of land and sea—­and adduced the slung leg of Michelangelo’s Florentine Pietà as a comparable instance of symbolic “sposalitio und unio mystica” (pp. 35–­36). Not a connection I would have thought of, but it served his purpose, and it was done briefly and handsomely. At about the same time, Prater published a signed, one-­page inspirational on Michelangelo in the West German art journal Pan, subtitled   “Ardent Love for the Cold Stone” (“Heisse Liebe zum kalten Stein”), of which a near third dealt with the missing leg of the Florentine Pietà.67 Here Prater retold the story of Vasari’s nocturnal visit to Michelangelo’s workshop, and how the artist dropped his lantern when he saw Vasari ogle the leg that lay across the Madonna’s lap. “This posture,” we read, “was audacious and, as a sign of physical devotion [als Zeichen körperlicher Hingabe], was familiar to any art connoisseur of the time from innumerable secular works. All too late, Michelangelo recognized the awkward situation to which he had been brought by his love of the stone. He smashed the treacherous leg and gave the sculpture away.” So the fiction that the slung leg’s meaning only dawned on the artist after eight years of imbecile innocence is being cast abroad, to become henceforth what everyone knows. And it is this same folly that returns in the Art Bulletin of March 1989, where Valerie Shrimplin-­Evangelidis (following Spector) supposes Steinberg to have said that Michelangelo destroyed the slung leg “because of a sudden awareness of its sexual connotations.”68 Since he had written that Michelangelo conceived the slung leg “in perfect awareness of what it meant,” we must conclude that the author was reading in accord with a rooted educational principle: that the inattention

t he m is s in g leg t we n t y y e a rs a f ter brought to a disparaged text should be directly proportioned to its disparagement. Shrimplin-­Evangelidis has an answer to the rhetorical question that closed the foregoing article: whether anything in the Pietà might have given the artist cause for anxiety. Yes, she argues, it was his self-­portrait in the figure of Nicodemus. For this would have stamped him as one of the Nicodemites (loyal Catholics of crypto-­ Protestant leanings), liable to persecution under the new heresy-­hunting Pope Paul IV. One is led to ask why, in that case, Michelangelo allowed the work out into the world; why he did not knock off the head, or at least deface its likeness. The answer comes in Shrimplin-­ Evangelidis’s final footnote (n. 80): “If the religious connotation argued above was a reason for Michelangelo’s attempted destruction of the work, it may be asked why he did not attack the significant self-­portrait in the Nicodemus figure. This is explained by the fact that the statue is 226 cm high (7'5") and that Michelangelo was of medium stature, and then an elderly man.” He couldn’t reach it, you see; so he murdered a telltale leg.

Appendix D: The Hand on the Shoulder: Appropriation and Conjugality* In Greek art, the laying of one hand on another’s shoulder usually appears in natural contexts—­a parent and child, in affection or mourning; it may also represent the action of restraint.69 To Etruscans and Romans, however, the gesture alluded to possession-­taking (figs. 5.17, 5.18).70 In Roman law, the manus injectio, performed as a physical gesture, demonstrated the ceremonial seizure of one being arrested, a debtor or runaway slave.71 But manus also signified dominion over a person, and was fixed in Roman marriage laws; a woman betrothed was in manu.72 Though these laws referred specifically to the husband’s legal power over his wife, in Roman art *This appendix reached the galley stage in 1989, when Steinberg found that too much new material was arriving to complete it by the publication deadline. The discussion was reduced to a footnote, which is here replaced with the planned appendix, incorporating that new material.

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Figure 5.17. Fresco from the Tomb of the Shields, Tarquinia, 350–­

340 BC, banquet scene of the Velcha family.

the gesture eventually came to signify marriage as such, with the woman’s hand just as often husband-­bound, in manu (fig. 5.19). As a token of marital status in Roman or Early Christian art, the motif is as common as it is self-­explanatory.73 Of course, its sense could be metaphorically extended: with hand on shoulder, Eros takes hold of Paris, Hercules reclaims Alcestis from Hades.74 Renaissance iconography revived the motif, both in its metaphoric and spousal contexts. It is understood as a sign of possession when Death lays a hand on a youth (fig. 5.20). Conjugal or lovers’ associations abound—­Mars claims Venus, a pagan wife signals Solomon’s idolatry (figs. 5.21, 5.22); Adam or Eve attest their prelapsarian union (fig. 5.23).75 In Aretino’s Dialogues (book 1, third day), the courtesan Nanna declares her choice of client: “I placed my hand on the shoulder of my man.” It is in secular marriage portraits, however, that the motif rehearses the spousal imagery of Roman art, and it still can go in either direction. Begin with the entry on Matrimonium in Alciati’s famous Emblemata, first published in 1531, where the husband, in fidem uxioram, lays a symbolic hand on his wife’s shoulder (fig. 5.24).76 Whether known from Alciati or Roman sculpture, the iconography keeps cropping up in marriage portraits from the sixteenth century down to Degas and daguerreotypes (figs. 5.25, 5.26).77

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Figure 5.18. Deceased couple on an Amazonomachy sarcophagus, c. 180 AD. Paris, Musée du Louvre.

Figure 5.19. Sarcophagus of the Annona, c. 280 AD, detail. Rome, Museo Nazionale Romano.

To revert from such secular portraits to Trecento icons may seem a wild historical move; but we are dealing with a traditional gesture whose unitive sense is largely given to intuition. And it seems to me more than probable that when Christian artists assigned the hand-­ on-­shoulder motif to the Christ Child approaching the Virgin, they were casting themselves as witnesses to a marriage, recognizing the sposalizio implicit in the Incarnation. The symbol of marital appropriation was meant to reveal the child as the “Infant Spouse” (St.

Figure 5.20. Master of the Housebook, Young Man with Death,

c. 1485–­90. Amsterdam, Rijksmuseum, Rijksprentenkabinet.

Figure 5.21. (top left) Marcantonio Raimondi, Mars and Venus, 1508–­10. Amsterdam, Rijksmuseum, Rijksprentenkabinet. Figure 5.22. (bottom left) Master of the Housebook, Solomon’s Idolatry, 1483–­87. Amsterdam, Rijksmuseum, Rijksprentenkabinet. Figure 5.23. (top right) Ludwig Krug, Fall of Man, 1514. Staatliche Museen zu Berlin, Skulpturensammlung. Figure 5.24. (bottom right) Andrea Alciati, “Matrimonium,” from

Emblemata (Lyons, 1548), p. 153.

Figure 5.25. (top)

Ferrara School, Portrait of a Gentleman and a Lady, c. 1520–­30. Philadelphia Museum of Art; John G. Johnson Collection, 1917. Figure 5.26. (bottom) Italian, A Man and His Wife, c. 1545. London, National Gallery.

t he m is s in g leg t we n t y y e a rs a f ter

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Figure 5.27. (top left) Cologne School, Enthroned Madonna, c. 1270. Cologne, Schnütgen Museum. Figure 5.28. (bottom left) Cimabue (?), Enthroned Madonna, c. 1290. Bologna, Santa Maria dei Servi. Figure 5.29. (top right) Pietro Lorenzetti, Madonna and Child,

1320. Arezzo, Santa Maria della Pieve.

Augustine’s phrase).78 The motif is not common, nor unequivocal in each case, yet it may be traced intermittently from before 1300 to Michelangelo’s Medici Madonna, where the child’s complex chiastic action includes a vigorous seizing of the Virgin’s shoulder—­not as a novelty, but in respect of a venerable tradition. The tradition in Virgin and Child iconography goes back to the late thirteenth century, both north and south of the Alps. French and German examples include the Vierge aux pieds d’argent (c. 1270, Compiègne, Musée Antoine-­Vivenel), commissioned by St. Louis, and a late thirteenth-­century Cologne School Enthroned

t he m is s in g leg t we n t y y e a rs a f ter

Figure 5.30. (opposite top left) Bernardo Daddi, Madonna and

Child, from the Bigallo Triptych, c. 1333, detail. Florence, Museo del Bigallo. Figure 5.31. (opposite top right) Vitale da Bologna, Madonna del

Ricamo, 1330–­40. Bologna, Pinacoteca Nazionale.

Figure 5.32. (opposite bottom) Coronation of the Virgin, before

1143, detail. Rome, Santa Maria in Trastevere, apse. Figure 5.33. (top left) Sassetta, Madonna of Humility, c. 1433–­35.

Pinacoteca Vaticana. Figure 5.34. (top right) Filippo Lippi, Madonna and Child with

Angels, c. 1465. Florence, Gallerie degli Uffizi.

Figure 5.35. (bottom right) Paolo di Giovanni Fei, Madonna and Child Enthroned, c. 1385–­90, detail. Altenburg, Lindenau Museum.

Madonna (fig. 5.27), while the motif appears contemporaneously in the Cimabue shop (fig. 5.28).79 In figure 5.28, the hand-­on-­shoulder gesture, signaling the mystical Infant Spouse, is but one half of the christological story: the child’s incarnate nature reveals itself in the raised robe that exposes his right leg.80 The marital symbolism recurs throughout the Trecento, from the Lorenzettis in Siena (fig. 5.29) to Daddi in Florence (fig. 5.30) and, moving north, Vitale da Bo-

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Figure 5.36. (top left) Giovanni di Paolo, Madonna and Child with Saints, 1454, detail. New York, Metropolitan Museum of Art;

Friedsam Collection, Bequest of Michael Friedsam, 1931. Figure 5.37. (top right) Raphael, Madonna del Granduca, c. 1505.

Florence, Galleria Palatina, Palazzo Pitti. Figure 5.38. (bottom right) Andrea del Sarto, Madonna and Child, 1508–­9. Rome, Galleria Nazionale d’Arte Antica, Palazzo Corsini.

t he m is s in g leg t we n t y y e a rs a f ter logna (fig. 5.31).81 The latter, a fresco fragment discovered in the 1970s, has been dubbed the Madonna del Ricamo by Rosalba D’Amico, who thought that the Virgin was plying needle and thread, which would locate the iconography within the tradition of the “Madonna operosa” in Trecento art.82 In a different devotional context, I would propose an alternative interpretation, consonant with the gestural symbolism of the infant. That the mother does not support or even touch the child is astonishing (equally so in Lippi’s Uffizi painting, fig. 5.34). And she sits at his right, on the same level, sharing a long red cushion. Such joint seating is known in earlier apsidal mosaics of Christ and the Virgin enthroned as Sponsus and Sponsa, as in the twelfth-­century mosaic in Santa Maria in Trastevere, Rome (fig. 5.32; cf. the Coronation of the Virgin in Santa Maria Maggiore, Rome, 1295). And it is from this independent position

Figure 5.39. (top) Giuliano Bugiardini,

Madonna and Child with St. John, c. 1525. Bologna, Pinacoteca Nazionale. Figure 5.40. (bottom) Giuliano Bugiardini, Mystic Marriage of St.

Catherine with St. Anthony of Padua and the Young St. John, c. 1530. Bologna,

Pinacoteca Nazionale.

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Figure 5.41. Michelangelo, Lamentation, 1530s. London, British

Museum.

Figure 5.42. Cosimo Tura, Pietà, c. 1460. Venice, Museo Correr.

that Vitale’s Christ Child, self-­supporting, launches the action—­laying a hand on Mary’s shoulder; to which she responds, not I think by hoisting needle and thread, but like a bride in the moment of her election, like Simone Martini’s Virgin Annunciate and scores of others. The Infant Christ bestowing the manus on his mother continues to punctuate later Italian art. In addition to Sassetta and Lippi (figs. 5.33, 5.34), the marital gesture turns up in Madonna and Child images of Paolo di Giovanni Fei, Andrea di Bartolo, and Giovanni di Paolo, down to Raphael, Bugiardini, and Parmigianino (figs. 5.35–­5.39, 1.36).83 Occasionally, the gesture is so subtly understated that its symbolic charge could be credited to mere naturalism if seen apart from the iconographic tradition or accompanying symbols. The smiling child’s left-­ hand gesture is somewhat ambiguous in the Andrea del Sarto (fig. 5.38); it rests both at the Madonna’s shoulder and at her bodice. But the symbolic cast of the image is assured by the apple, held or presented jointly by mother and child. The naked infant in Bugiardini’s Bologna tondo (fig. 5.39) approaches the Virgin from behind and interrupts her reading as he points to the departing St. John. Christ’s hand on her shoulder would seem no more than a bid to get mother’s attention if the work is considered in isolation. Yet the same gesture, but this time by the Madonna, recurs in Bugiardini’s Mystic Marriage of St. Catherine (fig. 5.40). Here it begins a gestural arc that extends down to Christ’s proffer of a ring to St. Catherine. As Christ mystically espouses himself to Catherine, the Virgin affirms her own spousal union.84 For further incidences of the motif in images of the Pietà or Lamentation—­projecting a spousal status upon the Crucified—­I cite two probable candidates. Most pertinent to our subject: a Michelangelo drawing in the British Museum (fig. 5.41), datable to the 1530s, where the hand of the dead Christ firmly grips Mary’s shoulder. The action recalls strikingly similar shoulder grasps in a small group of fifteenth-­century Pietà compositions, one by Cosimo Tura (fig. 5.42).85

Six

Y

ou ask what I think of it, but at this early moment, doubts about Michelangelo’s responsibility for the Fifth Avenue Cupid (figs. 6.1–­6.4) must sound merely cranky. Where a sensational discovery is proclaimed and celebration is under way, no one wants party poopers. Why not wait until the matter can be discussed without heat? Remember: just eight years ago, my expressed reservations about a newfound modello for Michelangelo’s David were described by the modello’s promoter, the late Frederick Hartt, as “smears” and “a series of poisoned darts.”1 So, as one art historian’s fiat made a (short-­lived) masterpiece of that statuette, another’s doubt was attributed to sheer venom, attribution being what we are best at. On second thought, there is perhaps more to be said even now. I remind myself that our notions of Michelangelo are unstable, especially around the edges and at the lost-­and-­found counter. It would be intriguing to assemble the sculptures which at one time or another, from the Palestrina Pietà to the wooden crucifix at the Casa Buonarroti, have been credited to Michelangelo’s hand. The exhibition would be arranged chronologically by date of ascription, showing us at a glance what over the centuries was held to be compatible with the root stock. Dead artists change with the times. When terribilità was thought to be Michelangelo’s defining trait, works such as the dainty, now forgotten, St. John (acquired for the Berlin Museum in 1880) or the Kneeling Cupid at the Victoria and Albert Museum in London would not have entered the canon. But they were welcomed by contemporaries of Walter Pater, for whom it was

The Michelangelo Next Door

Michelangelo’s sweetness that mattered. (Pater’s brief Michelangelo essay, 1871, writes “sweet” and “sweetness” twenty-­three times—­“terribleness” not even once.) In Vasari’s day, a Michelangelo attribution would have had to accord with notions of awesomeness; in Pater’s day, with expectations of suavity. Thus any proposed addition to the Michelangelo corpus approaches a body hospitable or resistant, depending on whether that body is construed in the age of Vasari, of Queen Victoria, or Jeff Koons. Individual perceptions of Michelangelo vary no less. Mine, for instance, resist the dapper Fifth Avenue Cupid. I do not recognize the young sculptor’s hand or mind in the statue’s presumable gait (the legs from the knees down are lost); it suggests the light footfall of one delighted to be moving along. Nor can I find Michelangelo in the ease of the figure’s frictionless spiral motion, as seen especially from sides and back. The sentiment of the cocked head seems too cozy, as does the smooth drop from chest to left thigh, or, for that matter, down the right flank—­ expanses of bland, placid surface that glide over terrain without density (whereas the surfaces of the Bacchus seem to swell from within). This Fifth Avenue Published in ARTnews, 95 (April 1996), p. 106. The sculpture has now been titled Young Archer. In 1996, it was more commonly described as a Cupid, sometimes the “Fifth Avenue” or “Manhattan” Cupid. Steinberg did not publicly reengage with the work after 1996, though he continued to reject the attribution to Michelangelo when the controversy was renewed in 2009, at the time the French government placed the sculpture on a ten-­year loan to the Metropolitan Museum of Art. The museum now firmly credits Young Archer to Michelangelo.

t he m ic h el a n g elo n ext d o or sculptor dreams silhouettes, charming in linear flow, but without stress of substance. I am baffled by the figure’s proportions—­the puny chest slightly atwist on a deep, overlong pelvis. Frontally, the effect is disconcerting enough; more disturbing when seen from the back, where, at the base of the spinal column, a stretched sacrum denies normal length to the spine. More disproportions: a boy’s neck inflated to three times the girth of the right upper arm at the shoulder; a plumpness of neck of which the rest of the body is entirely unaware. As for the facial expression, make what you will of it, but the right cheek and jaw

Figure 6.1. (opposite top left) Young Archer (Cupid). New York, Metropolitan Museum of Art; Lent by the French State, Ministry of Foreign and European Affairs, L.2009.40. Figure 6.2. (opposite top right) Young Archer (Cupid), back view. Figure 6.3. (opposite bottom left) Young Archer (Cupid), view from

the left. Figure 6.4. (opposite bottom right) Young Archer (Cupid), view from the right.

seem rigid to me, planed like carved masonry. And I wince at the adjacent right ear, out at ninety degrees to the head, yet meticulous. As I see it, incoherence prevails, along with a sweetish allure that I find foreign to the twenty-­year-­old Michelangelo, who had done the figures for the San Domenico altar and was conceiving the Bacchus and the Roman Pietà. The recovery of a treasure from under our very noses makes a good story, and it is churlish to spoil it with a recital of flaws—­it’s like itemizing the blemishes on someone’s inamorata. But since you asked . . .

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rancesca di Neri di Miniato del Sera died when the second of her five sons was not quite seven years old. It is the thesis of Dr. Liebert’s book—­the most ambitious attempt yet made to psychoanalyze a long-­dead artist—­that her desertion of the young Michelangelo determined forever the artist’s character and, “at the deepest level,” his art. The facts mustered to support this hypothesis are necessarily sparse. Michelangelo was born (1475) into an impoverished household of decayed Florentine gentry. As custom prescribed, the infant was put out to nurse—­with a stonemason’s wife in a village three miles away, where the family owned a small farm. What other children this wet nurse had, whether indeed any were living, we do not know. Unknown too is the date of the child’s return to the parental home, where Michelangelo would have found his mother absorbed in raising his younger brothers. The stage was set for sibling rivalry and, in Liebert’s script, for a fantasy of displacement that would ever after plague the artist’s unconscious. Of Donna Francesca, after her death from unknown causes at about twenty-­six, no more is heard. The boy’s childhood, then, may be read as a record of multiple deprivations: removal from a nurturing surrogate mother; losing out in competition for maternal attention; and the culminating bereavement which, according to modern theory, the child would have invested with rage and guilt. “On the basis of clinical work,” Lie­ bert writes in an unfootnoted passage central to his approach, “we may infer that the six-­year-­old Michelangelo believed that his mother died because of his rageful thoughts and feelings, stemming largely from his early

Shrinking Michelangelo

experiences of traumatic abandonments and sibling displacements.” The author is a practicing psychoanalyst with a firm faith in psychoanalytic theory as a method of historical investigation. His chosen task is to explain “why Michelangelo was the person he was,” and his procedure is to deduce from Michelangelo’s presumed early sorrows a complex of adult character traits. Letters, poems, drawings, and biographical data are interpreted to confirm what the diagnosis predicts; and select works by the master—­more often certain treacherous details within them—­are adduced as further evidence of malaise. If the argument fails to convince, it is not only because the factual base is precarious, but because the demands on us are too slight. In the end, we are asked only to nod along with a syllogism: cruel deprivation in early childhood produces adult neurosis; Michelangelo was so deprived; Liebert’s argument follows. The enterprise seems most successful in the chapters that concentrate on biography. One chapter gives a clearheaded discussion of Michelangelo’s relations with young men, another examines his rare encounters with women. Here, as in some observations on Michelangelo’s other connections—­with relatives or fellow artists—­the author discerns constant elements in a behavioral record that had previously seemed more episodic. Review of Robert S. Liebert, Michelangelo: A Psychoanalytic Study of His Life and Images, 1983. Originally published in the New York Review of Books, June 28, 1984, pp. 41–­45; reprinted here with minor revisions following Steinberg’s notes.

s hrin k in g m ic h el a ngelo

But the character that emerges is deeply flawed. Lie­ bert’s Michelangelo lives in “fundamental uncertainty concerning the integrity of his body” (which prohibits orgasm with a partner). He suffers from a sense of abandonment, and a lifelong inability to tolerate rivals. Fantasizing a condition of servitude, he dreams of exalted descent to replace his true origins, and he longs for omnipotent paternal surrogates, while harboring repressed matricidal impulses, combined with besetting guilt and regressive yearning for symbiotic union with the maternal breast.

The symptomatology raises a number of qualms, beginning with the author’s tendentious language. Liebert believes that the regressive yearning mentioned explains, among other puzzles, the sculptor’s overlong stays in the marble quarries, since “at the deepest level of unconscious thought, the marble face of the mountain represented the maternal breasts.” But “the union with the dead mothering one” brings with it an “unleashing of the impounded rage connected with the sense of abandonment so early in life.” Accordingly, the quest in the quarries for the perfect stone block becomes a “venting of Michelangelo’s rage at the oral and maternal deprivation to which he had been subjected. In contrast with the farmer who works the earth’s surface by agricultural means to yield nourishment, Michelangelo had to attack this obdurate and intransigent material with sharp and harsh weapons.” This is troubling; the simple truth that the sculptor’s imagination conceives the stone block as matrix becomes, in Liebert’s prose, a pathological symptom whose cause is traced to oral deprivation in infancy. For such deprivation we have no evidence whatsoever. The boy, for all we know, may have had a good time at the dugs of his foster mother. In later years, Michelangelo recalled with good-­humored affection the aptness of her being a stonemason’s wife. But Liebert’s polemic needs an enraged Michelangelo. He therefore equates breast and marble so that the stone, “obdurate and intransigent,” serves to indict the ungenerous bosom. This in turn motivates the sculptor’s aggression. The progress of Michelangelo’s chisel becomes a sadistic retalia-

tion. And what of the artful contrast Liebert draws between the sculptor’s mayhem and the farmer who, in his goodness, eschews hurtful tools in favor of  “agricultural means”? Even the wicked plow in the furrow is spared for the sake of an invidious comparison. Can the heuristic claims of psychobiography survive such rhetoric? Some of Liebert’s characterizations of Michelangelo rely on distorted facts, as when he speculates that Michelangelo was compensating for his disappointment over his actual family by inventing what Freud and Rank called a “family romance.” But Michelangelo’s aspiration to noble origins was not a foundling’s fantasy, since it never involved a rejection of his own clan. On the contrary: just as his father and uncle had opposed his adolescent inclination to sculpture on the grounds that so mean a craft would dishonor the Buonarroti, so the seventy-­year-­old Michelangelo, living in Rome, was distressed to learn that his younger brother Gismondo had taken up farming. In his social pretensions he followed his father. Writing to his nephew (December 4, 1546), he offered to buy for his relatives an imposing house in Florence “since we are, after all, citizens descended from a very noble family.” And, he continued, “get Gismondo to return to live in Florence, so that it should no longer be said here, to my great shame, that I have a brother at Settignano who trudges after oxen. . . . One day, when I’ve time, I’ll tell you about our origins.”1 These origins, Michelangelo thought (mistakenly, as it turns out), reverted to one Simone da Canossa, podestà of Florence in 1250—­and Canossa was a great name. The claim has a period ring: as every upstart in Michelangelo’s day gentled his pedigree, aping the Hapsburg boast of direct descent from Hercules, so the artist gloried in a fancied connection with the counts of Canossa; in this respect, at least, he was well-­adjusted. Yet, since the house of Canossa included the great Countess Matilda (d. 1115), Liebert deftly observes that “Michelangelo appropriated as his own ancestor a woman who was both powerful and long-­lived—­a dramatic contrast to the reality of his own mother and maternal surrogate.” Why would Liebert turn Michelangelo’s mild case of status-­seeking into an intrapsychic conflict over his lin-

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eage? Because he is leading up to the artist’s frescoes of the genealogy of Christ—­some eighty-­odd Ancestor figures fringing the Sistine Ceiling. These figures Liebert (wrongly) regards as substandard, and his plan is to blame their supposed inadequacy on Michelangelo’s “conflicted feelings about his own ancestry.”2 As Liebert presents them, the artist’s character traits are, by and large, pathological—­they cry out for therapy. And since crippling afflictions alone would be irreconcilable with Michelangelo’s capacity for performance, Liebert from time to time praises the strength of the master’s ego, his courage and unwavering vision, his powers of sublimation, “the fluidity of his fantasy life and mental organization,” his “capacity to master and transform his tormented inner drama into art,” and, above all, his imagination—­“the glorious arena of his life . . . where beauty reigned and anything was possible.” These are deserved compliments, but they do not come from the analyst’s shop. Given the author’s commitment to childhood trauma as the wellspring of Michelangelo’s character, we are left to wonder at the etiology of those compensations. How deep-­lodged in the psyche were they? If we assume the enabling gifts to have been more than a tempering overlay, if we work from them backward to the unknown in Michelangelo’s infancy, we are prompted to fabricate an alternative childhood experience no less plausible than the Liebertine artifact. We would begin with Freud’s famous dictum: “He who has been the undisputed darling of his mother retains throughout life that victorious feeling, that confidence in ultimate success, which not seldom brings actual success with it.”3 Freud was here speaking of Goethe, covertly perhaps of himself. But if we reverse the proposed causal connection, inferring beneficent mothering from a son’s proven self-­confidence, then the dictum applies as well to Michelangelo in his teens, twenties, and thirties. Was ever a youth more abundantly blessed with “victorious feeling”? The young Michelangelo was sublimely sure of his powers, disdainful of lesser talents. At thirteen, he found Master Ghirlandaio unfit to learn from, and mocked the efforts of fellow students until young Pietro Torrigiani (who grew up to become a good sculptor)

Figure 7.1. Michelangelo, Manchester Madonna, c. 1497. London,

National Gallery.

dealt the arrogant boy such a blow that Michelangelo’s nose—­more precisely, the cartilage at the rhinion—­ caved in for good. But some time after, Michelangelo painted the Manchester Madonna and there bestowed the likeness of his disfigurement not only on the beautiful angel at right—­but on the Madonna herself (fig. 7.1). Other instances of the young Michelangelo’s self-­ assurance are his “faking” an antique Sleeping Cupid to prove his parity with the ancients, when it was axiomatic that antique excellence could not be matched; contracting at twenty-­three to deliver a monumental Pietà that would be “the most beautiful work in marble now to be seen in Rome”; and then, still in his twenties, returning to Florence to hew the colossus we know as the David from a marble block which experts had declared irretrievably botched. Invincible confidence governs the young Michelangelo’s dealings with patrons—­whom he wants rich

s hrin k in g m ic h el a ngelo and powerful, not, as Liebert believes, to play Zeus to his Ganymede, but because only power and wealth could support the scope of his projects. There can be no question that Michelangelo’s early self-­image was that of a conqueror. And if, psychogenetically, such a self-­image presupposes, in childhood, the blessing of a favorite parent—­which we know Michelangelo’s dismal father withheld—­why then the boy must have got it (like Goethe and Freud) from his mother.

Hence my counterhypothesis. Recalling a tag misattributed to the Jesuits—­give us a child until six years of age and we have him for life—­I note that Donna Francesca had Michelangelo with her for six years and nine months. And from the evidence of his feats of valor, I propose an alternative to the deprivation romance: that she must have regretted the custom of putting a child out to wet-­nurse; must have reclaimed him after, say, fifteen or eighteen months; then proceeded to cherish him for over five years, and, at her death, bequeathed the care of him to two doting females who were part of the Buonarroti household but who get no mention in Liebert’s text—­the paternal grandmother, Alessandra di Brunaccio Brunacci (1409/10–­1494), who lived until her talented grandson was nineteen, and his uncle’s childless wife, Cassandra di Cosimo Bartoli (married 1474, died 1530). All honor to these two women who, in my brash speculation, continued to treat the boy, against minimal competition from his four dullard brothers, as the “undisputed darling” he had been to Francesca.4 And we might guess that this experience of favoritism implanted in young Michelangelo an unrealistic expectation of privilege which, in adult life, in the collision with a sovereign will as unbending as his, incurred a rude shock. But not until he was almost forty does his confidence crack. Only then do we note its first slackening and the hardening of his tragic self-­image. And by that time his projected life’s work, the Julius Tomb, was crumbling beyond hope of repair. Liebert either omits or deflects certain traits of character in Michelangelo that tend to personal power. Among them I cite the artist’s ability to build himself a millionaire’s fortune, and his manipulative cunning in

dealing with others. The former deserves closer study than it has yet received. Michelangelo’s sources of income and energetic investments should be investigated by an economic historian with an art historian in tow. As to his cunning, Michelangelo is at all times adept at bending people to his own ends—­patrons and financial advisers, servants and fellow artists, and lovers no less. A recent review by Frederick Hartt cites a newly published love letter to Michelangelo from a young man “of tender years.”5 Hartt points out that the implied liaison coincides with the documented if somewhat mysterious relationship between Michelangelo and young Febo di Poggio and with Michelangelo’s ardor for Tommaso de’ Cavalieri. Such triplicity puts one in mind of Michelangelo’s habit of dispersing his money among several Florentine banks. It’s safer that way. Then there is the question of Michelangelo’s pride. The obsequious servility Liebert discerns in some of the letters seems to me a needed respite from haughtiness. Much of it is dictated by epistolary convention, often ironically exaggerated. Pope Clement VII is supposed to have said, “When Michelangelo calls, I always ask him to sit down, because I know he will anyway.” The report may be inauthentic, but incidents of a similar drift document nearly every period of Michelangelo’s life, even his dealings with the redoubtable Julius II. Lie­bert’s notion that “groveling” was “a predisposition in Michelangelo’s psyche” strikes me as wholly mistaken. The other half of Liebert’s “twofold purpose” is to seek the deep meaning of Michelangelo’s art. And this meaning is invariably found to be an unconscious expression of a character trait induced by trauma. Though Liebert respects Michelangelo as a thinking man, the method he has chosen hardly allows the artist’s created images to be significantly informed by thought or decision. Their deep meaning must be a lapse. To confirm the displacement fantasy, for example, Liebert looks for, and finds throughout Michelangelo’s oeuvre, sorry neglected selves growling at preferred siblings. Such are the Gemini at the hatching of Helen (in engravings based on the master’s lost design); such is the departing St. John in the Doni Madonna (fig. 5.15);

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Figure 7.2. Michelangelo, Taddei Tondo, c. 1504–­5. London, Royal Academy of Arts.

and such again is the Child of Promise in the Creation of Adam (on the Sistine Ceiling). It is now commonly recognized, and not doubted by Liebert, that as God’s most famous finger alerts the first man, his other forefinger lights on the shoulder of the Christ Child, so that God’s ambidexterity spans the redemptive history of the race from First to Second Adam.6 This much is conceded to the painter’s conscious intention. However, says Liebert, “for Michelangelo, the idea of parenting figures caring for one child carried with it the expectation of their neglecting the other.” Liebert therefore describes this other child as “barely noticed,” marked by “fear and abandonment,” and “in danger of slipping

off. ” There is, of course, no such danger. And as for the child’s propensity to escape notice, I find Michelangelo’s underhand prophecy of the Incarnation at this moment of Genesis remarkably apt. More ominous and truer to psychobiographical method is Liebert’s claim that the artist’s imagery projects a fantasy of punitive mothers and vengeful sons. The orphaned young Michelangelo, we are told, must have internalized the “view of his mother as a Medea.” And the proof of this fantasy is discovered in the Taddei Tondo, a marble from the artist’s late twenties, in the making of which “fear of danger from a murderous mother . . . was the controlling unconscious force.”

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Figure 7.3. Pietro Santi Bartoli, Admiranda romanarum antiquitatum ac veteris sculpturae . . . (Rome, 1693), plate 55. Engraving by

Giovanni Pietro Bellori.

The tondo (fig. 7.2) displays a winsome Madonna, seated low in the traditional humility posture. She faces—­and gently parries—­an overeager little St. John who proffers a goldfinch, symbol of the Passion, to the young Christ. The latter scampers away, overstepping the Virgin’s thigh, and twists back again. Playfully or in earnest, the child in its human nature seeks safety, but is recalled by curiosity—­or, if mysteriously meant, by the understood vision which the bird’s spread-­eagled body foreshadows. Nothing here insinuates a Medea. What then does Liebert see in this christological idyll to make it sinister? Nothing. But he is inspired by a remark of Panofsky’s (repeated by Tolnay and others) to the effect that the Taddei Tondo exploits an antique motif—­“the posture of the Infant Jesus being derived from the little boy [in a Medea sarcophagus at the Palazzo Ducale, Mantua] stepping over the fragment of a column.”7 Liebert takes this alleged derivation to have been “persuasively established,” and applies his discovery of “a previously untapped potential for understanding” Michelangelo’s work. He reasons that the artist would not have used an antique motif simply for its formal adaptability; but that it “probably struck dominant unconscious chords in Michelangelo,” so that he must have elected its original meaning. In the present case, modeling Mary’s son on Medea’s, Michelangelo was unconsciously equating the Virgin herself with the terrible filicide—­“compelling evidence of the strength and influence of Michelangelo’s

unconscious struggle with the theme of a murderous contest between mothers and children.” In view of the gravity of the charge, Liebert’s “compelling evidence” had better be reconsidered. Leaving aside the question whether any Medea sarcophagus was available by 1504, or whether Michelangelo’s Christ Child is sufficiently like the sarcophagus child to qualify as a dependent, we merely ask whether anyone in the sixteenth century could have correctly identified the mythological subject of a Medea sarcophagus—­as we do by reading museum labels. To this question, which Liebert has failed to pose, the answer is No. The mythologies on Roman sarcophagi, those of Medea and Orestes especially, required centuries of perplexed scholarship to decode. The former appears in two mid-­sixteenth-­ century prints, engraved after a sarcophagus now in Mantua, neither of which reads the depicted events with reference to Medea; one bears a legend referring to the myth of Theseus, Ariadne, and the Minotaur.8 As late as 1693, the foremost authorities in the field, Giovanni Pietro Bellori and Pietro Santi Bartoli, mistook the compressed iconography of the same Medea sarcophagus for scenes from the Proserpine story (fig. 7.3); as did Bernard de Montfaucon in 1722.9 Until the latter part of the eighteenth century, when Euripides’s play had become sufficiently popular to suggest the right reading, the sense of a Medea relief remained inscrutable, like a hieroglyphic inscription. Yet Liebert has the young Michelangelo discern its true subject

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fifty years before Euripides’s Medea appeared in Latin translation and almost three hundred years in advance of all classicists. The same objection invalidates Liebert’s recourse to an Orestes sarcophagus, on which, he believes, Michelangelo drew for the Sistine Ceiling fresco of the Expulsion of Adam and Eve; Adam’s defensive gesture being “virtually copied” from that of the matricidal Orestes pursued by the Furies. By this gestural likeness, “the theme of [Michelangelo’s] own matricidal impulses” is said to be “demonstrated.” But the author has neglected to notice that the fending-­off gesture in the sarcophagus is not made by Orestes, but by the old nurse—­a guiltless crone—­at the sight of the murdered Aegys­ thus. Nevertheless, Liebert insists on locating the deep meaning of Michelangelo’s fresco—­by way of a misconstrued Roman sarcophagus whose subject was unidentified—­in the Oresteia. And though he acknowledges that Aeschylus’s trilogy was not yet translated from the Greek, and that Michelangelo’s familiarity with it is unlikely, he can write: Michelangelo’s turning to the Oresteia lends strong support to the conclusion that his unconscious source of inspiration for the motif of the Expulsion was the unresolved and unneutralized residue of the murderous impulses he harbored toward his abandoning wet-­nurse and mother.

Meanwhile, the Blessed Virgin continues to serve the author as the butt of Michelangelo’s rage, and this brings us to the Last Judgment. Here Liebert defers to the work of Richard and Edith Sterba—­“the first to explicate the interaction of Christ, the Virgin, and St. Bartholomew in terms of  ‘the most important conflict in [Michelangelo’s] troubled soul: the aggression against the rejecting mother and the condemnation with which his Superego met this aggression.’”10 In the fresco, the bald, white-­bearded figure of St. Bartholomew holds a flayed skin—­displaying the artist’s self-­portrait with its characteristic flat nose and short, curly black hair. For the Sterbas it is nonetheless St. Bartholomew with whom Michelangelo identified;

and they see the Apostle pointing the knife that had flayed him at the Madonna, as if he indicted her for all the martyrdom and injustice which he had to suffer from her in his childhood and, through her, throughout his life. . . . The intensity of the reproaches has struck her so hard that she moves nearer to the Savior and half hides behind him for protection and her face she turns away in shame and guilt.

Liebert finds this reading congenial (“at the deepest level, as the Sterbas propose, the artist’s indictment is against the mother”) and he quotes the sequel: “Bartholomew, who stands for Michelangelo, is punished for his reproachful attack on the mother of God. This accounts for the pronouncement of severe condemnation by Christ under which Bartholomew is cringing.” Is it possible? Has a half century of psychoanalytical exploration of art availed only to reduce the greatest Renaissance fresco to the compass of a family tiff, where son snaps at mom and gets his comeuppance from dad—­the rest being mere eschatology? Liebert writes as if religious experience, anxiety about salvation, the meditating on Christian mysteries, could never deeply engage a man of the sixteenth century. Michelangelo’s faith has no place in his psyche, and the Christian content of a Michelangelo work is routinely dismissed as masking profounder symbols. Indeed, one senses impatience with the whole subject—­no other way to explain the careless abuses of Christian terminology that bestrew the book’s pages. The issue here is an unconscious resistance to Christian subject matter, an attitude that estranges the author from the content of Michelangelo’s art. Central to Liebert’s conception of Michelangelo’s psyche is a supposed  “absorption in the Ganymede fantasy.” The artist, we read, chose the myth to appropriate the rewards of eternal youth received by the beautiful Ganymede in recompense for sexual surrender to Zeus. Surely this fantasy is another of the author’s gifts to his subject. His assertion that Michelangelo’s work

s hrin k in g m ic h el a ngelo includes “a lifelong series of variations on the myth of Ganymede” is simply false. And his Ganymeding of the artist’s relations with patrons rests on a disregard of the role of patronage in Renaissance culture. The most Jovian of Liebert’s several characters playing Zeus to Michelangelo’s Ganymede is, of course, Julius II. For the first time in art-­historical literature, the scene shifts, in Liebert’s book, to Michelangelo’s bedroom, the occasion being the aged artist’s account to Condivi of the pope’s initial enthusiasm for the tomb project of 1505. Condivi’s text (1553) tells how eagerly His Holiness watched over the project, to the point even of visiting the sculptor’s quarters—­called interchangeably casa or stanza. These quarters had been set up close to the corridoio, the elevated passage that still links the Vatican Palace with the Castel Sant’Angelo. And we read that the pope had a ponte levatoio constructed to enable him to make his visits without publicity or, as Condivi says, privately—­segretamente. One would expect such a covered gangplank or drawbridge to have been hammered up in a day. But here is Liebert’s account:

There is . . . no record of Pope Julius’s undertaking construction of a drawbridge so that he might easily be able to visit the artist’s bedroom. The circumstance also seems unlikely in the extreme. Therefore, we must assume that at seventy-­eight, when fantasy and true recollection merged in this anecdote, what is recorded is Michelangelo’s vestigial wish.

Perhaps so, but how did the bedroom get into the text? By mistranslating “dal corridore alla stanza di Michelangelo.” For a stanza is not a camera da letto; in older Italian it can mean room, or suite of rooms, but it more often means residence or abode. The injection of the word “bedroom” so as to add sex to the old artist’s memoir suggests that the fantasy at hand is not Michelangelo’s. The mistranslation is needed, however, to prepare Liebert’s case that the relation between Pope Julius and Michelangelo was continually threatened by “an element that both men were defending themselves against—­the eruption of strong unconscious homosex-

ual impulses toward each other.” It is hard to see what such conjectures accomplish, beyond giving the book its consistency. The above, fairly typical, instances of misreading indicate that the factual ground on which Liebert bases his diagnosis hardly exists. But the problem is not primarily one of spurious evidence or slanted interpretation. It seems to me that his attempt to psychoanalyze Michelangelo is inherently self-­defeating. For the imperative to find confirmation for an unverifiable diagnosis within the artist’s creation demands that the most carefully pondered symbolic structures be treated as one might treat a slip of the tongue. And yet Liebert appears to know better. “It should be emphasized,” he writes in the introduction, “that works of art are not to be equated with either neurotic symptoms or dreams.” True enough, but who needs the warning? Not the thousands who daily gaze at the Sistine Ceiling; they know that they are looking at something other than a pathological symptom or private dream. Liebert’s caution can be meant only for those so immersed in psychoanalytical theory that they are tempted to class the creative act with the dream and the symptom, since all three are supposed to thrive on repressed, primitive thought; all three are “manifest expressions of latent and conflicted dark motives.” So the author is trapped. Protest as he may that great art resolves unconscious conflicts and “sublimates unacceptable drives,” Liebert’s program constrains him to make precisely the artist’s work testify to the reality of those conflicts. What evidence after all would there be for Michelangelo’s dread of murderous mothers unless his Madonnas supplied it? If the works furnished no proof, the whole enterprise would collapse. Liebert, therefore, must search Michelangelo’s imagery for symptoms of unacceptable drives left unsublimated and unresolved. Accordingly, throughout the book, unconscious compulsions, overruling the artist’s intention, are “a major determinant.” Unrecognized by the hapless artist himself, they “continually dictated many of his artistic solutions.” We are offered a Michelangelo so captive to his un-

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conscious that he succumbs time and again to inappropriate artistic solutions. For it is inappropriate for Michelangelo to have depicted Christ at the Creation of Adam as ill-­housed and “bewildered”—­just because the unwitting artist’s own sense of displacement prevailed while he worked; inappropriate again to have let the Last Judgment collapse on a three-­way family altercation, for which “the rest of the close to four hundred figures largely serve as a supporting cast.” And since the artist’s assignment was to project the eschatology of the Church on the altar wall of the pope’s chapel, it was entirely inappropriate to have St. Bartholomew out to knife the Madonna, with a retributive Christ dispatching his own Apostle to hell—­and all this because the artist’s alleged oral deprivation in infancy continued to fester. Such are the results of Liebert’s findings: the deep meaning of Michelangelo’s work resides in successive failures to satisfy the requirements of a subject. And so implausible is this result that the author must periodically deny the drift of his book. He reminds himself that the “essence of Michelangelo’s genius” is the ability “to cast aside individual neurosis”; or that the quality of that genius is “attributable to the extraordinary strength of his ego, which enabled him to utilize, master, and re-

solve conflict in forms that transcended his unrelenting obsessions.” This sounds right; yet whenever the author, instead of delivering general proclamations, expounds what he thinks Michelangelo actually did, we are shown a psychoanalyst’s patient, an artist whose ego lacked the strength to transcend private obsessions—­one who was near-­blinded by them. That impulses from the depths of the psyche feed into works of art is not in doubt; they probably affect most human actions. But artists, if they are any good, preside over their work with eyes open, and no one more so than a Renaissance fresco painter. Therefore, if the analyst finds, in one Michelangelo work after another, that “the defensive aspects of the sublimation are incomplete”—­if he finds much of the imagery incompatible with conscious intention—­he should take warning, retrace his steps. Liebert did not. And while his program leads him again and again to find neurosis accountable for the artist’s creations, his contrary protestations sound like attempts at exorcism, as though to banish a sense of transgression. “To say that [Michelangelo’s] own neurosis was responsible for his art would be to parody psychoanalytic theory,” he declares. In the context of the book he has written, this truism becomes a self-­accusation more stinging than anything a reviewer might say.

Eight

A

s a lifelong Michelangelo lover, I want to take this occasion to express my gratitude to the medical profession on two counts—­or, more precisely, for the work of two men. The first is the physician who treated Michelangelo for a painful disorder when the artist had just turned seventy-­five, i.e., in the spring of 1549. His name, and the role he played in saving that famous life, emerge slowly and somewhat reluctantly from Michelangelo’s correspondence. I have in mind the letters Michelangelo wrote at this time, most of them from Rome to his nephew and heir Lionardo Buonarroti in Florence; they reveal a cranky, irritable old man. Following is a characteristic opening: Lionardo—­ As I was unable to read your last letter or to make it out, I threw it in the fire. I am therefore unable to reply to you about anything. I have written and told you several times that every time I get a letter from you I’m thrown into a fever before I manage to read it. I therefore forbid you to write to me again from now on, and if you have anything to communicate to me, get hold of someone who knows how to write, because I’ve other things to occupy me without having to struggle over your letters.1

Two weeks later, March 15, 1549, Michelangelo writes again, this time more fully on a subject only hinted at previously: As regards my malady—­being unable to urinate—­I have been very ill with it . . . groaning day and night, unable to sleep or to get any rest what-

Michelangelo and the Doctors

ever. As far as they can make out, the doctors say I am suffering from the stone. They’re still not certain. However, they continue to treat me for the said malady and are very hopeful. Nevertheless, as I am an old man suffering from such a cruel malady, they are not making me any promises. . . . I am therefore in need of God’s help. So tell Francesca to pray for me. . . . Perhaps, with God’s help, it will turn out better than I expect, and if otherwise, I’ll let you know, because I want to put my spiritual and temporal affairs in order. . . . If you know of any noble family in a state of real need, let me know about it, because I’ll send you up to 50 scudi, so that you may make a donation for the good of my soul. This will in no way diminish what I have arranged to leave you, so see to it without fail.

Notice that in this letter no physician is named. A week later, I am happy to report, Michelangelo seems much improved. He writes to his nephew on March 23, 1549: Lionardo—­ In my last letter I wrote and told you about my being ill with the stone, which is something cruel, as those who have had it know. Since then, having been given a certain kind of water to drink, it has caused me to discharge so much thick white matter in the urine, together with some fragments of the Introduction to the symposium “Visual Arts and Medicine,” moderated by Steinberg, The Johns Hopkins Medical Institutions, November 3, 1981. Published in Bulletin of the History of Medicine, 56 (Winter 1982), pp. 543–­53.

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stone, that I am much better and they hope that in a short time I shall be free of it—­thanks to God and to some good soul.

Notice that the attending doctors continue to be spoken of anonymously, and in the plural. Credit for the recovery is given to God, which seems fair enough, and to some good soul (qualche buona persona) who, Michelangelo believes, has been praying for him efficaciously. Another week goes by and the old man, still anxious about the state of his soul, sends his nephew a bank draft for fifty scudi to be paid to an impoverished nobleman in Florence “who has to place his daughter in a monastery”—­evidently because there was not money enough for a dowry. He urges his nephew not to divulge the source of the money, but to be sure to get a receipt. His letter of March 29 adds: Writing is a trouble to me, because I don’t feel well. However, compared with the state I have been in, I think I’ve recovered; and as I’ve begun to discharge some fragments of the stone, I’m very hopeful.

Six days later, on April 5, Michelangelo writes, almost in passing: As regards my malady, I’m very much better. We are now certain that I am suffering from the stone, but it is a small one and thanks to God and the virtues of the water I’m drinking, it’s being dissolved little by little, so that I’m hopeful of being free of it.

Observe that Michelangelo writes “we are now certain,” and that the credit for his improved condition is given to God and to the medicine, but as yet to no doctor. Not until his letter of April 25, 1549, do we get this postscripted concession: As regards my malady, I’m . . . very much better—­ to many people’s amazement, because I was given up for dead, and so I thought myself. I’ve had a good doctor, but I believe more in prayers than in medicines.

So, after six weeks of successful treatment, Michelangelo at last allows that he had a good doctor who, nevertheless, still goes nameless. But the anonymity is dispelled in the biography of Michelangelo published in 1553 by Michelangelo’s pupil and assistant, Ascanio Condivi. There we learn that this same “good doctor” had also become a good friend. We hear that the aged master was thinking of composing an anatomy for artists; and that he often conferred with—­I am quoting Condivi—­“ Messer Realdo Colombo, an anatomist and most excellent surgeon, a great friend of Michelangelo’s and mine. He sent to Michelangelo for study the body of a Moor, a very fine young man, and very suitable to the purpose. . . . On this corpse Michelangelo showed me many rare and recondite facts, perhaps never before understood.” Finally, a letter of Michelangelo’s to Vasari, written on May 22, 1557 (or eight years after that first attack of the stone) informs us that Realdo Colombo was the man who had treated his stone eight years before. Michelangelo, now eighty-­two, writes: I am physically enfeebled like all old men, by kidney trouble, the stone and the colic, and Messer Eraldo [sic] can bear witness to this, because I owe my life to him.

Of course Michelangelo may be exaggerating, dramatizing his peril as elderly patients are known to do. But even so, consider what it means to have saved or eased Michelangelo’s life at seventy-­five. Michelangelo lived to be eighty-­nine, and during his last fourteen years of unremitting activity he redesigned the Basilica of St. Peter’s, surmounted by the world’s bravest dome; produced the Florentine Pietà, intended for his own tomb; and the Rondanini Pietà, on which he worked to within two weeks of his death. So that, if Michelangelo survived a crippling malady at seventy-­ five, all this and much else is what he was saved for by his physician. Who was this “Messer Eraldo”? A personage of some stature in the history of medicine, Realdo Colombo of Cremona had worked as Vesalius’s assistant at Padua. Sometime during the mid-­1540s, he discov-

m ic h el a n g elo a n d t h e d o ctor s ered, and succeeded in demonstrating, the lesser, or pulmonary circulation. Where Galen had assumed a direct passage of the blood from the right to the left ventricle through invisible pores or cavities in the septum, and where Vesalius had noted the impermeability of the septum without being able to specializing explain the contradiction, Colombo—­ in the dissection of live animals as well as human corpses—­proved the passage of the blood through the lungs. He knew what he had accomplished, and his arrogance (as toward Vesalius) could be obnoxious. But unfortunately, little is known of his life. The literature swells with conjecture. And the only modern study of Colombo’s life which is thoroughly conscientious and authoritative has been—­with one important exception2 —­consistently overlooked since it appeared in 1957. The study was produced by a young American, Edward Coppola, as an MD thesis (1955) in the Yale Department of the History of Medicine. It was published here at Johns Hopkins as the William Osler Medal Essay in the Bulletin of the History of Medicine.3 How Colombo and Michelangelo might have met in 1547 or 1548, immediately after Colombo’s first arrival in Rome and long before Michelangelo’s illness, remains a mystery to me. But in April 1548, Colombo wrote to the Duke of Tuscany, who had appointed him professor of anatomy at the University of Pisa, that he must stay in Rome, being engaged on a book; and, he adds, “as luck would have it, the foremost painter in the world is assisting me.” It is generally assumed that these words refer to Michelangelo—­there is no other candidate for the title if you were writing from Rome. And from this and other hints scholars infer that Colombo and Michelangelo planned to collaborate on an anatomical treatise, with the artist furnishing the illustrations, just as Titian’s shop had furnished the woodcuts for Vesalius’s Fabrica of 1543. But no collaboration materialized, and Colombo’s treatise, De re anatomica, went to press in 1559, posthumously, without illustrations—­except for the title page (fig. 8.1) which imitates that of Vesalius’s Fabrica and in which Michelangelo was not involved.

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Figure 8.1. Realdo Colombo, De re anatomica (Venice, 1559), title

page.

Colombo’s treatise has been recently studied for traces of Michelangelo’s influence—­not in its scientific reporting, but in its attendant rhetoric. It seems that Colombo was given to discussing anatomy metaphysically and metaphorically, dwelling on analogies, for instance, between anatomy and architecture, as Michelangelo does in his work, and may well have done in his conversation. But I am not persuaded that such possible traces of influence—­a feeling, perhaps, for the metaphoricity of the body—­go to the heart of the matter. Colombo counts in medicine as a pioneer anatomist and precursor of William Harvey; he matters to art historians as the “good doctor” who preserved Michelangelo’s life. Four centuries later, in 1925, a professor of pathology at the University of Rome, Francesco La Cava, published a little pamphlet entitled Il Volto di Michelangelo scoperto nel Giudizio Finale. What he had discerned

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was Michelangelo’s only authentic self-­portrait. And he had recognized it within the flayed skin which St. Bartholomew holds up to the gaze of the Christ. Since La Cava’s discovery, the possible meanings touched off by this awesome symbol have been often discussed, most recently by myself. I will not go into them now, except only to point to one observation that confirms the importance of La Cava’s discovery. The portrait lies in the path of Christ’s imminent action. More than that, it lies on a diagonal that traverses the fresco like a heraldic bend chief to base—­ from left top to right bottom. The twofold competence thus assumed by the self-­portrait—­in its concrete location and in the range of its influence—­is something to marvel at. A hangdog face flops to one side, helpless and limp. But the tilt of its axis projected upward across the field strikes the apex of the left-­hand lunette, the uppermost point of the fresco. And if, departing once again from the skin’s facial axis, we project its course netherward, we discover the line produced to aim straight at the fresco’s lower right corner. Such results do not come by chance. To put it literally, letting metaphor fall where it may: it is the extension of the self ’s axis that strings the continuum of heaven and hell.4

None of this could have been seen or conceptualized without La Cava’s prior identification of the self-­ portrait. And this is how the identification was introduced by La Cava in the brief note he addressed “To the gentle reader”: As I consign the discovery I have made to the press, confiding to you the cherished secret of my heart, I beg your kind indulgence for my work, such as it is. I feel deeply the new and terrible beauty of that which I was the first to see. But I am also aware of the deficiency of my talent and the poverty of my style before an argument so sublime. Perhaps I should not have dared approach Michelangelo, unversed as I am in the relevant studies; and I was frequently tempted to surrender to others the glory of revealing—­with

magisterial art becoming its subject—­the secret of Michelangelo’s visage in the Last Judgment. But in the end, vanity prevailed over modesty. To excuse my boldness, let me cite my sincerity and those words of Michelangelo himself, which I humbly repeat: “Writing is a great trouble to me, for it is not my art.”5 Rome, March 6, 1925, on the 450th anniversary of Michelangelo’s birth —­Francesco La Cava

Reviewing La Cava’s pamphlet, the famous art historian Rudolf Wittkower closed with these words: “No finer gift could be made to the world on Michelangelo’s 450th birthday than this unexpected portrait from his own hand.”6 What I have said so far will, I hope, clear me of any suspicion of prejudice against doctors. But don’t let this go to your heads. Friends sometimes send me clippings from the newspapers or from JAMA dealing with art/ medicine subjects, and these I drop into a pot called “Doctors on Art.” In preparation for today’s entertainment, I pulled it out to see what had been stewing in it. Mostly the usual stuff—­not lead story matter but the kind that makes it into the daily press when a short filler is needed: “Thick Necks in Rubens Art Believed Caused by Goiter.”7 And I see that the Mona Lisa recently contracted arteriosclerosis from a Japanese doctor.8 In such diagnoses the symbolic structures of a Leonardo or Rubens are viewed as though they were patients who’d been loitering in the waiting room these four hundred years. And then my file yielded a series of letters that appeared in JAMA ten years ago, concerning the fact that Michelangelo’s David is uncircumcised.9 The writers, fresh from a European vacation, pride themselves on their perceptiveness, but they leave me puzzled. How did it escape these observant men that, in Renaissance art, it is not only Michelangelo’s David but the Christ Child too who is represented uncircumcised, though the child is clearly more than eight days old? Yet we read in the Gospel (Luke 2:21) that on the eighth day Jesus was circumcised to prove himself (in the words of Sts. Bernard and Thomas Aquinas) a true son of Abraham;

m ic h el a n g elo a n d t h e d o ctor s and by the sixth century, January 1 was fixed as the Feast of the Circumcision of Christ. Thereafter, for more than a thousand years, sermons on Christ’s circumcision were preached every first of January from every pulpit in Christendom. And scores of these sermons survive—­ many of them from the Renaissance. Yet the physical effects of the operation are not admitted in Renaissance art, so that one is tempted to diagnose the optical capabilities of physicians who regularly make David a problem, but walk past hundreds of uncircumcised Christs without noticing. But I am taking up too much time. Let me close by

quoting from one late thirteenth-­century preacher on the subject of Christ’s circumcision: From that time, corporal circumcision was abolished and we have baptism, of more grace and less pain. But we must undergo spiritual circumcision . . . [which] must occur in all the senses of our body. In seeing, hearing, tasting, and touching we must exercise temperance, and especially in speaking too much. Therefore we must be circumcised in the tongue.10

This should suffice to silence a moderator.

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Nine

What Would You Ask Michelangelo?

“Mike, tell me about your mother.”

Response to a questionnaire, ARTnews, 85 (November 1986), p. 102.

not e s

Preface and Acknowledgments 1. A full list of Steinberg’s publications appears on pp. 213–18. 2.  See “The Gestural Trace,” Steinberg’s interview with Richard Cándida Smith for the Getty Research Institute’s Art History Oral Documentation, 2001, p. 21. Available online at https:/ ia801707.us.archive.org/18/items/gesturaltraceleo00stei/gestur altraceleo00stei.pdf. Most of Steinberg’s papers are now on deposit at the Getty Research Institute. Temporarily held back were those needed for these volumes. 3.  “The Gestural Trace,” p. 19. 4.  Ibid., p. 21. 5.  Ibid., p. 27. Steinberg’s several editions of Ulysses and Finnegans Wake, all heavily annotated, are now in the Berg Collection of English and American Literature at the New York Public Library. 6. Richard Shiff, “Our Cézanne,” Source, 31–­32 (Summer–­ Fall 2012), special issue in memory of Leo Steinberg, pp. 27–­28. See also Shiff ’s review of Steinberg’s Incessant Last Supper, Artforum (May 2001), esp. p. 24; and Yve-­Alain Bois’s introduction to Steinberg’s second Norton Lecture at Harvard, October 18, 1995: “his writings reintroduce a dimension of pleasure in the dry and often polemical field of art history—­the sheer sensory pleasure of language; as if to compensate, through exquisite linguistic elegance and precise stylistic economy, for the unbridgeable gap between images and words.” 7.  “The Gestural Trace,” p. 5. 8. A selection of about seventy drawings, dating from the 1930s to the 1990s, was exhibited at the New York Studio School, January 31–­March 9, 2013: The Eye Is a Part of the Mind: Drawings from Life and Art by Leo Steinberg, catalogue with essays by David Cohen and Jack Flam. The drawings were sold to benefit the school’s scholarship fund. Steinberg had long supported the Studio School for its emphasis on primary drawing skills, donating lectures from the 1960s on. 9.  “The Gestural Trace,” p. 89, among other places. 10.  Quoted from pp. 154 and 137 below. 11.  Quoted from p. 154 below.

12.  These characteristic passages are from Steinberg’s “A Corner of the Last Judgment,” Daedalus, 109 (Spring 1980), pp. 211, 208, and 210. 13.  From the preface to Steinberg’s Michelangelo’s Last Paintings: The Conversion of St. Paul and the Crucifixion of St. Peter in the Cappella Paolina, Vatican Palace (London and New York, 1975), p. 6. 14. “Michelangelo’s Florentine Pietà: The Missing Leg,” published in the Art Bulletin in 1968, was republished, with revisions, in “The Metaphors of Love and Birth.” It appears in this volume in its revised form. 15.  “The Gestural Trace,” p. 1. 16.  Ibid. for Steinberg on Merce Cunningham, who never allowed his dancers to improvise on stage, lest they fall back on clichés.

Introduction 1.  E. H. Gombrich, “Talking of Michelangelo,” New York Review of Books, January 20, 1977, p. 19; reprinted in Gombrich, Reflections on the History of Art: Views and Reviews (Oxford, 1987), p. 90. 2.  Editors, “About October,” October, no. 1 (1976), p. 4. 3.  E. H. Gombrich, Art and Illusion, 2nd ed. (Princeton, 1961). 4. The title was “The Burden of Michelangelo’s Painting.” Some of these lectures are scheduled to appear in the next volume of Steinberg’s essays, again under the imprimatur of the University of Chicago Press. 5.  Other Criteria: Confrontations with Twentieth-­Century Art (New York, 1972); Michelangelo’s Last Paintings: The Conversion of St. Paul and the Crucifixion of St. Peter in the Cappella Paolina, Vatican Palace (London and New York, 1975); Encounters with Rausch­enberg (A Lavishly Illustrated Lecture) (Chicago, 2000); Leonardo’s Incessant Last Supper (New York, 2001). 6. On Steinberg and Panofsky, see David Carrier, “Erwin Panofsky, Leo Steinberg, David Carrier: The Problem of Objectivity in Art Historical Interpretation,” Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, 47 (1989), pp. 333–­47; Lisa Florman, “The Difference Experience Makes in ‘The Philosophical Brothel,’” Art Bulletin, 85 (December 2003), pp. 769–­83.

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7.  “Retrospect,” in the revised and expanded edition (Chicago, 1996). 8.  Leo Steinberg, “The Philosophical Brothel” (1972), as revised in October, 44 (1988), p. 47. Italics added. 9. Steinberg, Encounters with Rauschenberg, p. 22. 10.  See, for instance, Lucy R. Lippard, Six Years: The Dematerialization of the Art Object from 1966 to 1972 (New York, 1973); Nicolas Bourriaud, Relational Aesthetics (Dijon, 2002). 11.  Stanley Cavell, The Claim of Reason: Wittgenstein, Skepticism, Morality, and Tragedy (Oxford, 1979), p. 16. Compare Steinberg, Other Criteria, p. 15: “I am alone with this thing, and it is up to me to evaluate it in the absence of available standards. The value which I shall put on this painting tests my personal courage.” 12. Steinberg, Other Criteria, p. 91. 13.  This line concluded Steinberg’s essay on the Florentine Pietà when it first appeared in 1968, but dropped out of the expanded version, reprinted here in chapter 1. It then popped up again in two subsequent studies: twice in an essay on the Medici Madonna (see pp. 103 and 128), and once in a return to the Pietà that appeared in 1989 (see p. 151). Rosalind Krauss, in her moving obituary of Steinberg, zeroed in on the importance of the essay on the Florentine Pietà to Steinberg’s thought. See Krauss, “The Slung Leg Hypothesis,” October, no. 136 (2011), pp. 218–­21. 14.  See ch. 2, “The Roman Pietà: Michelangelo at Twenty-­ Three,” p. 71. 15.  Ch. 4, “Body and Symbol in the Medici Madonna,” p. 95. 16. “Adaptive borrowing”: “Body and Symbol in the Medici Madonna,” p. 120; “bodied theology”: “The Roman Pietà,” p. 68. 17.  “Body and Symbol in the Medici Madonna,” pp. 100–101. 18.  “The Roman Pietà,” p. 70. 19.  Ibid., p. 83. Florman, “The Difference Experience Makes,” stresses the Nietzschean element in Steinberg’s work; there is certainly something Dionysiac in his conception of Michelangelo. 20. “Body and Symbol in the Medici Madonna,” p. 103. [See also “The Roman Pietà,” p. 73; —Ed.] 21.  For a recent monograph on this work, with thorough technical discussion, see Jack Wasserman, Michelangelo’s Florence Pietà (Princeton, 2003). 22.  Ch. 7, “Shrinking Michelangelo,” p. 177. Steinberg liked the pun so much that he used it again in his lecture on the Medici Madonna, p. 120, “a deeply pondered work.” 23.  It was recently estimated that 80 percent of current graduate students in art history are working on contemporary artists; see Richard Meyer, What Was Contemporary Art? (Cambridge, MA, 2013), pp. 10–­11.

One 1. The full text was first published in Giovanni Gaye, Carteggio inedito d’artisti (Florence, 1840), vol. 2, p. 500. See Charles de Tolnay, Michelangelo: The Final Period (Princeton, 1960), pp. 68–­69. Two centuries later, Tobias Smollett had a similar reaction. Visiting Rome, he was “not at all pleased with the famous statue of the

dead Christ in his mother’s lap, by Michael Angelo. The figure of Christ is as much emaciated as if he had died of a consumption; besides, there is something indelicate, not to say indecent, in the attitude and design of a man’s body, stark naked, lying upon the knees of a woman”; Travels through France and Italy (1766). 2.  For the physiological differences between sleep and death, see John Glaister’s standard Medical Jurisprudence and Toxicology (Baltimore, 1957), pp. 110–­11, where the changes following death are summarized. Immediately after death, there is general and complete muscular relaxation, called “primary flaccidity” to distinguish it from the secondary flaccidity which follows the departure of rigor mortis. The primary condition lasts several hours, often as many as ten or more. It gives way to a progressive rigidity as dehydration brings about a shortening of the muscle fibers, causing the arms and legs to bend and the fingers to curl. Depending on atmospheric conditions, rigor mortis may last several days. Many late medieval representations of the dead Christ may be intended to represent this state. Michelangelo’s Christ is obviously not an object for medical postmortem examination. It exists in a poetic realm—­open to faith and hope as forensic medicine rarely is—­where the fraternity of sleep and death is a natural law; Homer knew as much when he called sleep and death “the twin brethren” (Iliad, XVI, line 673). But it is certain that the sculptor understood the respective anatomies of sleep and death. He knew that a sleeper’s muscles retain some tone, and that his surface veins remain blood-­filled—­as do the limbs and the veins of this Christ. Thus, whether seen with professional or devotional eyes, Michelangelo’s Christ is a body asleep. In the language of metaphor, its “inaccuracies” as a corpse are the pledge of its waking. For Michelangelo, as for St. Paul, the Risen Christ is “the firstfruits of them that slept” (1 Cor. 15:20). Cf. also St. Cyprian, Bishop of Carthage (200–­258), epistle 62: Christ himself is “the lion of the tribe of Judah [who] reclines sleeping in his Passion”; in Fathers of the Third Century, Ante-­Nicene Fathers, 5 (Grand Rapids, MI, n.d.), p. 360. For twentieth-­century reactions by the medical profession, see pp. 72–73 below. 3.  For the disputed attribution of this work either to Lorenzetto’s young pupil Nanni or to the aging master himself, see Rudolf Wittkower, “Nanni di Baccio Bigio and Michelangelo,” in Festschrift Ulrich Middeldorf (Berlin, 1968), pp. 248ff. 4. Tolnay, The Youth of Michelangelo, 2nd ed. (Princeton, 1947), fig. 176 and p. 146, misattributes the print to Bonasone, despite its legend, “Antonius Salama[n]ca quod potuit imitatus ex[s]culpsit 1547.” 5. Wittkower, “Nanni di Baccio Bigio and Michelangelo” (above, note 3) sees “a criticism of the original” in the changed head position of the 1532 copy, but seems to regard other changes “which Nanni felt free to incorporate” in his imitations as “personal vagaries.” It is important to stress that Nanni moves in a stream. Pope-­Hennessy suggests as much when he cites Montorsoli’s “copy”—­with its haggard old Virgin—­as evidence that Michelangelo’s “break with conventional iconography was not uni-

n ot es to pag es 6 – 9 versally acceptable”; John Pope-­Hennessy, Italian High Renaissance and Baroque Sculpture (1963; 2nd ed., Princeton, 1970), p. 8. 6.  See the Lettere sull’arte di Pietro Aretino, ed. Ettore Camesasca, with commentary by Fidenzio Pertile (Milan, 1957–­60), vol. 1, no. LXIII, p. 102. Writing to Fausto Longiano on December 17, 1537, Aretino discusses the prerequisites of good judgment in art, arguing that it takes more than grammar and a knowledge of rules. Michelangelo’s Pietà is then cited to illustrate want of judgment: “Thus even he who knows whatever is needful about sculpture and painting, nevertheless [in] the marble of Our Lady . . . shows her much younger than her son”—­“assai più giovane che il figliuolo.” The passage occurs only in the first, 1552 edition of the Aretino letters published by Francesco Marcolini. 7.  For Donatello and the Etruscan figures, see Cornelius C. Vermeule, European Art and the Classical Past (Cambridge, MA, 1964), figs. 30–­31. The fifth-­century BC “Mater Matuta,” Florence, Museo Archeologico, inv. 73694, is catalogued in Mario Torelli, ed., The Etruscans, exh. cat. (Venice, Palazzo Grassi, 2001), no. 145. 8.  For further discussion of draperies, see p. 81. 9. Almost every formal recourse invented by Michelangelo is interpretable on a symbolic plane. The crescent curve of Christ’s body which curtails its apparent length also serves to intensify the physical union of mother and son; his supine form, curled about Mary, whose own upright form bends over his, creates a pattern of interlocking and reciprocity. But this sharp bend, which Christ’s body owes to the hold of Mary’s right hand, also displays and stretches the wound in his side. And it is a traditional requisite of Pietà compositions to make the wounds of Christ show. Cf. Curt Gravenkamp, Marienklage (Aschaffenburg, 1948), p. 58, quoting a medieval German poem to the Mater Dolorosa:

Ich man dich an das iammer groz daz er toter in dein schoz wart geleit mit fünf wunden . . . Thus the acute bend of Christ’s body in Michelangelo’s group implies an ostentatio vulnerum. For more on the display of the wound, see pp. 68–70. 10.  Francesco Milizia, Dell’arte di vedere nelle belle arti (1781; ed. Pistoia and Rome, 1943), p. 54. The general praise of the Virgin’s beauty, “perfect proportions,” and immutable youth (to be found, for instance, in Savonarola’s sermon 24 from the Amos and Zacharia series, delivered March 11, 1496 [Venice, ed. 1544, pp. 238v–­239]) is not relevant to our theme. For the concept of the Madonna’s timeless beauty was almost never appropriated to the tragic historical moments of Crucifixion, Descent, Lamentation, Entombment, or to the symbolic moment of the Pietà. The Virgin in Renaissance Pietàs usually looks her age. Aretino’s sneer at the inordinate youth of Michelangelo’s figure indicates that he knows of no way to justify it. 11.  For references and an elaboration of the subject of the Virgin’s youth, see pp. 84–­87. 12.  “Nostro Signore, e tuo / Sposo, figliuolo e padre, / Unica

sposa sua figliuola e madre”; Paola Barocchi, Giorgio Vasari, La Vita di Michelangelo nelle redazioni del 1550 e del 1568 (Milan, 1962), vol. 7, p. 152. 13.  For summaries of orthodox doctrine and poetry describing the Virgin as Sponsa Dei, and specifically as Bride of Christ, see Yrjo Hirn, The Sacred Shrine (1909; ed. Boston, 1957), esp. pp. 291ff., and the chapters “Annunciation” and “Incarnation.” See also note 44 below, as well as Henri de Lubac, The Splendor of the Church (1953; ed. San Francisco, 1986), pp. 198ff. The classic formulation occurs in the authoritative Commentary on Canticles written in the twelfth century by Honorius of Autun, quoted on p. 25 below. In an earlier poetic image, Mary’s womb was hailed as “the bridal bed of the royal spouse”; St. Gregory, Hom. XXXVIII in Evangelia, 3, Patrologiae . . . latina, vol. 76, col. 1283. Andrew of Crete (c. 700) invoked the Virgin as “God’s living marriage chamber”; Domini Dei thalamus animatus, Patrologiae . . . graeca, vol. 97, col. 1315. And with San Bernardino of Siena (canonized in 1450, his collected sermons published in 1495), the metaphor, linked to the Virgin-­Church equation, is brought down to Michelangelo’s immediate religious environment. The great Franciscan revivalist calls the Virgin “sponsa Dei, et totius Trinitatis triclinium et specialissimum Filii Dei reclinatorium” (“Bride of God, and triple couch of the whole Trinity and the special reclining couch of God’s son”); S. Bernardini Senensis, Opera omnia (Florence, 1956), vol. 4, sermon 51, p. 548. The sermons of Savonarola, too, continually refer to the Virgin as the “Sponsa lesu,” and her joys are described in amorous passages from the Song of Songs; see Sermoni e Prediche di F. Girolamo Savonarola, ed. Ranieri Guasti (Prato, 1846), sermon 13, p. 134. 14.  The compositional Venus and Adonis type which so closely anticipates the arrangement of a Pietà is remarkably rare. Our fig. 1.12 is a line engraving by Giovanni Paolo Lasinio of a destroyed Pompeian fresco from the atrium of the House of the Surgeon; see G. B. Finati et al., Real Museo Borbonico (Naples, 1827), vol. 4, pl. XVII. The only reference to the destruction of the painting occurs in P. Fumagalli, Pompeia (Florence, 1824–­27), p. 40. See also Wolfgang Helbig, Wandgemälde der verschütteten Städte Campaniens (Leipzig, 1868), no. 336. Drawings of the fresco made after Lasinio’s engraving are reproduced in Roux and Barré, Herculaneum et Pompei (Paris, 1875), vol. 3, pl. 105; and in Salomon Reinach, Répertoire de peintures grecques et romaines (Paris, 1922), p. 65, 4. The type of the Pompeian fresco must have been known in other examples. It would otherwise be hard to explain such a work, for instance, as Annibale Carracci’s Pietà of c. 1599 in the Museo di Capodimonte, Naples (fig. 1.13). Carracci’s composition, clearly developed from Michelangelo’s marble group, also comes strikingly close to the pagan original. 15.  See, for example, Rosso’s Death of Adonis in the Gallery of François I at Fontainebleau and his Pietà in the Louvre. 16. Rilke’s Pietà, a poem of 1906, seems clearly inspired by art, probably by the thought of Michelangelo. The erotic tenor of Rilke’s vision is so intense that the poem was first published under the bowdlerizing title “The Magdalene.”

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Thus do I, Jesus, see your feet again, That I was wont to see a timid youth’s, Feet that my trembling hands undressed and laved; Oh how they stood distraught amid my hair Like deer entangled white in a thornbush. I gaze upon your never yet loved limbs As if ne’er seen before this night of love. We never yet together laid us down, And now there’s but to wonder and to wake. Behold, Beloved, how your hands are torn—­ Not torn by me, not by my lover’s bite. Your heart gapes open wide and all may enter By that same gate that was to have been mine. Now are you weary and your weary lips Have no desire unto my bruised mouth—­ O Jesus, Jesus, have we missed the hour? How wondrously we perish, you and I. (Author’s translation) 17.  See Barocchi, Giorgio Vasari (above, note 12), vol. 1, pp. 82, 99–­100, and 129–­30, for all Vasari references to the Florentine Pietà. 18. Thus Henry Thode, Michelangelo: Kritische Untersuchungen über seine Werke (Berlin, 1908), vol. 2, p. 278; “Für das linke Bein Christi ist gar kein Platz vorhanden. . . . Die einzige Möglichkeit es anzubringen wäre die gewesen es vorne über Marias Bein herabhängen zu lassen. . . . Dies aber hätte eine nicht nur unschöne, sondern unmögliche Stellung ergeben” (see p. 155 below for the full text). Thode is followed by W. R. Valentiner in The Late Years of Michel Angelo (New York, 1914), pp. 24–­25: “Michelangelo’s failure to finish it entirely was probably due to the impossibility of adding the missing left foot of the Christ. . . . One feels astonished that such an omission could have occurred in the master’s composition.” And finally, Herbert von Einem: “Rätselhaft ist das Fehlen des linken Beines Christi. Wir wissen dass es vorhanden gewesen ist. . . . Aber es ist keine Frage, dass sein Fehlen ein künstlerischer Vorzug ist. Sollten wir hier den Grund fassen können, warum Michelangelo das Werk aufgegeben hat?”; von Einem, Michelangelo: Die Pietà im Dom zu Florenz (Stuttgart, 1956), p. 6. 19.  A free copy of the Sabatini altarpiece (fig. 1.16) by Antonio Viviani is in Santa Maria dei Monti, Rome; both described in Baglione’s Vite (Rome, 1642), pp. 18 and 103. An execrable wax copy that first appeared in a Florentine private collection in the mid-­ nineteenth century has been repeatedly cited by Goldscheider as the master’s “first version”; see his Michelangelo’s Models in Wax and Clay (London, 1962), p. 60. For the provenance: Gaetano Milanesi, Le Opere di Giorgio Vasari con nuove annotazioni e commenti (Florence, 1906), vol. 7, p. 244 note. Jack Wasserman, Michelangelo’s Florence Pietà (Princeton, 2003), pp. 60, 227, and pl. 41, dates it to the eighteenth century. 20.  See appendix A, pp. 46–48, “The Slung-­Leg Motif.”

21.  Cf. the drawing by Jacques de Gheyn at Christ Church, Oxford, entitled Man and Witch Seated on a Monster; Paintings and Drawings from Christ Church, Oxford, exh. cat. (London, The Matthiesen Gallery, 1960), no. 24, pl. LV. 22.  Fig. 1.23 is now regarded as a copy of Campi’s (deteriorated) fresco in the Palazzo Aldegatti, Mantua; see Renato Berzaghi, “Un sconosciuto ciclo mantovano di Giulio Campi: Gli amori di Giove in Palazzo Aldegatti,” Verona Illustrata (1988), p. 32, and fig. 26 for the fresco. The drawing was sold at Christie’s, London, December 15, 1999, lot 5. Further on the subject, cf. the engraving by Daullé after Poussin, Jupiter as Diana Seducing Callisto; reprod. in “Catalogue des Graveurs de Poussin,” Gazette des Beaux-­Arts, 60 ( July–­August 1962), p. 168, A336. For the attribution of the original painting, now in Philadelphia, see Anthony Blunt, Poussin: A Critical Catalogue (New York, 1966), p. 175, R83. The wittiest use of the motif is Carracci’s Landscape with Diana and Callisto, c. 1598–­99, now in the collection of the Duke of Sutherland, engraved (in reverse) by Bernard Picart in 1707; see Donald Posner, Annibale Carracci (New York, 1971), vol. 2, no. 112 and pl. 112, for the painting. Here the erotic group works as a “flashback.” Diana, at the right (in the painting) points to the pregnant Callisto; in a vignette at left, a nymph looks out at the spectator as she performs the slung-­leg act on her fellow nymph so as to explain Callisto’s condition. The group recurs with similar propaedeutic intent in the Pan Subdued by Cupid engraving of Agostino Carracci (Bartsch 116). Agostino’s own variant, a doubling of the motif, is assigned to a couple engaged in complex mutual leg slinging to expound the principle of Reciprocal Love (Bartsch 119). 23. See J. Makaranos in Archaiologikon Deltion, 18 (1963). Summaries appeared in Du (October 1965) and Horizon (Fall 1966). Also, T. B. L. Webster, The Art of Greece: The Age of Hellenism (New York, 1965), pp. 20–­23; and, most extensively, with further bibliography, Beryl Barr-­Sharrar, The Derveni Krater: Masterpiece of Classical Greek Metalwork (Princeton, 2008). 24.  Cf. Erwin Panofsky, Tomb Sculpture (New York, 1964), p. 34:  “Ariadne’s ‘Sacred Marriage’ to Dionysus is not entirely absent from Roman monuments but it is rare and told without enthusiasm.” Panofsky refers to his single illustration of the subject from Roman art (his fig. 109, from an urn in the Vatican Museum, Rome). It shows the couple standing side by side and joined by the ritual clasping of hands. “A mimetic marriage was, it is clear, an element in the rites of Dionysus,” wrote Jane Harrison, Prolegomena to the Study of Greek Religion (1903; ed. New York, 1955), p. 538. Could it be that the symbolic action of the slung leg on the Derveni krater had its source in this secret mimesis of Dionysian mystery plays? 25.  For pre-­1520 instances in bronzes and prints, see appendix A, p. 47, and figs. 1.72, 1.73. 26.  See appendix B, pp. 48–49, for a closer analysis of the Christ figure. 27. Tolnay, The Final Period (above, note 1), p. 87. 28. From the Biblia pauperum, transcribed in A. Didron,

n ot e s to pag es 2 0 – 2 1 Christian Iconography, trans. E. J. Millington (New York, 1965), vol. 2, p. 423. Savonarola, too, in his fervent evocation of the Passion story, exhorts the Magdalen to weep ever more copiously for her “Sweet Spouse”; Tractato dello amore di Jesu Christo (Florence, 1492), unpaginated. For the lovers of Canticles in other metaphorical contexts, see, for example, Bernard of Clairvaux: “and when you reflect on the lovers themselves, think not of a man and woman but of the Word and the soul. And if I should say Christ and the Church the same applies”; Bernard of Clairvaux: On the Song of Songs III, trans. Kilian Walsh and Irene Edmonds (Kalamazoo, 1979), p. 141. 29. Wasserman, Michelangelo’s Florence Pietà (above, note 19), pp. 51–­52, rejects the idea of an embrace and a caressing shroud because “the shroud is attached to the Magdalene’s unfinished left breast—­being still part of the stone from which it is the process of being carved—­and continues in a freefall, away from her body, until it enters her hand.” Had the sculpture been finished, there might have been a small space between the Magdalen and the shroud, at least in the upper body. But the slight separation doesn’t alter the visual effect of a proximate connection. Unseeing that connection would accuse Michelangelo of introducing the loose end of Christ’s winding sheet with a vacuity found nowhere else in the sculpture. For further on the symbolism of the shroud, see Steinberg, “The Case of the Wayward Shroud,” in Tribute to Lotte Brand Philip: Art Historian and Detective, ed. William W. Clark, Colin Eisler, William S. Heckscher, and Barbara Lane (New York, 1985), pp. 185–­92. 30.  See appendix C, pp. 49–53, for the sources cited in this paragraph and for further comments on the role assigned to the Magdalen in the iconography of the Passion. 31.  The identity of the topmost figure is discussed by Wolfgang Stechow in “Joseph of Arimathea or Nicodemus,” in Studien zur toskanischen Kunst, Festschrift Heydenreich (Munich, 1964), pp. 289–­302. After an impressive accumulation of scholarly argument on both sides, the question remains undecided. But it appears to me, as I think it does to Stechow, that the weight of probability continues in Joseph’s favor. For further on the identification of the figure, see Wasserman, Michelangelo’s Florence Pietà (above, note 19), pp. 34, 56, 66–­67. 32.  See Hirn, The Sacred Shrine (above, note 13), ch. 7, esp. pp. 337–­38. Hirn quotes the Ambrosian Easter Hymn: “Thou who wast before born of a Virgin, art born now of the grave”; and from Ephraim Syrus (c. 306–­378), who compares Christ’s emergence from the sealed grave to the fact of Mary’s anatomical virginity: “Thus didst thou show, O Lord, by thy resurrection from the grave, the miracle of thy birth, for each was closed and each was sealed, both the grave and the womb. Thou wast pure in the womb and living in the grave, and Mary’s womb, like the grave, bore an unbroken seal.” The parallel was common in St. Augustine: “No less honor is due to the tomb which raised the Lord than to the womb of Holy Mary which brought him forth”; and  “He is believed to have

been conceived on the 25th of March, upon which day also He suffered; so the womb of the Virgin, in which He was conceived, where no one of mortals was begotten, corresponds to the New Grace in which He was buried.” The first passage is sermon 248, “De Sepultura Domini,” Patrologiae . . . latina, vol. 39, col. 2204; the second is from On the Trinity, IV, 5, ed. Whitney J. Oates (New York, 1948), vol. 2, p. 736. See also St. Ambrose, Liber de Virginitate, I, 3, 14, Patrologiae . . . latina, vol. 16, col. 283. In the Middle Ages, Hugh of St. Cher (d. 1263), addressing Luke 2:12, commented: “There [in the Nativity] Joseph lays God, wrapped in swaddling bandages, in a manger; here [in the Passion] another Joseph places God, wrapped in a shroud in a sepulcher”; quoted in J. J. Davis, “Saint Joseph in the ‘Postillae’ of Hugh of St. Cher,” in Saint Joseph durant les quinze premier siècles de l’Église (Montreal, 1971), pp. 308–­9. 33.  From Antonio Billi, around 1540, Vasari in 1550, to Serlio and Dolci the following year, and Lomazzo in 1590, Leonardo’s small number of finished works was explained by his chronic lack of satisfaction with what he had done, his inability to achieve his standard of perfection. The texts are assembled in Mario Pomilio, L’Opera completa di Leonardo pittore, Classici dell’Arte, 12 (Milan, 1967), pp. 9–­10. 34.  For recent documentation, see Wasserman, Michelangelo’s Florence Pietà (above, note 19), pp. 75–­76. 35.  The 1968 and 1970 publications on the Florentine Pietà erred in writing that Michelangelo “attacked only that corner of the block which involved Christ’s left leg and arm.” Recent technological examination and new photography reveal that all or parts of most of the limbs in the sculpture, except for Christ’s right leg, were destroyed; see Wasserman, Michelangelo’s Florence Pietà, esp. pp. 63, 68, and pl. 45. Wasserman ventures that Michelangelo removed the limbs in order to create a new composition, one where Christ’s legs were parallel, though there is no compelling evidence for the artist’s hypothetical decision (pp. 68, 70). Michelangelo may have given Calcagni a model of the original Pietà to work from, either one made for the occasion or his own first model (p. 76). Calcagni then restored the sculpture, reassembling the broken pieces or carving damaged pieces anew. But he never restored the left leg, which still leaves this limb the object of Michelangelo’s disquiet, as argued below. Elsewhere, Wasserman introduces an admittedly “cautious” hypothesis (pp. 79ff.) that it was Calcagni himself who “removed the entire leg—­foot, thigh, and calf alike—­as he went about restoring the statue” (p. 79); “Calcagni, when he sought to repair the statue, had to cut off the entire leg to the present stump in order to make room for a replacement limb” (p. 84). But why then did he not replace that limb, as he replaced others? And if Christ’s left leg arrived intact in Calcagni’s studio, what does this do to Wasserman’s earlier notion (pp. 63, 68, 70) that the destruction of the left leg should not be isolated from a larger program of limb amputation intended by Michelangelo to make room for a different composition? The resistance of scholars to the slung-­leg symbolism in the

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Florentine Pietà is discussed elsewhere in this book (ch. 5). For discussion of another Wasserman objection, see appendix A, “The Slung-­Leg Motif,” p. 193, note 73. 36. “Un ginocchio di marmo della pietà di Michelagnolo” in the testament of Daniele da Volterra; see Benvenuto Gasparoni, “La Casa di Michelagnolo Buonarroti (Continuazione),” Il Buonarroti, 1, no. 9 (November 1866), p. 180. Because the Volterra inventory doesn’t specify which Pietà or which leg, Wasserman, Michelangelo’s Florence Pietà, suggests that it “may, in fact, have been a fragment from the Rondanini Pietà” (p. 63). 37.  For the supposed eyewitness testimony of Blaise de Vigenère, see appendix D, pp. 53–56. 38. Karel Van Mander, Het-­Schilder-­Boeck (1604; reprint, Utrecht, 1969), fol. 286v. 39.  “Sometimes the soul, through the penetrating alterations of love, enters the marriage bed of heavenly mysteries . . . and not lacking are visions most lofty in which the soul tastes what it is to be almost translated into the profound and infinite abyss of God. It happens also that, in some unthinkable and most fervent act of love [ferventissimo actu amoris] in one glorious moment, a spiritual marriage with Christ is consummated”; Bernardini Senensis, Opera omnia (above, note 13), vol. 4, sermon 51, “De admirandis gratiis beatae Virginis,” p. 549. An Early Christian example of sexual metaphor relevant to the Pietà theme occurs in the Symposium of Methodius of Olympus. As summarized in Herbert A. Musurillo, The Fathers of the Primitive Church (New York, 1966), p. 213: “Christ’s final act was to sleep in the ecstasy of his Passion, during which he procreated through the virgin Mother Church all those who would be baptized in his blood.” 40.  Enzo Noè Girardi, Michelangelo Buonarroti: Rime (Bari, 1960), no. 285, “Giunto è già ’l corso della vita mia,” sent to Vasari on September 19, 1554. 41. For the Bolswert engraving, see Massimo Mussini and Grazia Maria De Rubeis, Parmigianino tradotto: la fortuna di Francesco Mazzola nelle stampe di riproduzione fra il Cinquecento e l’Ottocento (Milan, 2003), no. 438. For the Primaticcio, see Dominque Cordellier in Primatice: Maître de Fontainebleau, exh. cat. (Paris, Musée du Louvre, 2004), cat. 9, pp. 87–­89, as a pastiche of Giulio Romano conceits, possibly for the Chambre du Roi at Fontainebleau. Formerly attributed by Frederick Hartt to Giulio as a design for the stables of the Palazzo de Te; Hartt, Giulio Romano (New Haven, 1958), vol. 1, no. 139, and pp. 88–­89. There is a copy in the Victoria and Albert Museum, inv. 8077, and another in the Louvre, inv. 3677. The proliferation of infant slung legs during the 1520s suggests the effect of a single powerful stimulus; that this may have been Michelangelo’s Medici Madonna (fig. 3.1) becomes the more likely in view of Pope-­Hennessy’s recent insight that the work had been made in the preceding decade to form part of the Julius Tomb. 42.  [See ch. 5, appendix D, pp. 157–66, for the revised and expanded discussion of the hand-­on-­shoulder motif that originally appeared in this note. —­Ed.]

43.  Quoted in Lubac, Splendor of the Church (above, note 13), p. 209, from St. Gregory, Hom. XXXVIII in Evangelia, no. 3, Patrologiae . . . latina, vol. 76, col. 1283. 44.  Honorius of Autun, Commentary on Canticles, Patrologiae . . . latina, vol. 172, col. 494; quoted by Panofsky, Early Netherlandish Painting: Its Origins and Character (Cambridge, MA, 1953), p. 145. See also Rupert of Deutz, quoted below on p. 139, and pp. 139–40 for other references. For the equation of the Virgin and Church, see Wolfgang S. Seiferth, Synagogue and Church in the Middle Ages: Two Symbols in Art and Literature (New York, 1970), pp. 136–­40; and Lexikon der christlichen Ikonographie, ed. E. Kirschbaum (Rome, 1968), vol. 1, col. 563, s.v. “Ecclesia,” and vol. 2, cols. 308–­11, s.v. “Hoheslied.” 45.  Other examples: the reading of Canticles from a Lectionarium matutinale from Ellwangen, 1124–­36, Stuttgart, Württembergische Landesbibliothek, Cod. bibl. fol. 55, fol. 180v; Bede, Super cantica canticorum, from St. Albans, c. 1100–­1125, Cambridge, King’s College, Ms. 19, fol. 21v; Honorius of Autun, Expositio in cantica canticorum, from Salzburg, c. 1150–­75, Munich, Bayerische Staatsbibliothek, Clm 4550, fol. Iv; a Capuchine Bible of c. 1150–­ 1200 in the Bibliothèque Nationale, Paris, ms. lat. 16745, fol. 112v. 46. See also the Bohemian Bible of 1385, in Olomouc (Olmütz), State Archives, M III 4, reprod. in Gotik in Böhmen, ed. Karl Swoboda (Munich, 1969), fig. 149. The child also appears as bridegroom in the typological context of the Bible moralisée. In the mid-­thirteenth-­century manuscript at the Bodleian Library (Ms. 270b, fol. 6r), the marriage of Adam and Eve is paired with the marriage of Christ and the Church. The latter roundel shows a standing Christ and crowned Ecclesia at right; at left, a mantled Virgin with the child on her lap, his hand raised in blessing. 47.  [At this point, the 1970 text referred to an appendix, “The Chin-­Chuck Motif,” on the wooing motif of the touched chin as another allusion to the mystic marriage of the Virgin and Christ. Steinberg later expanded the material in The Sexuality of Christ in Renaissance Art and in Modern Oblivion (1983; 2nd, revised and expanded ed., Chicago, 1996), pp. 3–­6, and Excursus III, pp. 110–­ 18. The reader is referred to those pages for an illustrated study of the subject. —­Ed.] 48.  “Così come io lo ho conceputo senza pudore e senza violamento della mia verginità, così ora per tua grazia, lo partorisca senza dolore perseverando vergine e illibata”; Sermoni e Prediche di F. Girolamo Savonarola (above, note 13), sermon 19, “Della Natività di Cristo,” p. 485. 49.  Andreas Cretensis, Canon in Beatae Mariae natalem, Patrologiae . . . graeca, vol. 97, col. 1323. 50.  “Egredere igitur, fili mi, tanquam sponsus de thalamo suo. Esci del ventre mio. . . . Letifica l’anima dell’ancilla tua, adempe oromai il desiderio della madre tua, l’anima mia t’ha desiderato e desidera continuamente, Gesù mio, io non posso più aspettare, io mi consumo, io mi sento tutta liquefare, io languisco d’amore.” For speculations concerning this startling confession, see appendix E, pp. 56–57.

n ot e s to pag es 2 8 – 3 0 51. For the child’s hand on the Virgin’s shoulder, see pp.

157–­66. 52.  Hercules as a prefiguration of Christ is discussed in Marcel Simon, Hercule et le christianisme (Paris, 1955). We may add that in the history of representational imagery, the infant Hercules also prefigures the prolepses of the Christ Child, as when he appears with the Apples of the Hesperides in his little hands (the Ercole fanciullo statuette in the Capitoline Museums, inv. scu 01016). “Herakles’ long journey to the Far West has in this case been assigned to his babyhood,” commented Dorothy Kent Hill, “Ancient Representations of Herakles as a Baby,” Gazette des Beaux-­Arts, 36 (April 1948), p. 199. The concept is better explained as a future tense in the grammar of representation. The same grammar governs late medieval representations of the Apostles as children, already holding their instruments of martyrdom; see Émile Mâle, L’art religieux de la fin du moyen-­âge en France, 5th ed. (Paris, 1949), p. 218 and n. 2. 53.  The fourth drawing is a tiny study on a larger sheet, Uffizi 233 F, recto, described by Tolnay as a study for the Bruges Madonna, though the child’s twist toward the Virgin forecasts the Medici composition; Tolnay, I disegni di Michelangelo nelle collezioni italiane, exh. cat. (Florence, Casa Buonarroti, 1975), cat. 3. All these drawings (proposed datings run from c. 1503 to the 1530s) show the Virgin with the nursing Child, who sits astraddle on one of her thighs, spiraling inward. While his right hand reaches her breast, his left hand remains comparatively unemployed—­ and is omitted in what may be the earliest of the three drawings (the Louvre version). Even here, however, Mary’s gesture shows that the child, following Byzantine precedent, would have allowed his left hand to be held by the mother—­as he does in the Vienna version. This traditional solution leaves one hand of the Christ idling in a manner which no mature Michelangelo work will permit. Accordingly, in the London drawing, demonstrably later than the others, the child’s left hand is almost released for action—­but only to become redundant, for now both hands attach the same feeding breast. Michelangelo evidently felt this to be a problem unsolved; but the drawings do not as yet offer the structural base for the solution—­that of extricating the child’s hand to seize Mary’s shoulder. So long as the child sits on thighs that remain uncrossed, the mother’s shoulder remains inaccessible to his arm. If the Madonna was not to forfeit her regal height, the infant could reach her remote shoulder only by being raised on her arm or by standing up on her lap, as he does in Gothic Madonnas; but these adjustments would have surrendered the straddling motif. 54.  For an extended discussion of the Medici Madonna, see ch. 4. 55.  For another aspect of Trinities and St. Anne groups, see pp. 75–­77. 56.  All four works reproduced are Florentine and formed part of Michelangelo’s artistic environment. Several others could be cited as likely influences upon his youth, notably Neri di Bicci’s Trinity of 1461 in Santa Croce, Baldovinetti’s of 1473 in the Flor-

ence Accademia. Cf. also Raphael’s Trinity with Sts. Sebastian and Roch, 1499–­1500, Città di Castello, Pinacoteca Comunale, reprod. in Luitpold Dussler, Raphael: A Critical Catalogue (1966; ed. London and New York, 1971), fig. 1; Botticelli’s Trinity, c. 1500–­1505, at the Courtauld Institute; Ridolfo Ghirlandaio’s Trinity, 1514, on the vault of the Cappella dei Priori, Palazzo Vecchio, Florence. (Those of Masaccio and Castagno in which God does not appear seated represent a different type.) Francesco Granacci, the author of our fig. 1.46, was Michelangelo’s childhood friend and fellow apprentice. For discussions of the Gnadenstuhl Trinity, see Millard Meiss, Painting in Florence and Siena after the Black Death (1951; ed. New York, 1964), p. 34; and most recently Otto von Simson’s important essay “Über die Bedeutung von Masaccios Trinitäts Fresco in Sta. Maria Novella,” Jahrbuch der Berliner Museen, 8 (1966), pp. 119–­59. 57.  The St. Anne family group was developed in the fourteenth century to express the Franciscan tenet of the Virgin’s Immaculate Conception. As the receptacle of the conceptio immaculata, the Virgin’s mother gained ever greater importance within the divine plan. Images of the three-­generation group proliferated, known in Italy as Sant’Anna Metterza, in Germany as Die heilige Anna Selbdritt. Northern representations can show the two mothers standing, or seated side by side, or a diminutive Virgin on Anne’s lap; St. Anne, who is nearly always larger in scale, sometimes embraces her daughter, sometimes carries her miniature adult form like an attribute on one arm, while the Christ Child rests on the other. For an entertaining survey of the St. Anne cult in Europe after 1480, see André Chastel, The Age of Humanism (New York, 1963), pp. 105ff. The especial veneration of the Florentines for St. Anne as patroness of their city dates from the liberation of Florence from the tyranny of Brienne, Duke of Athens, on St. Anne’s Day, July 26, 1343. See Giovanni Villani’s Cronica, written from 1300 to 1348 (ed. Florence, 1823), vol. 7, p. 54. The fullest account of the subject from the points of view of religion and (more naively) art history, is Beda Kleinschmidt, Die heilige Anna (Dusseldorf, 1930). I have not followed his system of classification in the distinction of types, nor the more sophisticated system proposed in Hans Aurenhammer’s Lexikon der christlichen Ikonographie (Vienna, 1960), s.v. “Anna Selbdritt.” 58. The association of the Florentine St. Anne cult with victory explains the strangely archaic character of the Bargello group (fig. 1.48), originally placed over her principal altar in Orsanmichele. The group is clearly patterned on the Byzantine Madonna type known as the Nikopoia, the bringer of victory. Because of its rigid, hieratic frontality, the type had long passed out of favor in Italy. Its pattern was adapted and doubled at Orsanmichele not as a stylistic regression, but as visual evidence that the Virgin’s power of bestowing victory derived from St. Anne. The effect of this work, or rather of its authoritative sacred location, was to leave Renaissance realism with another magnificent paradox on its hands—­how to reconcile ideality with absurdity,

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or one adult woman perched, in beauty and dignity, on the lap of another. 59.  See, for example the Sant’Anna Metterza by Bicci di Lorenzo, c. 1430, in the Bob Jones University Museum and Gallery, Greenville, SC, inv. 3.2; the painting attributed to Francesco Signorelli at Castiglion Fiorentino, reprod. in Laurence B. Kanter and Tom Henry, Luca Signorelli: The Complete Paintings (London, 2001); the little Correggio Mystic Marriage of St. Catherine, c. 1515, Washington, DC, National Gallery of Art, inv. 194. 60.  The Virgin sits on St. Anne’s lap in the canonic fourteenth-­ century image from Orsanmichele (fig. 1.48). She does so in Gozzoli’s picture in the Pisa museum (fig. 1.50) and, almost a century later, in Girolamo dai Libri’s picture in London (National Gallery, inv. 748, dated 1518). Leonardo’s sidesaddle scheme is anticipated in Luca di Tommè’s polyptych of 1367 in the Siena Pinacoteca, and in an engraving (before 1470) by the Master E. S. (copy by Meckenem, Geisberg 332; fig. 2.31). The engraving also anticipates Leonardo in that the child is placed on the ground. 61.  [In the original 1970 publication of this essay, Steinberg here reproduced a drawing of the Virgin, Child, and St. Anne in the Ashmolean Museum (inv. WA1846.37, Parker 291) and referred to another in the Louvre (inv. 285r), both credited to Michelangelo. Later, however, he became convinced that the Ashmolean sheet was not by Michelangelo, and only the contours of the Louvre drawing (and thus the “nesting” composition) showed Michelangelo’s hand. The attributions are discussed at length in the forthcoming volume on Michelangelo’s paintings, whose opening essay treats the alleged relationship between Leonardo’s lost St. Anne and Michelangelo’s Doni Madonna. —­Ed.] The nesting principle was adopted by Francesco da Sangallo, 1526, in the monumental marble group which, on the St. Anne altar at Orsanmichele (fig. 1.51), replaced the old wooden effigy now at the Bargello (fig. 1.48). Sangallo’s symbolism is biological instead of hierarchic, substituting the authority of an unexecuted Michelangelo project for the authority of tradition. But his product, with its mechanical encapsulation of mothers, is one of the vulgarest sculptures in Florence; it demonstrates the implausibility of the nested family group when unredeemed by tenderness and imagination. 62.  The child climbs up from between the Madonna’s parted thighs in the Prato Master’s Trivulzio Madonna, late 1440s, Milan, Castello Sforzesco; reprod. in Curtis Shell, “The Prato Master,” Art Bulletin, 43 (September 1961), fig. 6. In Benozzo Gozzoli’s Madonna and Child Enthroned with Saints (fig. 1.54), the Christ Child, striding forward on his mother’s lap, appears literally to emerge from behind her rose-­colored tunic. The expressive and formal problems thus broached by the mid-­fifteenth century seem to have become matter of special interest in the Northern Italian centers of Ferrara and Padua, as in Cosimo Tura’s Madonna and Child in the Washington National Gallery; or Francesco Cossa’s great Pala dei Mercanti of 1474 in the Bologna Pinacoteca (fig. 1.55). Finally, a wealth of symbolic action appeared in Northern engravings toward the end of the fifteenth century.

Thus the Master I. A. M. of Zwolle (whose St. Anne engraving, Lehrs 13, uses the modern step-­down design to express “descent”) also engraved a mystic Madonna and Child, Lehrs 10, wherein the child, obviously “issuant,” floats out into space to embrace a large cross. It comes astonishingly close to Leonardo’s inventions of the child issuing from Mary either to caress St. John or to mount his Passion in the form of a lamb. Evidently the generation of the Italian High Renaissance availed itself of these Northern prints to help resolve the apparent conflict between dogmatic symbolism and naturalism. 63.  After 1500, the motif of the issuant child is recognizable in works of Piero di Cosimo, Andrea del Sarto, Sodoma, Franciabigio, Puligo, Sebastiano del Piombo, Giulio Romano, Garofalo, Lotto, and others. It is most powerfully used by Parmigianino. A Holy Family engraved after Parmigianino by the Master L. D. of the School of Fontainebleau shows the child literally stepping out of the Virgin’s body (fig. 1.60). In a pen-­and-­wash study for an enthroned Madonna and Child (fig. 1.61), the Christ Child—­a boy of more than infant years—­again surges upward from the inmost lap of the seated Madonna, but in a soaring pose which deliberately anticipates the Ascension. 64.  For Michelangelo’s studies of the Resurrection of Christ, see Bernard Berenson, The Drawings of the Florentine Painters: Amplified Edition (Chicago, 1938), figs. 696–­99. For striking examples of the issuant child among Michelangelo drawings, figs. 596, 626, 627, 628, 656, 759, 762. “Whenceness” is shown as well by Michelangelo’s Isaac writhing between Abraham’s knees in the Sacrifice scene. Cf. the drawing of c. 1535 in the Casa Buonarroti, Florence (Berenson, Drawings, no. 1417, fig. 721). There are precedents in Mantegna and Baldovinetti, sequels in Pontormo and Rembrandt, indicating how widely the metaphor of manifest filiation was understood. Shakespeare too (prologue to Romeo and Juliet) sees his star-­ crossed lovers take their life “from forth the fatal loins of these two foes.” 65.  See Tolnay, The Final Period (above, note 1), pp. 60–­64, for full documentation and his pl. 159 and figs. 340–­58. 66.  The connection with the image of the Man of Sorrows, as developed by Donatello, was first pointed out by Thode, Kritische Untersuchungen (above, note 18), vol. 2, p. 492. As the title-­page woodcut illustration to Savonarola’s Trattato dell’ Umiltà (1492), it became familiar to every Florentine. The most impressive examples of the type are Northern Italian: Giovanni Bellini, Museo Correr, Venice; Cosimo Tura (fig. 1.64), and Marco Zoppo, 1471, from the Pesaro Altarpiece, Pesaro, Musei Civici, inv. 82. 67.  Remarkable anticipations of Michelangelo’s thought occur in a poignant drawing by Marco Zoppo for an Entombment, Frankfurt, Städel Museum, inv. 3476, and in Dürer’s drawing, dated 1513, formerly in the Bremen Kunsthalle; Friedrich Winkler, Die Zeichnungen Albrecht Dürers (Berlin, 1936–­39), vol. 3, no. 578. In both works the spectator’s vantage point is within or on this side of the tomb. 68.  See above, note 32.

n ot e s to pag es 4 1 – 5 3 69.  I believe that Michelangelo fully intended to evoke the act

of childbearing. Whoever examines sixteenth-­century illustrated books on obstetrics and modern histories of the subject will find that it is only in antique (or in classicizing) delivery scenes that women in childbirth recline. In representations from the thirteenth century onward, the expectant mother is shown sitting up, often in a posture that comes astonishingly close to that of the Virgin in the Colonna Pietà. See Eucharius Rösslin, De partu hominis . . . (1532), opening page to ch. 4, and its German versions of 1513; Jacobus Rueff, De Conceptu et Generatione Hominis (Zurich, 1554); and Samuel Janson, Korte en bondige Verhandeling . . . (Amsterdam, 1685), especially book VI, fig. 21. See also Dürer’s Birth of Hercules, 1511, formerly in Bremen; Winkler, Die Zeichnungen Albrecht Dürers (above, note 67), vol. 2, no. 490. 70.  Of the many engravings of the Colonna Pietà, only the two earliest, Bonasone’s of 1546 (fig. 1.67) and Beatrizet’s of 1547 (Bartsch XV, 25; Tolnay, The Final Period [above, note 1], fig. 341), correctly transmit Michelangelo’s unique design for the cross. Their versions agree with each other and with Vasari’s description. But Bonasone, unlike Beatrizet, has misunderstood the lowermost zone of the composition by rendering it almost a horizontal ground. For the type of the cross and its implicit allusion to the Tree of Life, see Géza de Francovich, “L’origine e la diffusione del crocifisso gotico doloroso,” Kunstgeschichtliches Jahrbuch der Bibliotheca Hertziana, 2 (1938), pp. 150ff. 71. Tolnay, The Final Period (above, note 1), p. 61. 72.  Ibid., p. 220, for an analysis of the chronological sequence of the studies on the Oxford sheet; and pp. 89–­91 and 154–­55 for a lucid account of the complex genesis of the Rondanini Pietà. 73. See, for example, the Michelangelesque Adam and Eve drawing at the Musée Bonnat, Bayonne; Jacob Bean, Les dessins italiens de la Collection Bonnat (Paris, 1960), no. 66. For Wasserman, Michelangelo’s Florence Pietà (above, note 19), pp. 64–­65, the above distinction between canonic and noncanonic forms of the slung-­leg motif serves to disprove the theory: “Steinberg unintentionally provides the reason for doubting his theory in a second article he published on the Pietà.” (There was no “second article”; Wasserman is referring to this 1970 appendix, identical in the passages quoted to the original appendix in the 1968 Art Bulletin article.) He argues that if  “carnal and symbolic meanings are absent” in the noncanonic form, such as the fifteenth-­century Ferrarese bronze relief cited below, then the leg’s lack of meaning “would apply . . . to all Pietà representations in which Christ sits or reclines on the Virgin’s lap.” This misguided generalization belies the visual precision that the distinction was designed to ensure. 74.  For the bronze relief, Victoria and Albert Museum, London, inv. 5469.1859, see John Pope-­Hennessy, Catalogue of the Italian Sculpture in the Victoria and Albert Museum (London, 1964), pl. 337. 75.  The Robetta: A. M. Hind, Early Italian Engraving (London, 1938–­48), D. II, 31, and pl. 294. For the Gossaert in Birmingham, see Jan Gossart’s Renaissance: Man, Myth, and Sensual Plea-

sures, exh. cat. (New York, Metropolitan Museum of Art, 2010), cat. 31. Gossaert’s Adam and Eve drawing and Hercules and Dejanira woodcut, cited later in the paragraph, are cats. 65 and 118, respectively, the latter as after Gossaert. 76.  From Great Britain, Public Record Office, Letters and Papers . . . of the Reign of Henry VIII . . . , I, part 2, 1509–­14 (London, 1862), p. 861. 77.  [Steinberg was here referring to the famous game of legs in the Marx Brothers film The Cocoanuts (1929). Daniele Di Cola kindly supplied the reference. —­Ed.] 78.  John Shearman, Mannerism (Harmondsworth, 1967), p. 85. 79.  Letter of May 12, 1546, to Cardinal Ercole Gonzaga; see Thode, Kritische Untersuchungen (above, note 18), vol. 2, p. 494. 80.  Valentina Hawtrey, The Life of St. Mary Magdalen translated from the Italian of an Unknown Fourteenth Century Writer (London, 1906), pp. 236–­37. 81.  Trans. Moses Hadas (New York, 1953), p. 25. 82.  The Michelangelo sonnet is Girardi, Rime (above, note 40), no. 4. The topos recurs in Shakespeare, as in Romeo’s sigh in the balcony scene (Romeo and Juliet, II, ii), “Oh, that I were a glove upon that hand, that I might touch that cheek!”; cf. Antony and Cleopatra, V, i, “Oh happy horse to bear the weight of Antony”; and Sonnet 128, “How oft . . . do I envy those jacks that nimble leap, / to kiss the tender inward of thy hand.” Examples abound in later centuries (e.g., Crashaw, Robert Burns, Tennyson), down to James Joyce. Bloom’s fantasy of Gerty MacDowell (Ulysses, episode 13): “Like to be the rock she sat on. . . . Also the library today: those girl graduates. Happy chairs under them.” 83.  Reprod. in Mario Rotili, Fortuna di Michelangelo nell’incisione, exh. cat. (Benevento, Museo di Sannio, 1964), no. 122, fig. 47. 84.  I refer to such works as Caroto’s Lamentation of 1515, formerly in Turin; Berenson, Italian Pictures of the Renaissance: Central Italian and North Italian Schools (London, 1968), vol. 3, pl. 1880; Moretto da Brescia’s Pietà in the National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC, datable in the 1520s; Correggio’s Deposition of 1522 in the Galleria Nazionale, Parma; Lanino’s Deposition of 1558 at the Galleria Sabauda, Turin (Berenson, pl. 1278); and others. 85. Garth, St. Mary Magdalene, pp. 22–­23, citing E. A. Wallis Budge, ed., Miscellaneous Coptic Texts (London, 1915), pp. 629–­30 and 646, for Cyril’s texts. 86. Garth, St. Mary Magdalene, p. 79, for the quotations in this paragraph and the next. St. Gregory penned a similar thought to Gregoria, Epistles, VII, epistle 25. The Peter Chrysologus passages come from sermons 74 and 77, Patrologiae . . . latina, vol. 52, cols. 409–­11 and 417–­19. 87. Garth, St. Mary Magdalene, pp. 78 and 83. The St. Odo source is Patrologiae . . . latina, vol. 133, col. 716, sermon 2. 88.  La Suite de Philostrate par Blaise de Vigenere bourbonnois (Paris, Abel Langellier, 1597), pp. 120b–­121. Les Images ou tableaus de platte peinture de Philostrate, issued the same year by the same publisher, contains books I and II of the Imagines of Philostratus the Elder (1st ed. Paris, Nicolas Chesneau, 1578). In subsequent

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editions, the Imagines of both the younger and elder Philostratus, as well as Callistratus’s Descriptions, were published together. For a detailed listing of editions, see Maurice Sarazin, Blaise de Vigenère Bourbonnais: Introduction à la vie et l’oeuvre d’un écrivain de la Renaissance (Charroux-­en-­Bourbonnais, 1996), pp. 44–­63. The English translation used here is that of John Addington Symonds, The Life of Michelangelo Buonarroti (London, 1893), p. 101. The original reads: “A ce propos, ie puis dire avoir veu Michel l’Ange bien qu’ agé de plus de soixante ans, & encore non des plus robustes, abattre plus d’escailles d’un tres dur marbre en un quart d’heure, que trois ieunes tailleurs de pierre n’eussent peu faire en trois ou quatre, chose presqu’incroyable qui ne le verroit: & y alloit d’une telle impetuosité & furie, que je pensois que tout l’ouvrage deust aller en pieces, 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 passe outre tant soit peu plus qu’il ne falloit, il y avoit danger de perdre tout, parce que cela ne se peult plus reparer parapres, ny replaster comme les images d’Argille, ou de Stucq.” 89.  Thus the passage is quoted by, among others, Leopoldo Cicognara, Storia della scultura (1813–­15; ed. Prato, 1825), vol. 5, pp. 156–­57, “nulla indica meglio la sua maniera di scolpire”; by Charles Bell, The Anatomy and Philosophy of Expression, 3rd ed. (London, 1844), p. 207, as an example of Michelangelo’s “manner of working”; referenced by Ruskin, citing Bell (misnamed Clarke)—­“ When the imagination is powerful, . . . its first steps will commonly be impetuous,” in Modern Painters, III, section II, ch. 3 (ed. London, 1889), p. 188; by Charles Heath Wilson, Life and Works of Michelangelo Buonarroti  .  .  . (London, 1876), p. 50, using the passage to reveal how Michelangelo worked on the David and continued to work, “even when age had overcome him  .  .  . admirably described by Vigenero, who knew him and had seen him at work”; by Julian Klaczko, Causeries florentines (Paris, 1880), p. 20, to document Michelangelo as “un travailleur infatigable”; and again by John Addington Symonds, The Life of Michelangelo Buonarroti (above, note 88), p. 101, wherein Blaise’s account of Michelangelo’s “violent way of attacking his marble” explains why the sculptor sometimes “had to abandon a promising piece of sculpture.” 90.  Henry Thode, Michelangelo und das Ende der Renaissance, vol. 1 (Berlin, 1902), p. 452. Here Blaise’s text merely documents one of the chronology entries for 1550, “M. arbeitet an der Pietà (jetzt im Dom zu Florenz).” Six years later: “Die Arbeit ist demnach 1550 begonnen worden. Es war offenbar das Werk, an dem Blaise de Vigenère 1550 den Meister so furios arbeiten sah”; Thode, Kritische Untersuchungen (above, note 18), vol. 2, p. 273. Finally, Thode elaborated: “Den Beginn der Arbeit, . . . lernen wir durch Blaise de Vigenère kennen: mit ungestümen, leidenschaftlichen Hammerschlägen sucht der Meister dem Block, ihn formend, sein stürmisches Seelenleben aufzuzwingen”; Thode, Ende der Renaissance, vol. 3/2 (Berlin, 1912), p. 690. That Vigenère was referring to the Florentine Pietà is then taken for granted. See, for example, Denyse Métral, Blaise de Vigenère: Archéologue et critique

d’art (Paris, 1939), p. 93; von Einem, “Bemerkungen zur Florentiner Pietà Michelangelos,” Jahrbuch der preussischen Kunstsamm­ lungen, 61 (1940), p. 77; and Howard Hibbard, Michelangelo: Painter, Sculptor, Architect (New York, 1974), p. 186. Later scholars occasionally revert to Vigenère’s anecdote solely as testimony to Michelangelo’s working method; see, for example, Tolnay, The Final Period (above, note 1), p. 9; Barocchi, Giorgio Vasari (above, note 12), vol. 2, p. 232, in her notes to the St. Matthew. 91.  See, for example, Métral, Blaise de Vigenère (above, note 90), p. 238: “Vigenère a personellement connu Michel-­Ange. . . . Ce qu’il dit a la valeur d’une source.” More recently and emphatically, Gabriella Rèpaci-­Courtois, “Blaise de Vigenère et l’expérience des arts visuels,” in Blaise de Vigenère, poète et mythographe au temps de Henri III, introduction by Marc Fumaroli (Paris, 1994), p. 103: “la connaissance de Michel-­Ange fut à elle seule une expérience qu’il [Vigenère] n’oublira jamais.  .  .  . La description superbe du maître au travail . . . en dit plus qu’un épanchement autobiographique sur l’émotion ressentie devant une telle vision.” 92. Métral, Blaise de Vigenère (above, note 90), pp. 90, 81. For updated biographical and bibliographical details on Vigenère, see Sarazin, Blaise de Vigenère Bourbonnais (above, note 88), and the essays in Blaise de Vigenère, poète et mythographe au temps de Henri III (above, note 91). 93. Rèpaci-­Courtois, “Blaise de Vigenère” (above, note 91), pp. 107–­8, suggests that it was Vigenère’s visits in 1566–­70 to the Mantuan court, still under the sway of Isabella d’Este’s penchant for the Philostratus Eikones, that prompted his decision to translate the texts. 94. The Torso Belvedere was “l’escolle principalle de Michel l’Ange, où il se façonna tel qu’on l’a veu depuis en ses ouvrages de relief et de platte peinture”; in Vigenère’s translation from the 1556 Latin version of Chalkondylas’s Turkish history: L’Histoire de la Décadence de l’Empire Grec et establissement de celuy des Turcs, . . . par Nicolas Chalcondyle, Athénien (Paris, 1577), fol. F.III v. 95.  “L’escholle pythagoricienne . . . reduisoit les genres de couleurs à ces quatres: le noir et le blanc; le jaulne et le rouge. . . . Neantmoins j’ay ouy plusieurs fois dire à Michel l’Ange et à Daniel de Volterre, qu’ils aimeroient mieux se passer du jaulne que du bleu, à cause du ciel qui intervient en tous ouvrages presque”; Les Images . . . (1578), pp. 252b–­253, lacking the reference to the preferred colors of the Pythagorean school, which appears only in the 1597 edition, p. 451. 96.  Les Décades qui se trouvent, de Tite-­Live (Paris, Jacques du Puys, 1583), p. 727: “Là est encore pour le iourd’huy un petit Satyre de marbre tout rompu & rapiecé, mais l’un des plus belles excellents chefs-­d’oeuvre qui se puisse voir, comme mesmes ie l’ay ouy autrefois de la bouche propre de Michel Lange; & d’un maistre Iacques natif d’Angoulesme, qui l’esgalloit en la statuaire: duquel il se voit encore pour le iourd’huy un Automne de marbre à Meudon, en forme d’un beau ieune adolescent coronné de raisins & de pampre, qu’il fit à Rome l’an 1550, extremement loué de tous, & presque à pair des antiques.” See below for the mar-

n ot e s to pag es 5 4 – 5 5 ble “Autumn” and other sculptures Vigenère elsewhere credits to Jacques d’Angoulême. It was Vigenère who introduced the name of Jacques d’Angoulême into art history, though neither the works Vigenère describes nor any others have come to light; likewise absent is any documentary record of such a seemingly major French sculptor. For two centuries, the name was repeated in the literature, along with an unquestioned acceptance of Vigenère’s anecdotes (see above, note 89) and an occasional sigh of frustration that Jacques d’Angoulême’s sculptures had gone missing. In 1840, however, Louis Paris, native of Reims, assembled documents concerning a family of Reims sculptors surnamed Jacques, the first and most renowned being Pierre Jacques (1520–­1596). The latter accompanied the archbishop of Reims to Rome in 1549; see Paris, Remensiana: Historiettes, légendes et traditions du pays de Reims (Reims, 1845), reprinting an article of 1840; as cited and transcribed in Paris, Revue universelle des arts, vol. 3 (1856), p. 182. Paris claims, without sources, that Pierre Jacques sojourned in Angoulême, where his brilliant success earned him the name Jacques d’Angoulême. Thus Pierre Jacques, with many documented works in Reims, and the undocumented Jacques d’Angoulême became one, with French scholars gratified to rescue Vigenère’s great master from oblivion. But the absence of any documentation in Angoulême still rankled, which led Liénard in 1847 to conclude that Blaise simply got the place of Jacques’s birth wrong, problem solved; “Communication de M. Liénard: Notice sur les Jacques, sculpteurs rémois,” Séances et travaux de l’Académie de Reims, vol. 7 (1847–­48), esp. pp. 292–­93. No further documentation has ever emerged, but the two names are now interchangeable, and the anecdotes about Michelangelo repeated as fact. See, for example, Jocelyn Bouquillard, in Dessins de la Renaissance dans les collections de la Bibliothèque Nationale de France, exh. cat. (Paris, Bibliothèque Nationale, 2004), no. 26, concerning Pierre Jacques’s album of drawings after the antique, made in Rome in the 1570s. Auguste Geffroy’s reasonable effort to refute the identification of Jacques d’Angoulême with Pierre Jacques won no support; Album de Pierre Jacques de Reims: Dessins inédits d’après les marbles antique . . . (Rome, 1890), pp. 13–­14 (originally published in the Mélanges d’archéologique et d’histoire, École française de Rome, vol. 10). 97. Vigenère, La Suite de Philostrate (above, note 88), p. 120b. On the previous page, Vigenère had been discussing the need for sculptors to excel in drawing, citing Jean Goujon. He then, characteristically, drops the subject and continues with: “Mais le plus excellent imagier François tant en marble qu’en fonte: i’excepteray tousiours un maistre Iacques natif d’Angoulesme, qui l’an 1550 s’osa bien parangonner à Michel l’Ange pour le modelle de l’image de S. Pierre à Rome, & de faict l’emporta lors par dessus luy au iugement de tous les maistres, mesme Italiens: & de luy encore sont ces trois grandes figures de cire noire au naturel, gardees pour un tres-­excellent ioyau, en la librairie du Vatican, dont l’une monstre l’homme vif, l’autre comme s’il estoit escorché . . . & la troisiesme est un Skeletos . . . Plus un Automne de marbre qu’on

peult veoir en la grotte de Meudon, . . . ayant esté faict à Rome, autant prisé que nulle autre statue moderne” (p. 120b). The 1564 inventory of Michelangelo’s estate records “una statua principiata, per uno santo Pietro, sbozzata e non finita”; Aurelio Gotti, Vita di Michelangelo Buonarroti (Florence, 1875–­76), vol. 2, p. 150. If word of such a project reached Vigenère, it might have been the catalyst for his invented competition. 98. Cicognara, Storia della scultura (above, note 89), pp. 363–­ 66. Cicognara, in a long footnote, was the first to refute the tale of the competition, which had been repeated uncritically in Giulio Cesare Bulengero (the Jesuit historian Jules-­César Boulenger), De pictura, plastice, statuaria (Lyon, 1627), II, ch. 7, p. 127 (verbatim from Vigenère); Pierre Monier, Histoire des arts qui on rapport au dessin (Paris, 1698), p. 315; and by Mariette in his 1704 Abecedario, first published by Ph. de Chennevières and A. de Montaiglon, Abecedario de P. J. Mariette (Paris, 1851–­53), vol. 1, pp. 25–­26, and n. 2, listing other citations; and Toussaint-­Bernard Emeric-­David, Recherches sur l’art statuaire . . . (Paris, 1805), p. 451. Cicognara remains nearly alone in his refutation of the competition tale. His argument was greeted with nasty disdain (and illogical refutation) by Emeric-­ David in a later publication, “Jacques d’Angoulême, sculpteur français,” Revue universelle des arts, vol. 3 (1856), pp. 5–­10. Salomon Reinach suggested, to no avail, that Vigenère might have confused “le grand Michel-­Ange et quelqu’un de ses élèves, dont le nombre était grand à Rome”; Reinach, L’Album de Pierre Jacques, sculpteur de Reims (Paris, 1902), p. 5. 99.  Thus Vigenère identifies the satyr in his introduction to the description on p. 113. The satyr playing the flute may be the sculpture now in the Galleria Borghese, the Pan embracing Echo another group, once placed next to it; see Arthur Fairbanks’s annotations to his translation of Philostratus and Callistratus (Loeb Classical Library, no. 256), p. 376, n. 1. 100.  “Pource que Callistrate n’use point icy d’aucun preambule comme ont fait les autres, il sera besoin de traicter, puis qu’il y vient, tant à propos, quelque chose de la sculture ou statuaire, autrement ditte imagerie, laquelle se divise en deux principaux artifices; la bosse ou relief, & le creux, qui sont directement opposez l’un à l’autre” (p. 115). 101.  Due trattati di Benvenuto Cellini  .  .  . uno dell’oreficeria, l’altro della scultura (ed. Milan, 1811), p. 209. Not surprisingly, the presumed superiority of sculpture over painting goes unremarked in Vigenère’s annotations to paintings described in the Philostratus Imagines. 102. Pliny, Natural History, XXXV, xxxvi, 92; trans. H. Rackham, Loeb Classical Library, no. 394 (Cambridge, MA, 1968), p. 329. 103. “Michel L’Ange, qui a surpassé en l’une & l’autre toute ceste derniere vollee d’excellens Maistres, depuis que les bonnes arts & sciences commancerent à se resveiller, il y a peut avoir quelques cent ans & non plus” (p. 118). There follows a Vasarian list of Michelangelo’s predecessors, from Giotto to Mantegna. One further characteristic citation of Michelangelo on p. 122b:

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the subject is the different colors and veining of marble, with blocks quarried from the Pyrenees stained and veined in colors: “Nevertheless, you can find in places marble with [uniform textures], as in those Michelangelo made for all the figures in the Medici Chapel in Florence” (“Neanmoins il s’en trouve par endroits d’egal, comme celuy dont Michel L’Ange fit toutes les figures qui son en la chapelle des Medici à Florence”). 104.  “Or que la sculpture ne soit plus difficile & plus hazardeuse que la peinture, on le peut assez appercevoir entres autres, chose par les ouvrages de Michel L’Ange, le plus accomply des modernes en l’une & en l’autre, car encore qu’il excellast en toutes les deux presque esgallement, & qu’il y despensast son temps comme à la ballancé, il a neanmoins pour une statue de marbre fait une centaine de figures de platte-­peinture, & bien colorees, comme on peut voir au iugement de la chapelle Sixte . . . qui est un plat-­fonds” (p. 119b). 105.  “L’entreprise aussi de Michel l’Ange estoit hautaine & fort hardie, sentant bien sa main asseuree, lequel commança l’an 1550, que j’estois à Rome, un crucifiement où il y avoit de dix à douze personnages, non moindres que le naturel, le tout d’une seule pièce de marbre, qui estoit un chapiteau de l’une de ces huict grandes colonnes du temple de la paix de Vespasian . . . mais la mort qui le prevint empescha la perfection de ce bel ouvrage” (p. 118b). 106.  Archivio Buonarroti, I, 154, fol. 274. Tolnay, The Final Period (above, note 1), suggests that the idea for this gigantic marble group may have come to Michelangelo in 1547, “on the occasion of the death of his friend Vittoria Colonna” (p. 60 and fig. 170), for whom he had already made a three-­figured Crucifixion drawing (ibid., fig. 164). Frederick Hartt, Michelangelo Drawings (New York, 1969), no. 417: this drawing, along with two others in the Louvre, are “authentic elements for the reconstruction of a great sculptural group, intended, but never executed, by Michelangelo in 1547.” 107.  “Le plus excellent doncques sculpteur François, ny autre de deçà les mots, a esté maistre Germain Pillon decedé l’an 1580 dont se voyent infinis chefs d’oeuvre en marbre, bronze, & terre cuitte. . . . Le marbre au reste importe avec soy non tant seulement plus de peine que l’argille, le boys & semblables estoffes tendres, plus aisees a manier . . . mais pour la ruze & practique qu’il faut avoir à cognoistre le fil du marbre, & de quel biez on le doit prendre” (p. 120b). 108. Barocchi, Giorgio Vasari (above, note 12), vol. 1, p. 100. 109. Gotti, Vita di Michelangelo (above, note 97), vol. 2, p. 150; also Thode, Kritische Untersuchungen (above, note 18), vol. 2, pp. 283–­84. 110. See, for example, Predica del reverendo padre Fra Hieronymo Savonarola  .  .  . facta I sancta Reparata di Firenze  .  .  . MCCCCLXXXXVII (Florence, Antonio Tubini and Andrea Ghirlandi, c. 1505–­8). 111.  Collected Works of John Wilmot, Earl of Rochester, ed. John Hayward (London, 1926), p. 220. 112.  Cf. Claes Oldenburg’s drawing Clinical Study: Toward a Heroic-­Erotic Monument in the Academic-­Comic Style, 1965, lower left, reprod. in “America: War & Sex, Etc.,” Arts Magazine (Sum-

mer 1967), p. 32. Daniel Rancour-­Laferriere discusses the penis as a synecdoche for the whole person in male fantasies, in “Some Semiotic Aspects of the Human Penis,” Versus: Quaderni di studi semiotici, no. 24 (September–­December 1979), pp. 69–­70. 113. Lubac, Splendor of the Church (above, note 13), p. 206 and n. 87.

Two 1.  For the chronology of the Pietà, from commission to completion, see Michael Hirst, Michelangelo: The Achievement of Fame, 1475–­1534 (New Haven, 2011), pp. 33–­37. For the proposed location and function of the chapel, 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 (Paris, 1987), pp. 77–­108; William Wallace, “Michelangelo’s Rome Pietà: Altarpiece or Grave Memorial?,” in Verrocchio and Late Quattrocento Italian Sculpture, ed. Steven Bule and Alan P. Darr (Florence, 1992), pp. 243–­55. I do not believe that, as Weil-­Garris Brandt suggests, the cardinal’s irenic political mission—­to soothe relations with Italy after the murderous French invasions of the 1490s—­exerted any influence whatsoever on the artist’s invention. Michelangelo and the cardinal never met, and of the latter’s intentions for the chapel and the housing of the Pietà too little is known to permit more than imaginative speculation. 2.  On the Pietà’s original installation, see Weil-­Garris Brandt, “Michelangelo’s ‘Pietà’ for the Cappella del Re di Francia” (above, note 1); also note 29, below. 3.  See p. 187, note 6. 4.  See p. 186, note 1. 5.  Francesco Bocchi, Le bellezze della città di Fiorenza (Florence, 1591), p. 76. 6.  Francesco Milizia, Dell’arte di vedere nelle belle arti (1781; ed. Pistoia and Rome, 1943), p. 54. 7.  Friedrich Wilhelm Basilius von Ramdohr, Ueber Malerei und Bildhauerarbeit in Rom fuer Liebhaber des Schoenen in der Kunst (Leipzig, 1787), quoted in Henry Thode, Michelangelo: Kritische Untersuchungen über seine Werke (Berlin, 1908), vol. 1, p. 58. Thode also cites Johann Jakob Volkmann, Historisch-­kritische Nachrichten von Italien (Leipzig, 1777), p. 73: “Der Affekt der Traurigkeit ist in der Maria vortrefflich ausgedruckt, die Draperie aber nicht gut gerathen. Die Figur von Christo hat zwar ihre Schönheiten, sie ist aber etwas mager, und in Ansehung der Maria zu gross.” 8.  Heinrich Wölfflin, Die Jugendwerke des Michelangelo (Munich, 1891), p. 23: “Hier ist der erste Eindruck immer ein Sich-­ Verwundern über den unmässigen Aufwand im Gefält”; Wölfflin, Die klassische Kunst (1899; 6th ed., Munich, 1914), p. 45: “In den Gewandpartien herrscht ein etwas aufdringlicher Reichtum.” The translation used here, by Peter and Linda Murray, is from the 1952 Phaidon edition, p. 41. 9. Herbert von Einem, Michelangelo, trans. Ronald Taylor (1959; ed. London, 1973), p. 27.

n ot e s to pag es 6 8 – 8 4 10.  St. Augustine, City of God, XXII, 17.

11.  For Sts. Gregory and Bernardino of Siena, see p. 187, note 13, and p. 190, note 39. St. Bernard’s epithet appears in Ad laudem gloriosae Virginis matris, Patrologiae . . . latina, vol. 182, col. 1144: “thalamus Sponsi, aureum vivi Salomonis reclinatorium.” 12. Alberti, On Painting, II, 44–­46, trans. John R. Spencer (New Haven, 1970), p. 73. 13.  Giovanni Paolo Lomazzo, A Tracte Containing the Artes of Curious Paintinge Carvinge and Buildinge, trans. Richard Haydocke (1598; reprint, Farnsborough, 1970), II, ch. 16, p. 70. For the original Italian, see Paola Barocchi, Giorgio Vasari, La Vita di Michelangelo nelle redazioni del 1550 e del 1568 (Milan, 1962), vol. 2, p. 178. Ibid., for Benedetto Varchi, Due lezzoni, 1549: “whoever looks upon Michelangelo’s Pietà must inevitably be reminded of that verse in the Divine Comedy, which shows Dante to be no less painter than poet: ‘Morti gli morti, e’ vivi parean vivi’” (“The dead seem dead and the living alive”). 14.  “Né ancora un morto più simile al morto di quello”; Barocchi, Giorgio Vasari (above, note 13), vol. 1, p. 17. 15.  “É stato nel suo dire molto coperto et ambiguo, avendo le cose sue quasi due sensi”; 1550 ed., Barocchi, Giorgio Vasari, vol. 1, p. 125. 16.  The semblance of sleep in the figure has often been noticed. Thus Johannes Jahn in Michelangelo Heute (Berlin, 1965, p. 46): “Michelangelo allowed the figure of the dead Christ not only consummate beauty but even avoided the impression of death, rendering his Christ as one asleep.” Who, asks the author, would not here recall the antique notion of death as sleep’s brother? Accordingly, Jahn finds the Pietà an outstanding case of Christian-­pagan interpenetration. This reading, offered by an East German scholar in the mid-­1960s, may have been thought congenial to a Communist system but it ignores the specifically Christian character of the corpse the artist was carving. See also p. 186, note 2. 17.  Journal of the American Medical Association, 219 (February 28, 1972), p. 1212. 18.  G. J. Witkowski, Les licences de l’art chrétien (Paris, 1920), p. 124. 19.  From the Tome of Leo the Great, letter to Archbishop Flavian of Constantinople, Patrologiae  .  .  . latina, vol. 54, col. 756, translation in Henry Bettenson, ed., Documents of the Christian Church (Oxford, 1963), p. 70. 20. Alberti, On Painting, II, 43, trans. Spencer (above, note 12), p. 73: “Then provide that every member can fulfill its function in what it is doing. A runner is expected to throw his hands and feet . . .” etc. 21.  Émile Mâle, L’art religieux de la fin du moyen-­âge en France (1908; 5th ed., Paris, 1949), p. 128. 22.  Ibid., for San Bernardino of Siena, cited as Oeuvres, vol. 1, sermon 51. Cf. also Simeon Metaphrastes (fl. c. 960): “you have often slept on my lap the sleep of infancy, but now you sleep on my lap the slumber of death”; quoted in Gabriel Millet, Recherches sur l’iconographie de l’Évangile (Paris, 1916), p. 490; and Erwin

Panofsky, “The Reintegration of a Book of Hours Executed in the Workshop of the ‘Maître des Grandes Heures de Rohan,’” in Medieval Studies in Honor of A. Kingsley Porter (Cambridge, MA, 1939), vol. 2, p. 491, and n. 43, citing Millet. In note 44, referring again to the diminution of the corpse, Panofsky quotes an early German Marienklage: “Si gedahte, wie er ir was geben”—­“she remembered how he had been [given to her].” 23.  For the liturgy and theology of the Supplices in the Canon of the Roman Mass, see Joseph Jungmann, The Mass of the Roman Rite (New York, 1955), vol. 2, pp. 231ff. 24.  The engraving adopts and rearranges figures in Titian’s Triumph of Christ woodcut, 1517. 25.  For the iconographic types of the Trinity and St. Anne with the Virgin and Child as exemplars of “manifest filiation,” see pp. 28–33. 26.  Aurelio Gotti, Vita di Michelangelo Buonarroti, vol. 2 (Florence, 1875–­76), p. 33: “una Pietà di marmo . . . cioè una Vergine Madre vestita, con Cristo morto in braccio, grande quanto sia uno homo iusto . . . et serà la più bella opera di marmo che sia hoge in Roma, et che maestro nisuno la faria migliore hoge.” 27.  On the Virgin as Ecclesia, see pp. 7–8 and 15. 28.  For comparison with the Etruscan “Mater Matuta,” see p. 6. 29.  Weil-­Garris Brandt, “Michelangelo’s ‘Pietà’ for the Cappella del Re di Francia” (above, note 1), suggests a viewing point with eye level at the base of the Pietà. William Wallace, “Michelangelo’s Rome Pietà” (above, note 1), fig. 205, would have the Pietà at ground level, resting on a short plinth, because engraved copies (such as fig. 1.7) show no altar, and he finds iconographic significance in the rocky base. Wallace does not, however, take the incline of Christ’s body into account, nor that all the engraved copies relocate the sculpture to a landscape setting. 30. Although not visible in the reproduction, the sculptor of the Walters bronze interposed another pad to raise the Virgin’s seat. In a sixteenth-­century bronze copy at the Frick (inv. 1916.2.39), a pad is again added and Christ’s thighs are leveled. See also the copy in the Kaiser Wilhelm Museum, Krefeld, from the Palazzo Sciarra, Rome, reprod. in Volker Krahan, Italienische Renaissancekunst im Kaiser Wilhelm Museum Krefeld (Krefeld, 1987), p. 60, cat. 16. 31.  Cf. Landucci’s description of a tabernacle outside of Bibbona in 1482: “E in questo tempo [ June 1482] molto si parlava d’una divozione di Nostra Donna trovato a Bibbona, d’un tabernacolo fuora di Bibbona . . . ; ch’è una Vergine Maria a sedere con Cristo in braccio come si levò di croce, come si dipingono l’altre Piatà [sic].” 32.  For the connection between devotional poetry and the image of the Pietà, see Wilhelm Pinder, “Die dichterische Wurzel der Pietà,” Repertorium für Kunstwissenschaft, 42 (1920), pp. 145–­ 63; also Curt Gravenkamp’s short book Marienklage: Das deutsche Vesperbild im 14. und im frühen 15. Jahrhundert (Aschaffenburg, 1948). 33.  Robert S. Liebert, Michelangelo: A Psychoanalytic Study of

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His Life and Images (New Haven, 1983), pp. 69–­70; reviewed by Steinberg, ch. 7, “Shrinking Michelangelo.” 34.  The same passage appears in both the 1550 and 1568 editions of Vasari; Barocchi, Giorgio Vasari (above, note 13), vol. 1, p. 10. 35.  In their association of chastity with youthfulness, Vasari, as well as Michelangelo as reported by Condivi, may have been echoing a familiar topos. Thus Alain of Lille, the twelfth-­century theologian and poet, describes the blazon of Prudence: “The apple-­like breasts, descending in gentle swell, hang not flaccid and broken-­down but by their very firmness give proof of personal chastity”; Anticlaudianus or the Good and Perfect Man, ed. James Sheridan (Toronto, 1973), p. 57. Erasmus, in the Enchiridion, says that “lust destroys the vigor and attractiveness of the body. . . . It deforms the flowering of youth and hastens a repulsive old age”; The Enchiridion of Erasmus, trans. Raymond Himelick (Bloomington, IN, 1963), p. 178. One of Luther’s comments in Table Talk suggests a similar connection: “Es konnen gedancken wol einen alt machen”—­“what one thinks can very well make one old”; D. Martin Luthers Werke: Kritische Gesamtausgable. Tischreden, vol. 3 (Weimar, 1914), p. 655, no. 3843. At the end of the Cinquecento, Antonio Gallonio, in his vita of St. Petronilla, makes the same physiological observation: “essendo commune alle Vergini il dimostrare assai minor tempo di quello che elle s’habbino”—­ “virgins normally appear younger than their actual years”; Historia delle sante Vergini Romane . . . (Rome, Ascanio and Girolamo Donangeli, 1591), p. 104 (misnumbered 114). The notion may have been given a theoretical base by Aquinas (with recourse to Aristotle), who explained that the acts of the sensitive appetites (such as lust) are called passions (i.e., something we suffer) precisely because they induce a bodily change; Summa theologica, I, q. 20, art. 1, in Basic Writings of St. Thomas Aquinas, ed. Anton C. Pegis (New York, 1945), p. 216. 36.  See, for example, the Virgin in Masaccio’s Trinity, Santa Maria Novella, Florence; and in Mantegna’s Cristo morto and Giovanni Bellini’s Pietà, both in the Brera, Milan. 37. Translation in Charles Holroyd, Michelangelo Buonarroti . . . with Translations of the Life of the Master by . . . Ascanio Condivi (London, 1903), p. 26. 38.  St. Augustine, letter 164, to Bishop Evodius, in St. Augustine, Letters, vol. 3, trans. Wilfrid Parsons (New York, 1953), p. 396. 39.  Which does not surprise me at all. I’ve been telling my students for years: if you want the truth about a work of art, be sure to take your information from the horse’s mouth, bearing in mind that the artist is the one selling the horse. Or, as D. H. Lawrence said, “Never trust the teller. Trust the tale. The proper function of a critic is to save the tale from the artist who created it.” 40.  For the Virgin as Bride of Christ, see pp. 7, 25, and 139–40. 41.  For the tradition of the Virgin as mother, daughter, and bride in medieval poetry, see Nicolas J. Perella, The Kiss Sacred and Profane: An Interpretative History of Kiss Symbolism and Re-

lated Religio-­Erotic Themes (Berkeley, 1969), p. 73 and n. 71, citing the troubadour Aimeric de Belenoi. 42. Barocchi, Giorgio Vasari (above, note 13), vol. 1, p. 19, and vol. 2, p. 188, for the author of the madrigal. 43.  See ch. 5, pp. 141–45. 44.  See, for example, John Pope-­Hennessy, discussed on p. 129. 45.  Julian of Norwich, Showings, 51, trans. Edmund Colledge and James Walsh (New York, 1978), p. 278.

Three 1.  For a few Early Christian examples all’antica, see p. 199, note 3. 2.  John Pope-­Hennessy, Italian High Renaissance and Baroque Sculpture (1963; 2nd ed., Princeton, 1970), p. 25. The head and (misplaced) right arm of the Vatican Penelope are later additions. For the sculpture’s history, restorations, and recent bibliography, see Wolfgang Helbig, Führer durch die öffentlichen Sammlungen klassischer Altertümer in Rom, vol. 1, Die päpstlichen Sammlungen (Tübingen, 1963), nos. 123 and 341; see also p. 114 below. Cross-­ legged Penelopes, on seals, vase painting, and reliefs, as well as the adoption of the motif for Electra at Agamemnon’s tomb, are reproduced in Raimund Wünsche, Der Torso: Ruhm und Rätsel, exh. cat. (Munich, Staatliche Antikensammlun­gen und Glyptothek, 1998), pp. 103–­7, without discussion of the motif. [For the origin and function of the original Penelope statue, see Tonio Hölscher, “Wandering Penelope: Multiple Originals in Classical Greece,” in Serial/Portable Classic: The Greek Canon and Its Mutations, ed. Salvatore Settis et al. (Milan, 2015), pp. 119–­23. —­Ed.] 3. After publication of this essay, the painting was offered for sale at Christie’s, London, July 5, 1991, lot 6, unsold, from the Frederick Field collection. It was later at Berry-­Hill Galleries, New York; see the catalogue From Sacred to Sensual: Italian Paintings 1400–­1750, January 20–­March 14, 1998, entry on p. 24, with full bibliography, to which may be added Tom Nichols’s Tintoretto: Tradition and Identity (Chicago, 1999), pp. 34–­35. 4.  Rodolfo Pallucchini, La Giovanezza del Tintoretto (Milan, 1950), pp. 74–­76; James Stubblebine, “The Italian Heritage,” Burlington Magazine, 109 (August 1967), p. 488; Juergen Schulz, Venetian Painted Ceilings of the Renaissance (Berkeley, 1968), p. 14. 5.  In one respect, the similarity of the etching to Michelangelo’s marble is deceptive since the printed image reverses the direction of the original. In the actual statue, as in the Vatican Penelope, the right thigh is thrown over the left, so that Michelangelo will have reoriented his Madonna, whether derived from the Penelope or from the muse. Such mirror reversals in monumental sculpture are not uncommon. The Fogg Art Museum exhibits two Roman copies of Scopas’s Meleager, of which one is the reverse of the other. 6.  See J. G. Van Gelder, “Jan de Bisschop’s Drawings after Antique Sculpture,” in Acts of the XX International Congress of the History of Art (Princeton, 1963), vol. 3, p. 56. For the attribution

n ote s to pag es 9 3 – 1 0 9 to de Gheyn III, see Van Gelder and Ingrid Jost, Jan de Bisschop and His Icones & Paradigmatica: Classical Antiquities and Italian Drawings for Artistic Instruction in Seventeenth-­Century Holland, ed. Keith Andrews (Doornspijk, c. 1985), pp. 15–­16; pp. 184–­ 85, no. 98, for the catalogue entry on the de Bisschop plate. De Gheyn’s drawing was then in the collection of Johan Wtenbogaert in Amsterdam. The Icones is dedicated to Constantijn Huygens the Younger. It was Constantijn the Elder who met the Earl of Arundel in 1618 and visited his collection in the company of de Gheyn III. Ibid., pp. 14–­18, for the close connections among de Bisschop and the Huygens and de Gheyn families. 7.  Adolf Michaelis, Antique Marbles in Great Britain (Cambridge, UK, 1882), pp. 548–­49. The statue is described under the rubric “Oxford, University Galleries, no. 32; Statue of a Muse, sitting (Kleio?).” See now D. E. L. Haynes, The Arundel Marbles (Oxford, 1975), p. 21, pl. 18. 8. Helbig, Führer durch die öffentlichen Sammlungen klassischer Altertümer in Rom (above, note 2), p. 90. 9. Ibid., nos. 341 and 1502; and Dieter Ohly, “DIA GYNAIKON,” in Robert Boehringer: Eine Freundesgabe, ed. E. Boehringer (Tübingen, 1957), figs. 15–­24. A particularly beautiful instance of our figure is the cross-­legged Andromache presented in almost three-­quarter view on a sarcophagus in the Museum of Art, Rhode Island School of Design (fig. 4.42). The frontal relief represents Achilles dragging the body of Hector around the walls of Troy. The sarcophagus is said to have come from Pamphylia, and deserves to be considered among the typological antecedents of the Medici Madonna. 10. Helbig, Führer durch die öffentlichen Sammlungen klassischer Altertümer in Rom, vol. 2, Die städtischen Sammlungen, no. 1480. 11.  Eutychides’s creation repeats a feat exactly comparable to that of another Lysippean work, the Ares Ludovisi in the Terme Museum in Rome. The Ares is a three-­dimensional, effectively frontal conception, though the god’s characteristic gesture, his raised knee caught in his clasped hands, is deliberately transposed from the Ares who appears in extreme low relief on the east frieze of the Parthenon. The figure preceding Ares on the same relief slab is Demeter. Her mode of sitting is not immediately clear, since her draped lower legs are entangled with those of her neighbor Dionysus—­as if to symbolize bread and wine growing from a common ground. But the elevation of Demeter’s right thigh betrays the profile of a cross-­legged posture, and it is this posture which Eutychides’s Tyche of Antioch reenacts in monumental frontality. 12.  Discussing the difficult acquisition of classical specimens from the Greek islands after the establishment of Turkish dominion, Michaelis, Antique Marbles in Great Britain (above, note 7), p. 9, quotes an old author: “All above ground was gone to Venice.” 13.  See the descriptions of the houses of Andrea Odoni and Antonio Foscarini in Marcantonio Michiel, Notizia d’opere del disegno, 1515–­1543 (Vienna, 1888), pp. 82 and 90. In the lower

court of Odoni’s house, Michiel observes that “le altre molte teste et figure marmoree, mutilate et lacere, sono antiche.” 14.  Raffaello Borghini, Il Riposo (Florence, 1584), p. 551. 15.  A rare feat it remains until Rubens’s Holy Family of c. 1615, at the Art Institute of Chicago (fig. 4.56 and p. 119). Careful comparison of the two works suggests that the Rubens represented the Michelangelesque motif as if in an anterior moment.

four 1. Press release dated March 19, 2004, for the exhibition “Brancusi: The Essence of Things.” 2. Robertson Davies, The Rebel Angels (1981; ed. Penguin, 1983), p. 76. 3.  The only cross-­legged Madonnas that precede Michelangelo’s are on Early Christian sarcophagi representing the Nativity or Adoration of the Magi: one in the Duomo at Mantua, another at San Vitale, Ravenna, three others surviving in scattered fragments, all retaining the common antique motif of the cross-­legged seat. See Giuseppe Wilpert, I sarcofagi cristiani antichi, vol. 1 (Rome, 1929), pl. XXX; vol. 2 (Rome, 1932), fig. 181, pls. CLXXXXVIII, 1, CCXXIV, 3; and W. F. Volbach, Early Christian Art (New York, 1961), fig. 179. Thereafter, the motif is abandoned—­except for one unexpected occurrence in the Book of Kells, fol. 7v—­a reference kindly offered by Susan Petty of Southern Methodist University, Dallas. 4.  See also p. 128 and note 53 there. 5. Burckhardt, The Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy (1860). Part IV is entitled “The Discovery of the World and of Man.” Later, in the opening of ch. 4, Burckhardt writes: “To the discovery of the outward world the Renaissance added a still greater achievement, by first discerning and bringing to light the full, whole nature of man”—­a “striking expression,” he writes in a footnote, taken from Jules Michelet’s Histoire de France (1855), vol. 7, “la découverte du monde, la découverte de l’homme.” 6.  The two natures of Christ in the Roman Pietà, the function of the Virgin’s right hand, and the immensity of her frame are discussed in detail in ch. 1 and ch. 2. 7.  For the infant Hercules as a prefiguration of Christ, see pp. 27–28 and note 52 there. 8.  For the Minoan examples, see the frescoes of a goddess and a girl with a wounded foot in the excavated rooms in Xeste 3, Akrotiri, Santorini. 9.  See, for example, two engravings of sarcophagi in Pietro Bartoli’s Admiranda romanarum antiquitatum . . . (Rome, 1693), pls. 72 and 76. The Latin heading to pl. 72 translates as “The Household Mourning of a Deceased Woman,” and the cross-­ legged man is identified as the father. In pl. 76, “Grief and Lamentation of a Bereaved Household,” it is the cross-­legged “husband or brother” who laments. 10.  Horst Wenzel kindly sent me the Walther von der Vogelweide portrait (fig. 4.21); see his “Melancholie und Inspiration: Walther von der Vogelweide L. I, 4ff: Zur Entwicklung des europäischen Dichterbildes,” in Walther von der Vogelweide: Beiträge

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zu Leben und Werk, ed. Hans-­Dieter Mück (Stuttgart, 1989), pp. 133–­53 and Abb. 1. Another cross-­legged portrait of the poet is the Codex Manesse, c. 1305–­15, Heidelberg, Col. Pal. germ. 848, fol. 124r. 11.  Henry Martin, “Les enseignements des miniatures: Attitude royale,” Gazette des Beaux-­Arts, 55 (March 1913), pp. 173–­89. 12.  The lines are from John Gay’s Beggar’s Opera. For the etching, Tissot reworked, and retitled, a painting of the same year, Portsmouth Dockyard (Tate Gallery); see Nancy Rose Marshall and Malcolm Warner, James Tissot: Victorian Life/Modern Love, exh. cat. (New Haven, Yale Center for British Art, 1999), no. 35. 13.  Other Greek females posed with crossed legs in contemporaneous Greek art: a Nike on a coin from Olympia, probably slightly later than the earliest known Penelope; see Dieter Ohly, “DIA GYNAIKON,” in Robert Boehringer: Eine Freundesgabe, ed. E. Boehringer (Tübingen, 1957), fig. 20; Ohly’s fig. 21 is a Cretan coin from Gortyna with the abducted Europa mourning in the same posture. A Melian relief in the Louvre (inv. MNB 906), dating 460–­450 BC, shows a cross-­legged Electra with Orestes at the tomb of Agamemnon. An exception to the mourning context is the cross-­legged naked prostitute playing the aulos on the Ludovisi Throne, a decade or two earlier than the Penelope, though this context seems to have had no resonance in Greek and Roman art. 14.  For further references to Penelope, see p. 91 and note 2 there. Research into the cross-­legged posture eventually led me to the useful study by J. J. Tikkanen, Die Beinstellungen in der Kunst­ geschichte: Ein Beitrag zur Geschichte der künstlerischen Motive (Helsingfors, 1912). On Penelope, see also Ohly’s study (above, note 13). The cross-­legged Penelope figure with arm raised to chin seems to be the source for similarly posed females in Roman wall paintings depicting wives or unspecified women: one of the women in the gynaeceum of the Imperial Villa and another in the Villa of the Mysteries, both Pompeii; reprod. in Jean Charbonneaux et al., Hellenistic Art (New York, 1973), figs. 135 and 195. 15.  Among the cross-­legged Susanna images by lesser-­known Dutchmen are Salomon de Bray’s painting in the Stedelijk Museum de Lakenhal; and Nicolaes van Helt Stockade’s in Leipzig, Museum der bildenden Künste. 16.  Further on Rembrandt’s Bathsheba in Leo Steinberg, “An Incomparable Bathsheba,” in Rembrandt’s Bathsheba Reading King David’s Letter, ed. Ann Jensen Adams (Cambridge, UK, 1998), pp. 100–­118. 17.  Francisco Pacheco, Arte de la pintura (Seville, 1649), II, ch. 2, p. 189; ed. F. J. Sánchez Cantón (Madrid, 1956), vol. 1, p. 289. 18.  For the Tintoretto, see ch. 3. Given the rarity of cross-­ legged Madonnas, we may wonder what images drove Pacheco to his reprimand. As a practicing painter and overseer of sacred images for the Inquisition in Seville, he was surely familiar with the more common iconography of biblical heroines crossing their legs as a sign of willed chastity. He may have had at hand the Lu-

cas Vorsterman engravings, both published in 1620, of Rubens’s Susanna (fig. 4.51) and Holy Family (Hollstein 43). Could he have paired the two and, with his inquisitional mind, seen the Madonna implicated in Susanna’s sexual predicament? 19.  Steinberg, “The Glorious Company,” introduction to Jean Lipman and Richard Marshall, Art about Art, exh. cat. (New York, Whitney Museum of American Art, 1978), pp. 25–­26. 20.  St. Jerome, On the Perpetual Virginity of the Blessed Virgin Mary, 18, in Jerome: Letters and Selected Works, Nicene and Post-­ Nicene Fathers of the Christian Church, series II, 6 (New York, 1893), p. 343. 21. Quoted in Henry Denzinger, The Sources of Catholic Dogma, trans. Roy J. Deferrari (Fitzwilliam, NH, 1955), p. 39. 22. Jerome, On the Perpetual Virginity (above, note 20), ch. 4, pp. 336–­37. 23.  At the Council of Chalcedon in 451, Mary was declared Aeiparthenos (Ever-­Virgin); at the Fourth Lateran Council, 649, Pope Martin I made Mary’s perpetual virginity a dogma of the Church; see Marina Warner, Alone of All Her Sex: The Myth and the Cult of the Virgin Mary (New York, 1976), pp. 65–­66. 24.  Cf. Clement of Rome, First Epistle on Virginity, IV: “God will give to virgins the kingdom of heaven, as to the holy angels.” 25.  Savonarola delivered his sermons on Ezekiel during Advent 1496 and Lent 1497. 26. Jerome, Commentariorum in Ezechielem, XIII, cap. 44: “pulchre quidam portam clausam per quam solo dominus deus israel ingreditur  .  .  . mariam virginem intellegunt, quae et ante partum et post partem virgo permansit.” For an extended study of the Ezekiel passage, see Gail Gibson, “‘Porta haec clausa erit’: Comedy, Conception, and Ezekiel’s Closed Door in the ‘Ludus Coventriae’ Play of ‘Joseph’s Return,’” Journal of Medieval and Renaissance Studies, 8, no. 1 (1978), pp. 137–­56. 27.  St. Augustine, sermon 195, De Annuntiatione Dominica, Patrologiae  .  .  . latina, vol. 39, col. 2107; quoted in Mirella Levi d’Ancona, “The Medici Madonna by Signorelli,” Studi offerti a Roberto Ridolfi (Florence, 1973), n. 13, followed by a similar quote from St. Tarasius, eighth-­century patriarch of Constantinople, Patrologiae . . . graeca, vol. 98, cols. 1491D–­1494B. 28.  St. Bonaventure, Opusculum inscriptum: Laudus B. Virgini Mariae, quoted in French in L’Abbé Barbier, La Ste. Vierge d’après les Pères (Lyon, 1867), pp. 136–­37. 29.  Honorius of Autun, Speculum Ecclesiae, In purificatione Sanctae Mariae, Patrologiae . . . latina, vol. 172, col. 849. The Virgin as closed gate trickled down from the pulpit to vernacular poetry, as in Walther von der Vogelweide’s “Preis Mariens”: “Hesekiels Tor, das nie aufgetan wurde / und durch das der König in seiner Herrlichkeit ein und ausgelassen wurde. So wie die Sonne zu scheinen vermag durch unversehrte Glasscheiben, / so gebar die Reine Christum, die Jungfrau und Mutter war”; original text and modern German in Walther von der Vogelweide, Gedichte, trans. and ed. Peter Wapnewski (Frankfurt, 1966), pp. 214–­15. 30.  St. Antoninus, Summa theologica moralis, IV, tit. 15, cap. 10, col. 976, as cited in Samuel Y. Edgerton Jr., “Mensurare tempo-

n ote s to pag e s 1 2 2 – 1 3 4 ralia facit Geometria spiritualis: Some Fifteenth-­Century Italian Notions about When and Where the Annunciation Happened,” in Studies in Late Medieval and Renaissance Painting in Honor of Millard Meiss, ed. Irving Lavin and John Plummer (New York, 1977), vol. 1, p. 120, n. 20. Edgerton cites long patristic and medieval commentaries, from Jerome and Gregory to Nicolas of Lyra. 31.  As in Simone Martini’s Annunciation in the Uffizi, pinnacle above Gabriel, and Ugolino di Nerio’s polyptych of the Virgin and Child with Saints, c. 1317–­21, in the Clark Art Institute, Williamstown, MA. 32.  Bernard Berenson, The Drawings of the Florentine Painters: Amplified Edition (Chicago, 1938), no. 1734, fig. 820, attributed the sheet to Raffaello da Montelupo; others call it Michelangelo School or just a copy. The Louvre now catalogues it as attributed to Michelangelo, but it is more plausible as a copy.

five 1. For the Rilke poem, see pp. 187–88, note 16. Cf. the fourteenth-­century German poem, where the grieving Virgin kisses the dead Christ’s eyes, cheeks, mouth, hands, and feet for a thousand hours; Curt Gravenkamp, Marienklage: Das deutsche Vesperbild im 14. und im frühen 15. Jahrhundert (Aschaffenburg, 1948), pp. 56–­57. 2.  The error was honorably amended in the third edition of Elsen’s Purposes of Art (New York, 1972), pp. 153–­54; the original slip had appeared in The Partial Figure in Modern Sculpture from Rodin to 1969, exh. cat. (Baltimore, Baltimore Museum of Art, 1969), p. 14. 3.  A lack hardly noticed and rarely discussed—­“so well does the figure in its truncated state seem to work,” Steinberg wrote in his opening sentence. Cf. Howard Hibbard, Michelangelo: Painter, Sculptor, Architect (New York, 1974), p. 284: “The implications of the slung leg over Mary’s thigh may have become too overtly sexual for Michelangelo to tolerate—­in any event, he removed it and it has rarely been missed.” See further Frederick Hartt, Michelangelo’s Three Pietàs (New York, 1975), p. 69: “That so few of the thousands of visitors to Florence each season should even notice that the left leg is missing furnishes even stronger evidence of the power of Michelangelo’s conceptions and the supremacy of his genius.” See also Philipp Fehl (1978), quoted below on p. 135; and as late as 1981, Alessandro Parronchi, writing in La Nazione, July 21: “Recentemente si è fatto un gran caso di questa gamba mancante, alla quale prima evidentemente non s’ era prestato attenzione.” 4.  See p. 22 for the slightly revised 1970 version of this passage, p. 347 in the 1968 article. 5.  These ten constitute an imperfect consensus, since brief neutral or positive references to the slung-­leg hypothesis have appeared here and there, to say nothing of personal communications. But those cited below represent a fair record of what anyone interested in the fortuna of the hypothesis would find published. For Jack Wasserman’s dismissive response to the slung-­leg hy-

pothesis, see p. 189, notes 29 and 35; and p. 193, note 73. Wasserman’s prevarications can be summed up in a single sentence (his p. 51): “it is enough for me to claim that the leg behaves as it does in any Pietà: it falls aimlessy over the Virgin’s lap, the temporary resting place she offers the dead body for its repose.” Telling are the weasel words “aimlessly” (as if here alone Michelangelo gave no thought to what he was doing) and “lap” (which regularly replaces the more anatomically specific “leg” or “thigh”). There are no other Pietàs with Christ’s leg slung over the Virgin’s thigh. 6.  Art Bulletin, 51 (December 1969), p. 410. 7.  The response is reprinted here as appendix A, pp. 153–­55. 8.  Burlington Magazine, 107 (March 1975), pp. 131–­32. 9. Hartt, Michelangelo’s Three Pietàs (above, note 3). 10.  Schulz’s note 26 credits the above scenario to “J. Wilde in his Courtauld Institute lectures”—­“unknown to Steinberg.” What Steinberg did know, and emphatically disbelieved, was a partial statement of the case as presented by Tolnay in 1960: “The left leg of Christ is lacking. It seems that it was originally made from a separate piece of marble. The purpose of the hole at the thigh was probably to serve as a slot for the insertion of this leg”; Charles de Tolnay, Michelangelo: The Final Period (Princeton, 1960), p. 149. Wilde’s Michelangelo lectures at the Courtauld (delivered during the 1950s) were published posthumously as Michelangelo: Six Lectures by Johannes Wilde (Oxford, 1978). The relevant passage (pp. 181, 184) reads: “But the left leg of the figure of Christ is missing. This is not due to the attempted dismemberment; it was Michelangelo himself who, for some reason or other, perhaps because of a defect in the stone, was forced to piece on a separate bit of marble for this limb. Indeed, I am inclined to think that this act, which he had committed in order to save his work, was the very reason for his despair and for giving up the sculpture. We are told by many sources that the method of piecing-­on in sculpture was generally despised in the sixteenth century as not worthy of a true artist. It was certainly a major crime in the eyes of the man who had an almost metaphysical conception of the significance of the unviolated block.” Curious reasoning: Michelangelo, we are told, was thrown into despair over having committed a despicable crime; yet there is absolutely no evidence—­and little likelihood—­that the crime was committed. A similar presentation of wild conjecture as matter of fact appeared in David L. Bershad, “Recent archival discoveries concerning Michelangelo’s ‘Deposition’ in the Florence Cathedral and a hitherto undocumented work of Giuseppe Mazzuoli (1644–­ 1725),” Burlington Magazine, 120 (April 1978), pp. 225–­27: “Part of Mary’s arm had broken away and the left leg of Christ had presumably suffered a similar fate since the sculptor had been seen at work on a replacement made from a different marble.” This is sheer invention. (If Bershad had in mind the pretended eyewitness account of Michelangelo carving published by Blaise de Vigenère in 1597, the utter incredibility of that “source” was exposed in Steinberg, “Michelangelo’s Florentine Pietà” [1968], appendix

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A; in revised form, pp. 53–­56, appendix D here.) Soon after, the notion of Michelangelo working on, or even considering the piecing of, a separate leg was briskly dismissed by Linda Murray, Michelangelo: His Life, Work and Times (New York, 1984), p. 216: “The group remained unfinished because of a flaw in the marble; Michelangelo, in a rage, smashed the left leg of the Christ with a hammer. It never occurred to him to add a piece to a defective block or figure; his sculptures are monolithic and self-­contained in form. As the Belgian sculptor Victor Rousseau said, ‘You could roll them down a mountain and no piece would come off.’” (M. Rousseau had better choose the gentlest of slopes, lest Michelangelo’s openwork treatment of peripheral limbs—­three arms and one knee in the Pietà alone—­damage his argument.) Meanwhile, the conscientious attention to the limits of certainty contained in Tacha Spear’s letter remains unconsidered. The literature in its present state lays down as historic fact that (a) “Michelangelo himself . . . was forced to piece on a separate bit of marble”; (b) that he was “seen to work on a replacement”; and (c) that “it never occurred to him” to do any such thing. 11.  Liebert’s paper was published in the Art Bulletin, 59 (March 1977), pp. 47–­54. The material appeared again in his 1983 book, reviewed here in ch. 7. 12. Review by Bernard Hanson, Art Journal, 35 (Summer 1976), p. 391. 13.  See appendix B, pp. 155–56, for the troubled psychological origin of the formalist explanation. 14.  Charles Dempsey, “Michelangelo on the Couch,” New Criterion, 1 (April 1983), p. 76. 15.  “Michelangelo’s Florentine ‘Pietà’: A New Reconstruction,” College Art Association Conference, New York, January 26, 1978. I have quoted from Professor Fehl’s unpublished talk, which he kindly sent me. The quotation below is taken from Fehl’s abstract of his talk. 16.  For Jack Wasserman’s take on Calcagni’s participation, see p. 189, note 35. 17. “II quesito non ha mancato di sollecitare alcuni studiosi, che si sono sbizzarriti in interpretazioni concettuali, come Leo Steinberg, che intravedeva nella posizione delle gambe del Cristo accavallate a quelle della Madonna, molto in accordo coi tempi, un significato erotico. Per analoghe vie si potrà inoltrare quanto si voglia senza alcun frutto.” 18. The above colloquialism is borrowed from the great nineteenth-­century American thinker Artemus Ward: “It ain’t the things folks don’t know that make them ignorant; it’s the things they know for sure that ain’t so.” 19.  Reviewing Steinberg, The Sexuality of Christ in Renaissance Art and in Modern Oblivion (1983), in New Criterion, 3 (December 1984), p. 73. 20.  For the “Metaphors” essay, see ch. 1. It appeared within a collection of papers entitled Studies in Erotic Art, ed. Theodore Bowie and Cornelia V. Christenson (New York, 1970), pp. 231–­ 335. The volume includes an important study by Otto Brendel, “The Scope and Temperament of Erotic Art in the Greco-­

Roman World,” and a groundbreaking exploration, “Picasso and the Anatomy of Eroticism,” by Robert Rosenblum. These two essays alone deserved better than the indifference that snubbed the book, whose title was soon usurped (as a subtitle) by Woman as Sex Object, ed. Thomas B. Hess and Linda Nochlin (New York, 1972). 21.  See the “Appendix of Additions and Corrections” to the third edition of Pope-­Hennessy’s Italian High Renaissance and Baroque Sculpture (New York, 1985), p. 451. 22.  New York Review of Books, May 1, 1980, p. 44. Pope-­ Hennessy was referring to H. W. Janson. word précis of Steinberg’s thesis is 23. Spector’s hundred-­ framed by one introductory sentence and one terminal note, whose respective fallacies have been pointed out (p. 132). In between come three interesting distortions. (1) We are told that Steinberg interprets the artist’s destructive act as a response to “external pressures (potential criticism).” Steinberg had spoken of Michelangelo’s loss of confidence in the validity of his idiom, exacerbated by a changed climate—­an interaction, in other words, of internal and external forces. (2) What Steinberg at his most outré had described as “a direct sexual metaphor” to signify mystic marriage, Spector further qualifies as “repugnant” and “sacrilegious.” (3) In Spector’s summary, Michelangelo initially repressed the erotic meaning of the slung leg, then, after eight years, suddenly realized what he had done. It was presumably this fiction of protracted repression that earned the “Missing Leg” paper its place in a survey of “Psychoanalytic Research.” But Steinberg had written (1968, p. 344, and p. 19 here, with slight revisions): “In Michelangelo’s marble group, the themes of love, death, and communion are intimately interfused. There can be no question that he conceived the action of the left leg in perfect awareness of what it meant.” Thus no “Freudian ideas . . . concerning sexual repression” had anything to do with the case. In fact, nowhere in Steinberg’s writing is sexual repression imputed to works discussed or to their makers—­only to their conditioned reception by the public, art scholars included. 24.  There is no reason to imagine Cherubino Alberti’s engraving “based on Michelangelo’s group before its destruction.” When the Pietà was smashed, Cherubino was two years old, and his engraving is dated to the pontificate of Gregory XIII (1572–­85). It supplies the missing leg as it supplies landscape setting—­to make a full picture. And the same goes for the restored leg in Sabbatini’s painted version of the Pietà in the Sacristy of St. Peter’s (before 1576; fig. 1.16). None of the known adaptations date from before the mid-­seventies, and all restore the missing leg to what they take to be its probable disposition. For El Greco’s ingenious use of the Pietà Christ figure—­ accepting its one-­legged condition!—­see Steinberg, “An El Greco Entombment Eyed Awry,” Burlington Magazine, 116 (August 1974), pp. 474–­77. 25.  There is a further reason why Hartt’s distinction between a foot “free from the ground” and a foot “on the ground” fails to

n ote s to pag e s 1 3 7 – 1 3 9 impress me as the true motive for his resistance. In his comments on the Christ Child in Michelangelo’s Taddei Tondo, Hartt accepts with enthusiasm the figure’s alleged derivation from a high-­ stepping putto in a Medea sarcophagus—­even though the child in the tondo has its forward foot solidly on the ground, while the supposed model’s floats free. But in this instance, because Hartt likes the conclusion he draws from the comparison, the difference between tread and hover does not seem to count; see Hartt, Michelangelo: The Complete Sculpture (New York, 1968), p. 9. For the oversize of the protagonist in the Pietà, cf. Tolnay, The Final Period (above, note 10), p. 87: “It is noteworthy that [the Christ’s] dimensions are much larger than those of the three surrounding figures, a fact which is not apparent at first because of his position.” The recourse to relative disproportions among human figures within a system of ostensible naturalism is an intriguing instance of license in Renaissance art, deserving of more attention. An outstanding example of a discreetly aggrandized Christ is discussed in Steinberg, “Leonardo’s Last Supper,” Art Quarterly, 36 (1973), pp. 303–­4; revised and expanded as Steinberg, Leonardo’s Incessant Last Supper (New York, 2001), pp. 26–­27. 26. Steinberg, The Sexuality of Christ in Renaissance Art and in Modern Oblivion (1983; 2nd, revised and expanded ed., Chicago, 1996), excursus XXXV, “Not Other Than Willed,” pp. 202–­3. 27.  The subdefinition of “carnal” as carnivorous, flesh-­eating (or flesh-­devouring), ravenous, bloody, bloodthirsty, etc., should surprise most users of English. And I suspect—­against an entrenched lexicographic convention—­that “carnal” does not, in fact, have that meaning. It assumes that meaning, exceptionally and irresistibly, within one powerful passage in Shakespeare’s Richard III, IV, iv, 4. Queen Margaret is speaking of the king’s recent fratricide to his mother, the duchess of York: “That dog, that had his teeth before his eyes, / To worry lambs and lap their gentle blood; . . . this carnal cur / Preys on the issue of his mother’s body.” This is the only citation adduced in English dictionaries of the past one hundred years to support the alleged “flesh-­eating” meaning of carnal. Having neglected to comb the corpus of English literature, I cannot confidently assert that this cannibalistic sense occurs nowhere else; but since the lexicons cite no other example, I tentatively conclude that we are dealing not with a variant meaning, but with a one-­time bardic feat, a glorious instance of the power of poetic context to divert a common word to an unheard-of meaning ad hoc. 28.  Consider the carnality quotient in the following three instances. The first records a royal proxy wedding in the year 1514, the parties being an English princess, sister of Henry VIII, and a decrepit French king; quoted in full on p. 48. My second instance is an engraving after a lost painting by Luca Cambiaso, datable roughly to the mid-­sixteenth century, and perhaps remotely indebted to the Florentine Pietà. The subject is Venus lamenting the slain Adonis, whose left leg is slung over hers (fig. 1.30). The third instance comes from Othello (III, iii, 424), where

Iago, goading Othello’s jealousy, slanders the innocent Cassio by evoking a mental image of what a bedded lover would do. As they slept side by side, says Iago, Cassio repeatedly betrayed his lust for the Moor’s wife—­“then laid his leg / over my thigh, and sighed.” So we have in one instance a formal state ceremony that weds a young woman vicariously to an old impotent; in another, a corpse that declares itself amorous; in the third, the account of a restless sleeper whose love object is being dreamt. In each case, the nuptial or erotic meaning is conveyed by the play of a leg; symbolic because in each case—­impotence, death, or sleep—­“ literal consummation” is out of the question. 29.  One is almost ashamed to find the author so repetitive within a couple of pages. His hypothesis claimed that a mystery, a cosa divina, was being attempted—­a sposalizio prevailing over defeated death, the symbolic form of a lover’s approach being assigned to the Crucified. 30.  The motif of drapery diverted to a caress was first described in “The Missing Leg” (1968, p. 345, and pp. 19–20 here): “The drapery fold between the Magdalen’s breasts that flows down her abdomen is not her own garment but the loose end of Christ’s winding sheet. Released from his chest, it presses gently against her body. The delegated caress of the shroud confirms the Magdalen as an object of love.” (See p. 189, note 29, for a slight modification of this statement.) A subsequent fuller discussion of the motif—­“the most intimate intermingling of personal garments in Renaissance art”—­focuses on Michelangelo’s attempt to ensure that this errant drapery fold would pass unnoticed; see Steinberg, “The Case of the Wayward Shroud,” in Tribute to Lotte Brand Philip: Art Historian and Detective, ed. William W. Clark, Colin Eisler, William S. Heckscher, and Barbara Lane (New York, 1985), pp. 185–­92. In brief: Michelangelo had his compliant biographer Condivi climax his praise of the Pietà with the observation that the work was remarkable chiefly [sic!] for keeping the draperies of the various figures distinct from each other. Whereas the Pietà is the one work in which draperies intermingle. In Condivi’s encomium, the criterion that is finally said to make the supreme masterwork of the world’s greatest artist deserving of highest praise is an absurd anticlimax. But it makes sense as a calculated denial, designed to divert attention. (The article cited above further contains a first notice that the Virgin’s right hand is not, as used to be thought, “entirely hidden.” The carving of it is rudimentary and easily missed; but it is there and, once seen, activates the Virgin’s whole posture.) 31.  There may be a third cause for resistance, though it seems remote: an uneasy suspicion of that Gnostic heresy which denied the authenticity of Christ’s terrene body, so that he would never have suffered a true human death. Any suggestion of liveliness in Christ’s corpse might thus be suspect on doctrinal grounds—­in the fourth century, but hardly today. 32.  A recent personal letter (dated March 10, 1988) from a Catholic theologian at a major American school of religion informs me of “a deepseated Christian theological motif, recently

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revived by Rosemary Reuther and other feminist theologians, that Mary symbolizes the church.” It surprised me to learn that theologians needed to be reminded of a “motif ” so familiar to art historians. 33.  Rupert of Deutz, Patrologiae  .  .  . latina, vol. 169, col. 155, quoted in Hugo Rahner, Our Lady and the Church, trans. Sebastian Bullough (New York, 1961), p. 49. See p. 25 and note 44 there for other references. 34.  Honorius of Autun, Patrologiae . . . latina, vol. 172, col. 494, in Erwin Panofsky, Early Netherlandish Painting: Its Origins and Character (Cambridge, MA, 1953), p. 145. The Mary-­Ecclesia equation as it emerged from interpretations of Canticles is discussed, with abundant citation of sources, in Judith Glatzer Wechsler, “A Change in the Iconography of the Song of Songs in 12th and 13th Century Latin Bibles,” in Texts and Responses: Studies Presented to Nahum N. Glatzer . . . , ed. Michael A. Fishbane and Paul Mendes-­ Flohr (Leiden, 1975), pp. 73–­93, esp. 78–­80 and n. 19. 35.  The verse on Christ’s scroll—­“ Veni electa mea et ponam in te thronum meum”—­paraphrases Canticles 4:8; see Ernst Kitzinger, “A Virgin’s Face: Antiquarianism in Twelfth-­Century Art,” Art Bulletin, 62 (March 1980), p. 8. Manuscript commentaries on Canticles containing illuminations of Mary-­Ecclesia and Christ embraced as bride and groom are cited or reproduced in the following: Wechsler, “A Change in the Iconography” (above, note 34), pp. 82–­ 85; Hans Wentzel, “Die ikonographischen Johannes-­ Gruppe und das Voraussetzungen der Christus-­ Sponsa-­Sponsus-­Bild des Hohen Liedes,” Heilige Kunst: Jahrbuch des Kunstvereins der Diözese Rottenburg (Stuttgart, 1952), figs. 6, 7; Wentzel, “Unbekannte Christus-­Johannes-­Gruppen,” Zeitschrift für Kunstwissenschaft, 13 (1959), figs. 11, 12. 36.  [See here appendix D, pp. 157–66, concerning the hand-­ on-­shoulder motif. —­Ed.] The argument for the bridal symbolism has since been confirmed and elaborated (with convincing reference to the “friends of the Bridegroom” in the Songs of Songs) in Marilyn Aronberg Lavin, “The Joy of the Bridegroom’s Friends: Smiling Faces in Fra Filippo, Raphael, and Leonardo,” in Art the Ape of Nature: Studies in Honor of H. W. Janson, ed. Moshe Barasch and Lucy Freeman Sandler (New York, 1981), pp. 193–­210. 37.  [This note originally promised a longer study of the velation motif as a token of the bridal or married state from antiquity to the Seicento. The study was never completed, but some of the material was included in “Addendum to Julius Held’s Paper,” Source: Notes in the History of Art, 8–­9 (Summer–­Fall 1989), pp. 77–­79. —­Ed.] 38. The panel is catalogued among “Works Largely by the Shop of Taddeo Gaddi” in Andrew Ladis, Taddeo Gaddi: Critical Reappraisal and Catalogue Raisonné (Columbia, MO, 1982), no. 62. But the daring symbolism we now observe may yet earn it a higher grade. [The panel is now attributed by Yale to Taddeo himself. —­Ed.] 39.  See also the Pietà from Mariotto di Cristofano’s altarpiece of 1425–­26 in Carda, Chiesa Parrochiale.

An intriguing textual anticipation of the son’s embrace appears in the Early Christian apocryphal Odes of Solomon, 42.8; see Peter Brown, The Body and Society: Men, Women, and Sexual Renunciation in Early Christianity (New York, 1988), p. 92. For the baptized believer, as Brown puts it, “what Christ had brought to the world was the possibility of marriage to His Spirit.” Thus, the poet writes, “Like the arm of the bridegroom over the bride / So is my yoke over those who know Me.” Fig. 5.7 reproduces a disturbing Pietà—­the center finial of a considerably restored polyptych—­in the Pinacoteca Nazionale, Bologna. The work is attributed to the still shadowy personality of the Pseudo-­Jacopino di Francesco, and its conjectural date has been recently rolled back from “after 1360” to the 1330s in Andrea Emiliani et al., La Pinacoteca Nazionale di Bologna: Catalogo generale delle opere esposte (Bologna, 1987), no. 17. As is usual in these affairs, iconographic considerations—­not even so outrageous a feature as the dead Christ’s embrace of his mother—­hardly enter into debates over chronology. Nor does the motif seem to have attracted imitators in Bolognese painting. Fig. 5.8 appears in Ladis’s Gaddi catalogue raisonné (above, note 38), fig. 54. The group of late fourteenth-­and early fifteenth-­century works that take up Gaddi’s iconography includes (in addition to those reproduced): Maestro di Santa Verdiana, Pietà, 1395–­ 1400, detached fresco, Florence, San Miniato al Monte, reprod. in Miklós Boskovits, Pittura fiorentina alla vigilia del Rinascimento 1370–­1400 (Florence, 1975), fig. 358; and a Rimini School Madonna and Saint John with the Man of Sorrows, Strasbourg, Musée des Beaux-­Arts, reprod. in Gertrud Schiller, Iconography of Christian Art (Greenwich, CT, 1972), fig. 733. Once we recognize the late Trecento motif of Christ appearing as an embracing corpse, a question arises. To what extent, if at all, was the motif influenced by the “macabre” imagery that followed the experience of the Black Death? “La danse des morts” is first recorded in French literature around 1370, and the graphic motif of the self-­motivated skeleton as a symbol of generic death seems to emerge in this period. (The distinction between the fourteenth-­century death symbol and the motile skeletons of Roman art is discussed in Louis Edward Jordan III, “The Iconography of Death in Western Medieval Art to 1350,” PhD diss., University of Notre Dame [South Bend, 1980], esp. ch. V—­with ample citation of earlier literature.) 40. Alberti, De pictura, II, 37; Leon Battista Alberti: On Painting and Sculpture. The Latin Texts of De Pictura and De Statua, trans. Cecil Grayson (London, 1972), pp. 75–­77. 41.  S. Bernardini Senensis, Opera omnia (Florence, 1950), vol. 2, p. 267, sermon 55, 3, 2. Later in the same sermon (3, 3), “she embraced her beloved with the inexplicable tenderness of love” (“amplectebatur dilectum suum inexplicabili amoris dulcedine”). When the Virgin meets the Holy Women, they bring her “garments and veils for her new and sad widowhood” (“portata sunt vestimenta et capitis vela novae et maestae viduitatis”). Viduity, says the preacher, though it was a son, not a spouse she had lost.

n ote s to pag e s 1 4 4 – 1 5 0 42.  Patrologiae . . . latina, 13, cols. 162–­63; Origen: The Song of Songs, Commentary and Homilies, Ancient Christian Writers, 26, trans. R. P. Lawson (Westminster, MD, 1957), p. 200. 43.  Fig. 5.13 was long credited to Marco Marziale; the museum’s current attribution is to Bernardino Luini. In addition to the works here reproduced, I cite: Crivelli’s Pietà panel at the Metropolitan Museum of Art; his heavily restored, later Pietà in the Fogg Art Museum; and Butinone’s Pietà, formerly in Berlin, reprod. in Bernard Berenson, Italian Pictures of the Renaissance: Central Italian and North Italian Schools (London, 1968), vol. 3, pl. 1344. In each of these pictures, the dead Christ’s embrace is surely allusive, and it is noteworthy that in each instance emphasis is laid on the mother’s old age, as though to widen the generation gap and thereby distance the specter of incest. 44. Hartt, Michelangelo’s Three Pietàs (above, note 3), p. 80. For the Tolnay quotations that follows, see Tolnay, The Final Period (above, note 10), p. 87. 45.  Remember King Lear’s “But to the girdle do the gods inherit; beneath is all the fiends’” (IV, 6). Substitute art historians for “the gods” and Steinberg for “the fiend,” and all now crooked is made straight. For the devaluation of the lower limits of the human body in ancient and ecclesiastical commentary, see Steinberg, Sexuality of Christ (above, note 26), excursus XVII, “The Body as Hierarchy.” 46. Durandus, Rationale divinorum officiorum, I, 3, 2. 47. “Jeder sittliche Ausdruck gehört nur dem oberen Teil des Körpers an”; Goethe, “Joseph Bossi über Leonardo da Vincis Abendmahl zu Mailand,” Über Kunst und Altertum, 1 (1817). Hearing the above words quoted in conversation, Siegfried Gohr of the Museum Ludwig, Cologne, produced two instant reactions: at first the word “Feigling,” then the reflection that Germany had never created a native school of dance, and that even today every major dance school in Germany is headed by an imported foreigner. 48.  Sebastiano in Rome to Michelangelo in Florence, September 6, 1521, in Il Carteggio di Michelangelo, ed. Giovanni Poggi et al., vol. 2 (Florence, 1967), p. 314. 49.  The “hammock fold” had appeared before: in Cosimo Tura’s little Madonna panel at the National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC, and in a pen-­and-­ink sketch for a Virgin and Child by Marco Zoppo, reprod. in A. E. Popham and Philip Pouncey, Italian Drawings . . . in the British Museum: The Fourteenth and Fifteenth Centuries (London, 1950), pl. ccxxv. Tura has the boy fast asleep, nestling within the fold; Zoppo has him stepping out in brisk, lively action. The notion of using the hammock fold to project a psychology of internal conflict is entirely Michelangelo’s. 50.  The above interpretation of the Doni Madonna remains unpublished. In lecture form, it was first presented at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, on October 14, 1965, and two years later at Yale and Columbia. A five-­hundred-­word condensation was written (on a dare) for Vogue (December 1974), p. 139. A full statement of the case formed the subject of the first two of

my Mellon Lectures at the National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC, in 1982. A summary of those lectures was published in The A. W. Mellon Lectures in the Fine Arts: Fifty Years, ed. Elizabeth Cropper (New Haven, 2003). The Petrarch quotation in the foregoing text paragraph—­“tre dolci cari nomi ai in te raccolti, madre, figliuola e sposa”—­is taken from his Canzoniere, 366, “Vergine bella, che di sol vestita.” Cf. the closing lines of the “bellissimo spirito” that conclude Vasari’s praise of Michelangelo’s Roman Pietà, where Christ is addressed as “Sposo, figliuolo e padre,” the Madonna as “Unica sposa sua figliuola e madre” (p. 7). 51.  For Pacheco’s censure of the cross-­legged pose for the Virgin, see p. 119. Rare Early Christian examples of a cross-­legged Virgin are found on a few sarcophagi in scenes of the Nativity or Adoration of the Magi; p. 199, note 3. 52.  See pp. 121–­26 for references and further discussion of the Ezekiel passage. 53.  E. H. Gombrich, “Michelangelo’s Cartoon in the British Museum,” in New Light on Old Masters: Studies in the Art of the Renaissance, vol. 4 (Chicago, 1986), p. 175. The following passage from Anna Jameson’s Legends of the Madonna (1852; ed. London, 1903, p. 381) is worth rereading, since it offered a first inkling of the work’s theological orientation: “The exact meaning of the subject has often been disputed. It appears to me, however, very clear, and one never before or since attempted by any other artist. Mary is seated in the centre; her child is reclining on the ground between her knees; and the little St. John, holding his cross, looks on him steadfastly. A man coming forward, seems to ask of Mary, ‘Whose son is this?’ She most expressively puts aside Joseph with her hand, and looks up, as if answering, ‘not the son of an earthly, but of a heavenly Father!’ There are five other figures standing behind, and the whole group is most significant.” Though Jameson was unaware that Michelangelo’s specific theme was the doctrine of Mary’s perpetual virginity, she saw more clearly in 1852 than did the outstanding connoisseur of a half century later. Unlike Jameson, the following from Bernard Berenson may not be worth quoting, but perhaps it deserves a smile (the same Michelangelo cartoon is under discussion): “The motive is original. The Madonna, lightly seated, listens eagerly to the impassioned discourse of the Evangelist, while with one hand she silences Joseph. Of what is the Evangelist speaking? Perhaps of the Christ Child Who, unaware and unconcerned, is nestling roguishly at His Mother’s feet, making believe that He will not play with the infant John. This, at least, is my interpretation of the cartoon, so splendid besides as a composition, concerning which much might be said would space permit”; Berenson, The Drawings of the Florentine Painters: Amplified Edition (Chicago, 1938), vol. 1, pp. 231–­32. 54.  Jack Greenstein, “‘How Glorious the Second Coming of Christ’: Michelangelo’s Last Judgment and the Transfiguration,” Artibus et Historiae, no. 20 (1989), pp. 33–­57. The deliberate multivalence of Christ’s posture in the Last Judgment fresco was ex-

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pounded in Steinberg, “Michelangelo’s Last Judgment as Merciful Heresy,” Art in America (November–­December 1975), p. 50. 55.  “Vide Filium hominis ambulantem, vide sedentem, vide et stantem. Ambulantem in mortalitate, sedentem in glorificatione, stantem in aeternitate”; Patrologiae . . . latina, 198, col. 295. Adam Scotus: a Premonstratensian, later Carthusian, spiritual writer; Abbot of Dryburgh Abbey in Berwick, Scotland, c. 1184; died probably c. 1212. I have Jack Freiberg to thank for this welcome reference. 56. The passage served as the concluding sentence of the 1968 essay (p. 349). It was omitted from the revised, 1970 version (here ch. 1), which went on to discuss other works. The source is Freud’s “The Passing of the Oedipus-­Complex,” in Collected Papers, vol. 23, p. 274. 57.  From the Tome of Leo the Great (449): “And so, to fulfill the conditions of our healing, the man Jesus Christ, one and the same mediator between God and man, was able to die in respect of the one, unable to die in respect of the other”; letter to Archbishop Flavian of Constantinople, Patrologiae . . . latina, vol. 54, col. 756, translation in Documents of the Christian Church, ed. Henry Bettenson (Oxford, 1963), p. 70. 58. The motif of the pronated dead arm was originally identified in connection with Rodin’s response to the Pietà; see Leo Steinberg, “Rodin” (1963), revised for Steinberg, Other Criteria: Confrontations with Twentieth-­Century Art (New York, 1972), p. 402. But it was not Michelangelo who reinvented or revived the motif: a poignant example of it, similarly combined with the droop of the head, occurs in a terracotta Pietà of c. 1470, once attributed to Cosimo Tura, now to an unknown Ferrarese sculptor, possibly after a design by Cosimo Tura; since 1986 in the National Gallery of Australia, Canberra, inv. 1986.1054. [For discussion and bibliography, see the museum’s website entry at http://nga.gov.au/international/cata logue/Detail.cfm?ViewID=1&MnuID=1&GalID=ALL&Sub ViewID=4&IRN=45708. —­Ed.] The pronated arm is a striking feature of the panel with the dead Christ supported by the Virgin and St. John in Antonio Vivarini and Giovanni d’Alemagna’s Praglia polyptych, Pinacoteca di Brera, Milan. 59.  Johannes Molanus, De historia SS. imaginum et picturarum . . . (1570; ed. Louvain, 1771), pp. 120, 121: “Quanto ergo magis prohibendae sunt hujusmodi Picturae. . . . Lingua loquitur auribus, Pictura loquitur oculis . . . & frequenter altius descendit in pectus hominis.” 60.  Art Bulletin, 51 (December 1969), pp. 410–­13. 61.  See now Steinberg, “Who’s Who in Michelangelo’s Creation of Adam: A Chronology of the Picture’s Reluctant Self-­ Revelation,” Art Bulletin, 74 (December 1992), pp. 552–­66. 62.  For the Medici Madonna, see ch. 4. 63. Thode, Michelangelo und das Ende der Renaissance, vol. 3 (Berlin, 1912), pp. 695–­96; adapted from Thode, Michelangelo: Kritische Untersuchungen über seine Werke (Berlin, 1908), vol. 2, p. 278. 64.  Von Einem, Michelangelo: Die Pietà im Dom zu Florenz (Stuttgart, 1956), p. 6.

65.  Von Einem, “Bemerkungen zur Florentiner Pietà Michelangelos,” Jahrbuch der preussischen Kunstsammlungen, 61 (1940), pp. 77–­99. 66. Andreas Prater, Cellinis Salzfass für Franz I (Stuttgart, 1988). 67.  Andreas Prater, “Michelangelo: Heisse Liebe zum kalten Stein,” Pan, 5 (1988), p. 52. 68.  Valerie Shrimplin-­Evangelidis, “Michelangelo and Nicodemism: The Florentine Pietà,” Art Bulletin, 71 (March 1989), p. 64. 69. Examples: the grave stele of Krito and her deceased mother Timarista, 420–­410 BC, in the Archaeological Museum, Rhodes, inv. 13638, where the two place hands on each other’s shoulders; the fragment of a grave stele of a youth and warrior, c. 400–­375 BC, where the hand on the youth’s left shoulder belonged to a woman, probably the mother, reprod. in Glories of the Past: Ancient Art from the Shelby White and Leon Levy Collection, exh. cat. (New York, Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1990), cat. 97. Also, the votive relief of Demeter and Persephone, c. 420 BC, in the Ny Carlsberg Glyptothek, Copenhagen. Eurydice, consigned eternally to Hades, lays a consoling hand on Orpheus’s shoulder as Hermes pulls her away in the fifth-­century sculpture by Alkamenes (known in a Roman copy at the Museo Archeologico Nazionale, Naples, inv. 6727). Restraint is exemplified in the Death of Aegisthus (Revenge of Orestes) relief, Ny Carlsberg Glyptothek, inv. 1623, an archaizing work of c. 300 BC, based on an earlier Greek original, where Clytemnestra lays a hand on the shoulder of the knife-­wielding Orestes. 70. For further Etruscan examples, see another Tarquinia fresco in the Tomb of the Shields, also of the Velcha family, in Mario Torelli, ed., The Etruscans, exh. cat. (Venice, Palazzo Grassi, 2001), pp. 132–­33. Here, it is the wife’s hand that reaches to her husband’s shoulder. The gesture goes from husband to wife in a fourth-­century cinerary urn in the Museo Archeologico, Florence, ibid., cat. 194, p. 603. In the well-­known sixth-­century Sarcophagus of the Spouses from Cerveteri in the Louvre, the gesture is incipient, with the husband resting an upright, partly opened hand on his wife’s shoulder. A further Roman instance is the Hercules and Omphale fresco from the vicinity of Pompei at the Museum of Art, Rhode Island School of Design, reprod. in Rolf Winkes, Catalogue of the Classical Collection: Roman Paintings and Mosaics (Providence, 1982), cat. 22. 71. See Richard Brilliant, Gesture and Rank in Roman Art (Connecticut Academy of Sciences, XIV, 1963), p. 215, for full bibliography. 72. Ibid. In manu appears in the fifth-­century BC Laws of the Twelve Tables, VI, 5, and Gaius’s Institutes (c. 170 AD), I, esp. 108–­ 13. See also David Herlihy, Medieval Households (Cambridge, MA, 1985), pp. 8–­9, “Marriage in manu.” 73.  For an Early Christian example in the Lateran Museum, see Giuseppe Wilpert, I sarcofagi cristiani antichi, vol. 2 (Rome, 1932), pl. CCXVIII, 2. 74. Eros-­Paris: Neo-­Attic relief, first century AD, Naples,

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Alcestis: Museo Archeologico Nazionale, inv. 6682. Hercules-­ fourth-­century catacomb painting on the Via Latina, reprod. in André Grabar, The Beginnings of Christian Art, 200–­395 (London, 1967), pl. 251. 75.  Among other examples, Death possesses a foot soldier in Jacob Binck’s engraving of c. 1525–­30, Bartsch 51. Adam and Eve join hands, while Adam sets his right hand on Eve’s shoulder, in a marginal roundel in a late fifteenth-­century Book of Hours in the Russian State Library, Moscow, Ms. 256, no. 817, reprod. in Katia Zolotova, Western European Book Miniatures of the 12th–­ 17th Centuries: Catalogue of Illuminated Manuscripts in Moscow Libraries . . . (Moscow, 2010), pp. 390–­92; also in Livres d’Heure: Manuscrits enluminés français du XVe siècle (Leningrad, 1991), n.p. 76.  Fig. 5.24 reproduces the page in the Lyons 1548 edition. The Matrimonium images in the editio princeps (Paris, 1531) and the next edition (Augsburg, 1534) also depict the husband’s left hand on his wife’s shoulder, though the woodcuts are more primitive in style. 77.  Among other examples: Lotto’s portrait of a married couple in the Hermitage, c. 1525; Lucas van Leyden’s Betrothal, 1527, Antwerp, Koniklijke Museen voor Schone Kunste; two versions of the same couple portrait, one in Dresden, Staatliche Kunstsammlungen, inv. 221, attributed to Girolamo Romanino, the other in the Museum of Fine Arts, Budapest, inv. 6386, as Altobello Melone; a work from the school of Sebastiano in the Columbus Museum of Art, Ohio, inv. 38.7; the Florentine painting in the Palazzo Pitti, inv. 15934, once thought to be a portrait of Andrea del Sarto and his wife. For the latter, see S. J. Freedberg, Andrea del Sarto (Cambridge, MA, 1963), vol. 1, p. 223, as mid-­ sixteenth century, possibly Toschi. Noteworthy instances in the seventeenth century include Frans Hals’s Marriage Portrait of Isaac Massa and Beatrix van der Laen, c. 1622, in the Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam; Van Dyck’s drawing Double Portrait with Cherubim in Budapest, where the noble bridegroom lays a hand on his lady’s shoulder, while at their feet two winged putti, disposed like the Hellenistic Wrestlers of the Uffizi Tribuna, represent Eros chastised by Anteros, here interpreted as the principle of higher love. The tradition continues, so that we instantly understand what the gesture imports in Degas’s portrait of the Duke and Duchess of Morbilli in the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, no less than in nineteenth-­century tintypes and daguerreotypes, such as the family portrait in the Rinhart Collection, Ohio State University, reprod. in Floyd Rinhart and Marion Rinhart, The American Daguerreotype (Athens, Georgia, 1981), p. 117. 78. “His appearance as an Infant Spouse, from his bridal chamber, that is, from the womb of a virgin”; St. Augustine, sermon 7, 2 (Ben. 191) and, for the theme of the Infant Spouse, sermon 10, in Augustine, Sermons for Christmas and Epiphany, Ancient Christian Writers, 15, trans. Thomas Comerford Lawler (Westminster, MD, 1952), pp. 109 and 115–­16, respectively. The subject of marital appropriation was originally suggested in Steinberg, “Michelangelo’s Florentine Pietà: The Missing Leg” (1968); see p. 24 here.

79.  See also the Gualino Madonna in the Galleria Sabauda, Turin. 80.  For the exposure of the leg in token of Christ’s humanation, see Steinberg, Sexuality of Christ (above, note 26), excursus XVIII, “14th-­Century Nudity.” 81.  In the work of the Lorenzettis, see also Pietro Lorenzetti’s Madonna and Child, from the Montichiello polyptych, c. 1315, Museo Diocesano, Pienza; Ambrogio Lorenzetti (?), Madonna and Child with Two Angels, St. John and St. Catherine, c. 1335, Siena, Pinacoteca Nazionale, inv. 184. 82.  See D’Amico’s “Restaure di pitture murali del Trecento bolognese,” Itinerari, 4 (1986), pp. 46–­62, esp. p. 52, with reference to her 1981 publication on the same work. She reiterates the discussion in “La ‘Madonna del Ricamo’ di Vitale: Storia di un ‘filo,’” in La Madonna del Ricamo di Vitale da Bologna, exh. cat., ed. Franco Faranda (Bologna, Fondazione Casa di Risparmio, 2008), pp. 47–­68. The essays include interesting discussions of the “Madonna operosa” in later Trecento art. 83.  Additional fifteenth-­and sixteenth-­century examples include the Madonna and Child paintings of Andrea di Bartolo, c. 1405–­10, Yale University Art Gallery; Giovanni di Francesco Toscani, Madonna delle Calle, before 1430, Arezzo, Montemignano, Santa Maria Assunta; Arcangelo di Cola, Madonna and Child Enthroned with Angels, c. 1430, Camerino, Pinacoteca e Museo Civici; and Raphael’s Colonna Madonna in Berlin. 84.  The Virgin’s spousal union with the heavenly Christ is announced by the hand she lays on Christ’s shoulder as the two stroll through a glory of cherubim in a late sixteenth-­century engraving by Hieronymus Wierix after Bernardo Passeri (Macquoy-­Henrickx 2121). 85.  See also two Pietàs by Liberale da Verona, the first, dated 1476, recently on the art market (Dorotheum, Vienna, March 31, 2009, lot 22); the second, c. 1490, in the Alte Pinakothek, Munich, inv. 7821. Further: Macrino d’Alba’s Pietà of 1499, private collection, Berenson, Italian Pictures of the Renaissance (above, note 43), vol. 3, fig. 1229; and Edoardo Villata and Giovanni Romano, Macrino d’Alba (Alba, Fondazione Ferrero, 2000), cat. 9B. There are two other versions of the Tura. The first is a drawing in an English private collection. Though badly rubbed and reworked by a later hand, Eberhard Ruhmer, Tura: Paintings and Drawings. Complete Edition (London, 1958), p. 175 and pl. IX, judges it to be essentially by the master. The clarity of the dead Christ’s action confirms the import of the subtler gesture of the left hand in the Correr Pietà. In a poor copy of the Correr painting at the Art Institute of Chicago (inv. 1933.1037; Ruhmer, pl. VIII), that clarity is blurred.

six 1. See Frederick Hartt, “‘David’ in the Jackal’s Den: A Reply,” New York City Tribune, March 8, 1988, p. 14. Hartt was responding to comments Steinberg made to interviewers, published in James F. Cooper, “Raiders of the Lost Art: David, by the Hand

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of Michelangelo,” New York City Tribune, February 9, 1988, p. 14; and Judd Tully, “A Model for David,” ARTnews (Summer 1987), p. 53.

seven 1. E. H. Ramsden, The Letters of Michelangelo (Stanford, 1963), vol. 2, no. 272, p. 64. 2.  Michelangelo’s Ancestor figures are “the generations of Christ” named in the opening words of the Gospels. Male and female, young and old, they wait as the holy seed within them ripens toward the coming of the Messiah. The artist would have had to lose all control if Liebert’s description of them as “lost souls” (they include Abraham, Jesse, David!) had any validity. Fortunately—­and not surprisingly to the observant—­the current cleaning of those “wretched ancestors” reveals again their uncanny splendor. For the cleaning and a brief description of the Ancestors, see Steinberg, “A New Michelangelo,” Art & Antiques, 2 (October 1985), pp. 49–­55, 92–­93. [Steinberg’s full analysis of the Ancestors, “Why Michelangelo Huddled Those Ancestors under That Ceiling,” will be published in the forthcoming volume of his essays on Michelangelo’s paintings. —­Ed.] 3. “A Childhood Recollection from Goethe’s Dichtung und Wahrheit” (1917), trans. C. M. J. Hubback in On Creativity and the Unconscious (New York, 1958), p. 121. 4.  I am amused to find myself warming to my counterhypothesis as I write. I now see Donna Francesca riding out to Settignano three times a week to cosset her boy; see his cadets one by one packed off instantly to the wet nurse, so that, in the family bosom, Michelangelo had good Francesca pretty much to himself; and as he went on to outshine his dim siblings, it is they, poor fellows, who need our sympathy. 5.  Hartt, reviewing vol. 4 of Il Carteggio di Michelangelo in the Renaissance Quarterly, 36 (Summer 1983), p. 250. 6.  See Steinberg, “Who’s Who in Michelangelo’s Creation of Adam: A Chronology of the Picture’s Reluctant Self-­Revelation,” Art Bulletin, 74 (December 1992), pp. 552–­66. 7.  Erwin Panofsky, Studies in Iconology (1939; ed. New York, 1962), p. 172, n. 3. 8.  The two engravings are reproduced in Stefania Massari, Giulio Bonasone, exh. cat. (Rome, Instituto Nazionale per la Grafica-­Calcografia, 1983). Cat. 186 is the Bonasone print, sans legend; fig. 67 is by Master B with the Die. Though both are captioned “Jason and Medea” in the catalogue, the inscription on the Master B with the Die engraving, “Androgeneae poenas exsolvere caedis Cecropidae iussi,” comes from Catullus’s version of the Minotaur story, carmen 64, line 77. (Thanks to John Cunnally for

identifying the source of the inscription.) See Guntram Koch and Hellmut Sichtermann, Römische Sarkophage (Munich, 1982), p. 7, for the baffled seventeenth-­and eighteenth-­century scholarship confronting Orestes and Medea sarcophagi. 9.  The Latin texts below Bellori’s 1693 engraving (fig. 7.3) refer, on the left, to the newly wed Proserpine (Persephone); on the right, to Ceres’s grief at the rape of her daughter Persephone. Below are quotations from Claudian’s and Ovid’s accounts of the myth. Bernard de Montfaucon, L’Antiquité expliquée et représentée en figures (Paris, 1722), vol. 1, pl. XL, as “L’enlèvement de Proserpine.” 10.  Richard and Edith Sterba, “The Anxieties of Michelangelo Buonarroti,” International Journal of Psycho-­Analysis, 37 (1956), pp. 7–­11; Sterba and Sterba, “The Personality of Michelangelo Buonarroti: Some Reflections,” American Imago, 35 (1978), pp. 156–­77.

eight 1. E. H. Ramsden, The Letters of Michelangelo (Stanford, 1963), vol. 2, no. 322. The next six citations are taken from Ramsden, nos. 323, 324, 325, 326, 329, and 434. 2.  Jerome J. Bylebyl, “Realdo Colombo,” Dictionary of Scientific Biography (New York, 1971), vol. 3, pp. 354–­57. 3.  Coppola, “The Discovery of the Pulmonary Circulation: A New Approach,” Bulletin of the History of Medicine, 31 (1957), pp. 44–­77. 4.  Steinberg, “The Line of Fate in Michelangelo’s Painting,” Critical Inquiry, 6 (Spring 1980), pp. 430–­31. 5. Ramsden, Letters (above, note 1), vol. 2, no. 434, to Vasari, May 22, 1557. 6. Rudolf Wittkower, “Ein Selbstporträt Michelangelos im Jüngsten Gericht,” Kunstchronik und Kunstmarkt, 35 (1925–­26), p. 366. 7.  Unidentified newspaper clipping, c. 1968, received from an insouciant student. 8.  Cited in “La chronique des arts,” Gazette des Beaux-­Arts, 6e pér., vol. 89 (1977), p. 11. 9.  Journal of the American Medical Association, 218 (November 22, 1971), p. 1304; 219 (February 28, 1972), p. 1212. 10.  Pseudo-­Bonaventure, Meditations of the Life of Christ, trans. Isa Ragusa and Rosalie B. Green (Princeton, 1961), pp. 44–­45. For further on the uncircumcised Christ in Renaissance art, see Steinberg, The Sexuality of Christ in Renaissance Art and in Modern Oblivion (1983; 2nd, revised and expanded ed., Chicago, 1996), excursus XXIII, “Resisting the Physical Evidence of Circumcision.”

L eo Stei n berg : Chron olo g y

A

summary of biographical events, personal and professional, with emphasis on the lesser-­known formative years through the early 1960s. The rest of Steinberg’s career encompassed prolific publications and hundreds of public lectures, complemented by various appointments and awards, briefly encapsulated here. A complete list of publications appears on pages 213–18. 1920



1923

Born July 9, Moscow, USSR, to Isaac Nachman (1888–­1957) and Anyuta Esselson Steinberg (1890–­ 1954); given name, Schneur Zalman Ariyeh Lev Steinberg. Older sister, Ada (1917–­1956). His father, a member of the Left Social Revolutionary (LSR) party, had been People’s Commissar of Justice in Lenin’s first, coalition cabinet, but resigned after four months (December 1917–­March 1918). The Soviet government refuses to allow his father to return from an LSR conference in Germany. The family flees to Berlin, where his younger sister, Shulamit (1923–­2000) is born. With them is his maternal aunt, Esther Esselson (1892–­1947), who always lived with the family.

1933

May, while his father is in London, the Gestapo searches their house for evidence of Communist affiliation. The family flees to London. Steinberg had already been thrown off his school’s track team as the Nazis gained power.



USSR refuses to renew the family’s passports. The British government issues him a Certificate of Identity as a Russian national, though “Russia” no longer exists.

1933–­36 Attends King Alfred School, an independent progressive school. Initially speaks little English; reads English classics in German translation for school assignments. 1935

Studies philosophy with his uncle, Aron Steinberg (1891–­1975). Isaac Steinberg cofounds the Freeland League for Jewish Territorial Colonization, an organization that

seeks a secure, culturally autonomous home for Jews outside of Palestine. 1936–­40 Attends the Slade School of Fine Art, University of London; wins prizes in drawing and sculpture. Receives diploma in Fine Art, 1940. 1940–­41 Lacking British citizenship, is ineligible for military service. During the Blitz, serves as a warden for the ARP (Air Raid Precaution, later Civil Defence Service).

Works for the British Council as part of cultural propaganda campaigns; publishes articles on music, art, and political history.

1942–44 1942, for the Ministry of Information, delivers fifteen talks for BBC Empire on the history and geography of Russia. Publishes a series of three articles for the Ministry in Persian Quarterly: “Art and War: The Past, Present, and Future of British Art,” in conjunction with the War Artists Advisory Committee.

Four months on the staff of the Associated Press of Great Britain, in charge of the photographic library while working at the night news desk of the British Press Association.



Fall 1942, hired by the weekly News Review; spends eighteen months in the foreign news department, specializing in France and the French Empire; also writes feature articles on art, film, and books.



1944, joins Picture Post as staff writer and layout artist.



Most of these wartime publications are written under the pseudonyms John Avon and Vladimir Baranov.

leo stein berg : ch ron olo gy [210]



During these years, maintains a small studio where he continues to draw and sculpt. At the request of his father, who is stranded in Australia during the war, speaks about the Freeland League at meetings of British Zionists.

1945

January, emigrates to New York with his mother, aunt, and younger sister. His father and older sister are already in New York.



Becomes contributor to and managing editor of This Month, a pocket journal founded by his sister Ada, devoted to politics, current events, and culture, until it folds in 1947.

1947

Translates Jacob Pat’s Ashes and Fire, an early report on surviving Jews in postwar Poland, from Yiddish (New York: International Universities Press).

1948

Begins teaching life drawing at Parsons School of Design, New York (until 1960).

1949

Translates Sholem Asch’s novel Mary, from Yiddish (New York: G. P. Putnam’s).

1950

Naturalized as a US citizen under the name Leo Zalman Lev Steinberg.



Audits classes at the Institute of Fine Arts, New York University (through 1953).

1951

Begins to teach art history at Parsons along with life drawing (through 1960).



Gives lecture courses for the cultural programs of the 92nd Street Y (Young Men’s Hebrew Association, New York) on art and aesthetics (through 1955).

1952

Publishes his first extended critical essay, “The Twin Prongs of Art Criticism,” in the Sewanee Review.



Writes to his father in May: “I find that I delivered 37 lectures in 6 months [at Parsons and the 92nd Street Y]. . . . Chronologically I ranged from 30,000 BC to current exhibitions. Geographically, I ranged from Japan to the Congo to New York. My subjects included Oriental philosophy, medieval scholasticism, classical and modern physics, the history of photography, the physiology of the eye, the evolution of archaeology, esthetics, art history, and the formal analysis of art works.”

1953

Teaches course at Cooper-­Union, “Theory of Modern Art.”



Publishes “The Eye Is a Part of the Mind,” a now classic essay, in Partisan Review.

1954

Receives BS in Education, New York University.



Thinking of studying philosophy, takes summer course with philosopher Paul Henle at Columbia University on Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason.



Enrolls in the graduate program of the Institute of Fine Arts.

1955–­56 Writes “Month in Review,” a column on contemporary art, in Arts Magazine. The columns win him the College Art Association’s Frank Jewett Mather Award for Distinction in Art Criticism. 1957

Delivers first of several lecture courses in the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s Grace Rainey Rogers auditorium (into the 1960s); subjects range from Egyptian to Baroque art.

1960

February, delivers “Three Lectures on Contemporary Art and the Plight of Its Public” at the Museum of Modern Art; published in 1962 and revised and reprinted in Other Criteria.



Receives PhD, Institute of Fine Arts, with dissertation on “Borromini’s San Carlo alle Quattro Fontane: A Study in Multiple Form and Architectural Symbolism.”

1961

Begins collecting Old Master prints, discovering a pictorial world then generally unstudied by art historians. Realizes that prints played an essential role in the transmission of images.

1961–­75 Appointed associate professor, then professor of art history, Hunter College, City University of New York. Teaches half-­time to give himself freedom to write. 1962

Marries Dorothy Seiberling, art editor at LIFE magazine (later divorced).

1962–­65 Art history lecturer, Sarah Lawrence College summer sessions in Paris. 1968–­72 Serves on the Board of Directors, College Art Association. 1970–­75 While still teaching at Hunter College, begins giving courses on modern art and criticism at the Graduate Center, City University of New York, art history program, which he had created with Milton Brown. 1972

Publication of Other Criteria: Confrontations with Twentieth-­Century Art.

1975

Delivers convocation address at the College Art Association conference, “The Baldness of God and Other Ills.”



Appointed Benjamin Franklin Professor of Art History and University Professor, University of Pennsylvania.

le o stein be rg : c hronolo gy

1976

Art historian-­in-­residence, American Academy, Rome.

1978

Elected Fellow, American Academy of Arts and Sciences.

1979

Elected Fellow, University College, London.

1981

Receives Honorary Doctorate in the Fine Arts, Philadelphia College of Art. The first of six such awards, the last from Harvard, 2006.

1988

Scholar-­in-­Residence, J. Paul Getty Study Center.



Honored as Literary Lion, the New York Public Library.

1991

Retires from the University of Pennsylvania; teaches one semester in the Meyer Schapiro Chair, Columbia University.

1995

Delivers Charles Eliot Norton Lectures, Harvard University, “The Mute Image and the Meddling Text.”

1982

Delivers A. W. Mellon Lectures in the Fine Arts, National Gallery of Art, “The Burden of Michelangelo’s Painting.”

1996

Publication of the second, enlarged edition of The Sexuality of Christ in Renaissance Art and in Modern Oblivion.

1983

Publication of The Sexuality of Christ in Renaissance Art and in Modern Oblivion.

2002

Named Samuel H. Kress Foundation Distinguished Scholar, College Art Association.



Receives Award in Literature, American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters, the first art historian to be so honored.



His collection of more than three thousand prints is transferred to the Blanton Museum of Art, University of Texas, Austin.

1984

Receives College Art Association’s Frank Jewett Mather Award for Distinction in Art Criticism.

2011

March 13, dies at home, after years of being “afflicted with longevity.”

1986–­91 Receives MacArthur Foundation Fellowship.

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L eo Stei n be rg : Publi c ati on s ( 1 9 4 7 –­2010)

Books Leonardo’s Incessant Last Supper. New York: Zone Books, 2001. Encounters with Rauschenberg (A Lavishly Illustrated Lecture). Houston: The Menil Foundation; Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000. Trois Études sur Picasso. Translated by Jean-­Louis Houdebine. Paris: Éditions Carré, 1996. The Sexuality of Christ in Renaissance Art and in Modern Oblivion. New York: Pantheon Books, 1984. Originally published in October, no. 25 (Summer 1983), pp. 1–­222. 2nd, revised and expanded ed. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996. Italian translation: La sessualità di Cristo nell’arte rinascimentale e il suo oblio nell’epoca moderna. Translated by Francesco Saba Sardi. Milan: Il Saggiatore, 1986. French translation: La sexualité du Christ dans l’art de la Renaissance et son refoulement moderne. Translated by Jean-­Louis Houdebine, preface by André Chastel. Paris: Gallimard, 1987. Spanish translation: La sexualidad de Cristo en el arte del Renacimiento y en el olvido moderno. Translated by Jesus Valiente Malla. Madrid: Hermann Blume, 1989. Polish translation: Seksualność Chrystusa. Zapomniany temat sztuki renesansowej. Translated by Mateusz Salwa. Krakow: Universitas, 2013. Excerpt: In Religion, Art, and Visual Culture: A Cross-­Cultural Reader, edited by S. Brent Plate, pp. 73–­80. New York: Palgrave, 2002. Borromini’s San Carlo alle Quattro Fontane: A Study in Multiple Form and Architectural Symbolism. New York: Garland Publishing, 1977. Revised and expanded from 1960 dissertation. Michelangelo’s Last Paintings: The Conversion of St. Paul and the Crucifixion of St. Peter in the Cappella Paolina, Vatican Palace. London: Phaidon Press; New York: Oxford University Press, 1975. Excerpt: “Michelangelo’s Last Painting.” Smithsonian Magazine (December 1975), pp. 74–­85. Other Criteria: Confrontations with Twentieth-­Century Art. New York: Oxford University Press, 1972. 2nd ed., with new preface. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007. Portuguese translation: Outros Critérias. Translated by Celia Evualdo. São Paulo: Cosac Naify, 2008.

Chinese translation: Translated by Shen Yubing, Fan Liu, and Gu Guangshu. Edited by Shen Yubing. Nanjing: Jiangsu Fine Arts Publishing House, 2011. Jasper Johns. New York: George Wittenborn, 1963. Revised and expanded from the essay in Metro, nos. 4–­5 (1962). Later revised as “Jasper Johns: The First Seven Years of His Art,” for Other Criteria. French translation: “Jasper Johns: Les sept premières années de son art.” In Regards sur l’art américain des années soixante, edited by Claude Gintz, pp. 21–­32. Paris: Éditions Territoires, 1979. Reprint: Jasper Johns. 35 Years: Leo Castelli. Edited by Susan Brundage. New York: Leo Castelli, 1993.

Articles “What I Like about Prints.” Art in Print, 7 ( January–February 2018), pp. 3–28. Based on a 2003 lecture. “Christo’s Over the River: An Act of Homage.” NYR Daily, December 3, 2010. http://www.nybooks.com/blogs/nyrblog/2010/ dec/03/christos-over-river-act-homage/. “L’Autoportrait de Prague et l’intelligence de Picasso” / “The Prague Self-­Portrait and Picasso’s Intelligence.” In Picasso Cubiste / Cubist Picasso, exhibition catalogue, pp. 101–­17. Paris: Musée National Picasso, 2007. “Un tour dans le collage de Stockholm” / “Touring the Stockholm Collage.” In Picasso Cubiste / Cubist Picasso, exhibition catalogue, pp. 165–­75. Paris: Musée National Picasso, 2007. Statement in The Ironic Icon: A Retrospective Exhibition of the Work of William Anthony, p. 6. Copenhagen: Stalke Gallery, 2004. “With Perrig in Mind.” In Re-­Visionen: Zur Aktualität von Kunst­ geschichte, edited by Barbara Hüttel, Richard Hüttel, and Jeanette Kohl, pp. 1–­2. Berlin: Akademie Verlag, 2002. Comment in Harvey Quaytman, exhibition catalogue. New York: David McKee Gallery, 2000. “An Incomparable Bathsheba.” In Rembrandt’s Bathsheba Reading King David’s Letter, edited by Ann Jensen Adams, pp. 100–­118. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998. “In the Algerian Room.” In A Life of Collecting: Victor and Sally

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Ganz, edited by Michael Fitzgerald, pp. 64–­67. New York: Christie’s, 1997. “The Michelangelo Next Door.” ARTnews, 95 (April 1996), p. 106. “Picasso’s Endgame.” October, no. 74 (Fall 1995), pp. 105–­22. Revision, 2007, in French and English for the website picasso.fr (no longer available). “Adams Verbrechen.” In Glaube, Hoffnung, Liebe, Tod, exhibition catalogue, pp. 166–­74. Vienna: Graphische Sammlung Albertina, 1995. “Leon Battista Alberti e Andrea Mantegna.” In Leon Battista Alberti, exhibition catalogue, edited by Joseph Rykwert and Anne Engel, pp. 330–­35. Mantua: Palazzo del Te, 1994. “This Is a Test” (concerning a scandalous picture by Max Ernst). New York Review of Books, May 13, 1993, p. 24. Italian translation: “Max Ernst blasfemo.” La Rivista del libri, September 9, 1993, p. 21. Follow-­up letter to the editor: “Max Ernst’s Blasphemy.” New York Review of Books, September 22, 2005, p. 85. “Back Talk from Leo Steinberg” (appendix to “Jasper Johns” essay in Other Criteria). In Jasper Johns. 35 Years: Leo Castelli, edited by Susan Brundage, n.p. New York: Leo Castelli, 1993. “Who’s Who in Michelangelo’s Creation of Adam: A Chronology of the Picture’s Reluctant Self-­Revelation.” Art Bulletin, 74 (December 1992), pp. 552–­66. “All About Eve” (response to a letter concerning the above essay). Art Bulletin, 75 ( June 1993), pp. 340–­44. “Steen’s Female Gaze and Other Ironies.” Artibus et Historiae, no. 22 (1990), pp. 107–­28. “Deciphering Velázquez’s Old Woman.” Manhattan Inc. (October 1989), pp. 156–­59. “Michelangelo’s Florentine Pietà: The Missing Leg Twenty Years After.” Art Bulletin, 71 (September 1989), pp. 480–­505. “Addendum to Julius Held’s Paper” (on a Rubens picture in Pasadena). Source, nos. 8–­9 (Summer–­Fall 1989), pp. 77–­79. “La fin de partie de Picasso.” Les Cahiers du Musée National d’Art Moderne, no. 27 (Spring 1989), pp. 10–­38. German translation: “Picassos Endspiel.” In Picasso: Letzte Bilder. Werke 1966–­1972, exhibition catalogue, edited by Ulrich Weisner. Bielefeld: Kunsthalle Bielefeld, 1993. Revised English version: “Picasso’s Endgame.” October, no. 74 (Fall 1995), pp. 105–­22. French translation: In Steinberg, Trois Études sur Picasso. Translated by Jean-­Louis Houdebine. Paris: Éditions Carré, 1996. Italian translation: “Il finale di partita di Picasso.” In “Pablo Picasso,” edited by Elio Grazioli, special issue, Riga, no. 12 (1996), pp. 285–­318. Portuguese translation: “O fim de partida de Picasso.” Ars (Universidade de São Paulo), 5, no. 9 (2007), pp. 24–­3 5. http://www.scielo.br/scielo.php?script=sci_ arttext&pid=S1678-53202007000100002&lng=pt& nrm=iso&tlng=pt. “The Philosophical Brothel” (revision of 1972 ARTnews essay, with “Retrospect”). October, no. 44 (Spring 1988), pp. 7–­74.

Excerpt: “Las señoritas de Avignon.” Revuelta: Revista latinoamericana de pensamiento, no. 7 (2007), pp. 44–­45. “Le Bordel Philosophique” (French translation and revision of 1972 ARTnews essay, with “Post-­Scriptum”). In Les Demoiselles d’Avignon, exhibition catalogue, pp. 319–­66. Paris: Musée Picasso, 1988. “‘How Shall This Be?’ Reflections on Fra Filippo Lippi’s Annunciation in London.” Artibus et Historiae, 7, no. 116 (1987), pp. 25–­44. “Art and Science: Do They Need to Be Yoked?” Daedalus, 115 (Fall 1986), pp. 1–­16. Reprint: In Art and Science, edited by Stephen Grabaud. Boston: American Academy of Arts and Sciences, The Daedalus Library, 1988. “Some of Hans Haacke’s Pieces Considered as Fine Art.” In Hans Haacke: Unfinished Business, exhibition catalogue, edited by Brian Wallis, pp. 8–­19. New York: New Museum of Contemporary Art, 1986. Reprint: In Hans Haacke, edited by Rachel Churner. October Files 18. Cambridge: MIT Press, 2015. “The Case of the Wayward Shroud.” In Tribute to Lotte Brand Philip: Art Historian and Detective, edited by William W. Clark, Colin Eisler, William S. Heckscher, and Barbara Lane, pp. 185–­ 92. New York: Abaris Books, 1985. “A New Michelangelo.” Art & Antiques (October 1985), pp. 49–­53. “The Seven Functions of the Hands of Christ: Aspects of Leonardo’s Last Supper.” In Art, Creativity, and the Sacred, edited by D. Apostolos-­Cappadona, pp. 37–­63. New York: Crossroads/ Continuum, 1983. “Essay: On Signs.” Send: Video and Communications Arts, no. 8 (Fall 1983). “Michelangelo and the Doctors.” Bulletin of the History of Medicine, 56 (Winter 1982), pp. 543–­53. “Velázquez’s Las Meninas.” October, no. 19 (Winter 1981), pp. 45–­54. Spanish translation: “Las Meninas de Velázquez.” Kalías, 3 (October 1991), pp. 10–­15. Also in Otras Meninas, edited by Fernando Marías, pp. 93–­102. Madrid: Ediciones Siruela, 1995. Italian translation: “Las Meninas di Velázquez.” In Las Meninas: Velázquez, Foucault e l’enigma della rappresentazione, edited by Alessandro Nova, pp. 75–­88. Milan: Il Saggiatore, 1997. German translation: “Velázquez’ Las Meninas.” In Las Meninas im Spiegel der Deutungen: Eine Einführung in die Methoden der Kunstgeschichte, edited by Thierry Greub, pp. 183–­93. Berlin: Reimer, 2001. Polish translation: “Las Meninas Velazqueza.” In Tajemnica La Meninas, edited by Andrzej Witko, pp. 151–­61. Krakow: Wydawnietwo, 2006. “A Picture by One Jacob Pynas.” Print Collector’s Newsletter, 11 (November–­December 1980), pp. 171–­74. “A Corner of the Last Judgment.” Daedalus, 109 (Spring 1980), pp. 207–­73.

le o st ein be rg : pu bl ic at ion s ( 1 9 4 7– ­2 0 1 0 ) “The Line of Fate in Michelangelo’s Painting.” Critical Inquiry, 6 (Spring 1980), pp. 411–­54. Reprint: In The Language of Images, edited by W. J. T. Mitchell, pp. 85–­128. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980. “Remarks on Graduate Education.” Arts Magazine, 54 (February 1980), pp. 132–­33. “Guercino’s Saint Petronilla.” In Studies in Italian Art and Architectural History, 15th through 18th Centuries, edited by Henry Millon, pp. 207–­34. Cambridge: MIT Press, 1980. “Resisting Cézanne: Picasso’s Three Women” (part I). Art in America (November–­December 1978), pp. 114–­33. Japanese translation: Tokio 1920s, vol. 32, no. 467 ( July 1980). German translation (partial): “Cézannismus und Frühkubismus.” Translated by Reinhold Hohl. In Kubismus: Künstler, Themen, Werke, 1907–­1920, exhibition catalogue, pp. 59–­70. Cologne: Josef-­Haubrich-­Kunsthalle, 1982. French translation, with revisions: “La résistance à Cézanne: les Trois Femmes de Picasso” / “Resisting Cézanne: Picasso’s Three Women.” In Picasso Cubiste / Cubist Picasso, exhibition catalogue, pp. 71–­101. Paris: Musée National Picasso, 2007. Due to a publisher’s error, the revised version appears only in the French edition. “The Polemical Part” (part II of “Resisting Cézanne”). Art in America (March–­April 1979), pp. 114–­27. “The Glorious Company.” Introduction to Jean Lipman and Richard Marshall, Art about Art, exhibition catalogue, pp. 8–­31. New York: Whitney Museum of American Art, 1978. “Picasso’s Revealer” (with Diane Karp). Print Collector’s Newsletter, 8 (November–­December 1977), pp. 140–­41. “Eve’s Idle Hand.” Art Journal, 35 (Winter 1975–­76), pp. 130–­35. “Michelangelo’s Last Judgment as Merciful Heresy.” Art in America (November–­December 1975), pp. 48–­63. “Remarks on Certain Prints Relative to a Leningrad Rubens on the Occasion of the First Visit of the Original to the United States.” Print Collector’s Newsletter, 6 (September–­October 1975), pp. 97–­102. “Pontormo’s Alessandro de’ Medici.” Art in America ( January–­ February 1975), pp. 62–­65. “Michelangelo’s Doni Tondo.” Vogue (December 1974), p. 130. “Pontormo’s Capponi Chapel,” Art Bulletin, 56 (September 1974), pp. 385–­99. “An El Greco Entombment Eyed Awry.” Burlington Magazine, 116 (August 1974), pp. 474–­77. “Leonardo’s Last Supper.” Art Quarterly, 36 (Winter 1973), pp. 297–­410. “A Working Equation or—­Picasso in the Homestretch.” Print Collector’s Newsletter, 3 (November–­December 1972), pp. 102–­5. “The Philosophical Brothel” (Picasso’s Demoiselles d’Avignon). ARTnews, 71 (September 1972), pp. 20–­29 (part I); (October 1972), pp. 38–­47 (part II). See above, 1988. “Other Criteria.” Written for Other Criteria, 1972, pp. 55–­91. Spanish translation: “Outros Critérios.” In Clement Greenberg e o

debate crítico, edited by Glória Ferreira and Cecilia Cotrim de Mello, pp. 175–­210. Rio de Janeiro: Jorge Zahar, 1997. Italian translation: “Altri criteri.” In Alle origini dell’opera d’arte contemporanea, edited by Claudia Zambianchi and Giuseppe Di Giacomo, pp. 95–­138. Bari: Laterza, 2008. Excerpt: “The Flatbed Picture Plane.” In Art in Theory, 1900–­ 1990, edited by Charles Harrison and Paul Wood, pp. 948–­53. Oxford: Blackwell, 1992. Reprint of excerpt: In Poetics of Space: A Critical Photographic Anthology, edited by Steve Yates, pp. 197–­206. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1995. German translation of excerpt: “Andere Kriterien.” In Kunst/ Theorie im 20. Jahrhundert, vol. 2, pp. 1169–­74. Berlin: Verlag Gerd Hatje, 1998. “The Algerian Women and Picasso at Large.” Written for Other Criteria, 1972, pp. 125–­234. Excerpts: “What about Cubism” and “Who Knows the Meaning of Ugliness.” In Picasso in Perspective, edited by Gert Schiff, pp. 63–­67 and 137–­39. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-­Hall, 1976. Swedish translation: “Kvinnorna i Alger och Picasso i stort.” In Pablo Picasso, exhibition catalogue, pp. 121–­205. Stockholm: Moderna Museet, 1985. “Reflections on the State of Criticism.” Artforum, 10 (March 1972), pp. 37–­49. Reprint: In Robert Rauschenberg, October Files 4, edited by Branden W. Joseph, pp. 6–­37. Cambridge: MIT Press, 2002. “Art/Work.” ARTnews, 70 (February 1972). “Rubens’ Ceres in Leningrad.” ARTnews, 70 (December 1971), pp. 42–­43. “Mantegna’s Judith in Washington.” ARTnews, 70 (November 1971), pp. 42–­43. “The Skulls of Picasso.” ARTnews, 70 (October 1971). Included in Other Criteria. German translation: “Die Totenschädel Picassos.” In Picassos Todesthemen, exhibition catalogue, pp. 89–­94. Bielefeld: Kunst­ halle Bielefeld, 1984. French translation: In Steinberg, Trois Études sur Picasso. Translated by Jean-­Louis Houdebine. Paris: Éditions Carré, 1996. “Picasso: Drawing as If to Possess.” Artforum, 10 (October 1971), pp. 44–­53. Reprint, with revisions: In Major European Art Movements, 1900–­1945, edited by Patricia Kaplan and Susan Manso, pp. 193–­221. New York: E. P. Dutton, 1977. “Salviati’s Beheading of St. John the Baptist.” ARTnews, 70 (September 1971), pp. 46–­47. “The Water-­Carrier of Velázquez.” ARTnews, 69 (Summer 1971), pp. 54–­55. “Michelangelo’s Madonna Medici and Related Works.” Burlington Magazine, 113 (March 1971), pp. 145–­49. “The Metaphors of Love and Birth in Michelangelo’s Pietàs.” In Studies in Erotic Art, edited by Theodore Bowie and Cornelia V. Christenson, pp. 231–­335. New York: Basic Books, 1970.

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“Objectivity and the Shrinking Self.” Daedalus, 98 (Spring 1969), pp. 824–­36. Included in Other Criteria. Reprint: In Critical Reading and Writing across the Disciplines, edited by Cyndia S. Clegg, pp. 564–­73. New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1988. “Picasso’s Sleepwatchers.” LIFE, December 27, 1968. Included in Other Criteria. French translation: In Steinberg, Trois Études sur Picasso. Translated by Jean-­Louis Houdebine. Paris: Éditions Carré, 1996. Revision, 2007, in French and English for the website picasso.fr (no longer available). “Michelangelo’s Florentine Pietà: The Missing Leg.” Art Bulletin, 50 (December 1968), pp. 343–­53. On Michelangelo’s Florentine Pietà and Madonna Medici (response to a letter concerning the above essay). Art Bulletin, 51 (December 1969), pp. 410–­12. “The Water-­Carrier of Seville (by Velázquez).” In Man and His World, International Fine Arts Exhibition, Expo ’67, Montreal, 1967. “Paul Brach’s Pictures.” In Paul Brach: New Paintings, exhibition brochure. New York: Cordier & Ekstrom, 1963. Included in Other Criteria. Reprint: In Toward a New Abstraction, exhibition catalogue. New York: The Jewish Museum, 1963; Art International, 8 (April 1964). Reprint of excerpt: In Art in Process, exhibition catalogue. New York: Finch College Museum of Art, 1965. “Pop Art Symposium at The Museum of Modern Art, December 13, 1962.” Arts Magazine, 37 (April 1963), pp. 36–­44. Publication of participants’ remarks at the symposium; Steinberg’s remarks are on pp. 39–­41. “Rodin.” Introductory essay to Rodin: An Exhibition of Sculptures and Drawings, exhibition catalogue. New York: Charles E. Slatkin, 1963. Revised for inclusion in Other Criteria. French translation: Le retour de Rodin. Paris: Éditions Macula, 1992. “Contemporary Art and the Plight of Its Public.” Harper’s Magazine, 224 (March 1962). Included in Other Criteria. Swedish translation: “Samtidens Konst och publiikens dilemma.” Bonniers Litterara Magasin, no. 6 (Summer 1962). Translated into several Eastern European languages in Ameryka and Pregled, US State Department publications, 1960s. Spanish translation: “El arte contemporáneo y la incomodidad del público.” Otra Parte [Buenos Aires], Autumn 2004. Reprint: In The New Art: A Critical Anthology, edited by Gregory Battcock. New York: E. P. Dutton, 1966, 1973. Reprint: In The Sociology of Art and Literature: A Reader, edited by Milton Albrecht, James Barnett, and Mason Griff. New York: Praeger Publishers, 1970, 1976. “Observations in the Cerasi Chapel.” Art Bulletin, 41 ( June 1959), pp. 183–­93. Introduction to The New York School: Second Generation, exhibition catalogue, pp. 4–­8. New York: The Jewish Museum, 1957.

“The Eye Is a Part of the Mind.” Partisan Review, 20 (March–­April 1953), pp. 194–­212. Included in Other Criteria. Reprint: In Reflections on Art: A Sourcebook of Writings by Artists, Critics, and Philosophers, edited by Susanne K. Langer. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1958, 1961. Reprint, with revisions: In Modern Essays in English, edited by Joseph Frank. Boston: Little, Brown, 1966. “The Twin Prongs of Art Criticism.” Sewanee Review, 60 (Summer 1952), pp. 418–­44.

Book Reviews “Shrinking Michelangelo.” Review of Michelangelo: A Psychoanalytic Study of His Life and Images, by Robert Liebert. New York Review of Books, June 28, 1984, pp. 41–­45. “Leonardo by Carlo Pedretti.” Renaissance Quarterly, 28 (Spring 1975), pp. 86–­89. “Velázquez: A Catalogue Raisonné of His Oeuvre by José Lopez-­Rey.” Art Bulletin, 47 ( June 1965), pp. 274–­94. “The Berenson Collection.” Harper’s Magazine, 230 (March 1965), pp. 154–­55. “Art Books, 1961–­62.” Harper’s Magazine, 225 (December 1962), pp. 103–­10. “Art Books, 1960–­61.” Harper’s Magazine, 223 (December 1961), pp. 87–­91. “Four about Rembrandt.” Art in America, no. 4 (1961), pp. 88–­91. “Art Books of 1960.” Harper’s Magazine, 221 (December 1960), pp. 106, 110, 112, 114, 116–­20. “Professor Janson’s Donatello.” Arts Magazine, 32 ( June 1958), pp. 41–­43. “Monuments of Romanesque Art by Hanns Swarzenski.” Arts Magazine, 30 (May 1956), pp. 43–­45. “Caravaggio Studies by Walter Friedlaender.” Arts Magazine, 30 (October 1955), pp. 46–­48. “Le musée imaginaire, c’est moi!” Review of André Malraux. Art Digest, 29 (April 15, 1955), p. 16. “The Alphabet of Creation by Ben Shahn.” Commentary, 20 (March 1955), pp. 310–­12. “Modernity from Tombs and Temples” (recent books on Egyptology). Art Digest, 29 (December 1, 1954), pp. 20–­21. “The Synagogue’s New Look: An American Synagogue for Today and Tomorrow.” Commentary, 17 (August 1954), pp. 170–­72. “Undying Antiquity.” Review of The Survival of the Pagan Gods, by Jean Seznec. ARTnews, 52 ( January 1954), pp. 53, 73–­74. “Marino Marini by Umbro Apollonio.” Art Digest, 28 (October 1, 1953), pp. 22–­23. “Egypt in New York: The Scepter of Egypt by William C. Hayes.” Art Digest, 27 (September 15, 1953), p. 23. “Sculpture Since Rodin: Sculpture in the 20th Century by Andrew Carnduff Ritchie.” Art Digest, 27 (August 1953), pp. 22–­23. “Isaac Kloomok’s Marc Chagall.” Judaism, 1 (April 1952), pp. 190–­91. “Perspective Drawing” (animated short). Film News (April 1952), p. 6.

le o st ein be rg : pu bl ic at ion s ( 1 9 4 7– ­2 0 1 0 )

Exhibition Reviews “Deliberate Speed.” ARTnews, 66 (April 1967), pp. 42–­59. “Month in Review,” a column on contemporary art in Arts Magazine, 1955–­56: Twelve Americans. Arts Magazine, 30 ( July 1956), pp. 25–­28. Raoul Hague included in Other Criteria. Fritz Glarner and Philip Guston. Arts Magazine, 30 ( June 1956). Included in Other Criteria. Recent Drawings USA. Arts Magazine, 30 (May 1956), p. 66. Included in Other Criteria. Franz Kline et al. Arts Magazine, 30 (April 1956), pp. 42–­45. Included in Other Criteria. Julio Gonzalez. Arts Magazine, 30 (March 1956). Included in Other Criteria. Spanish translation: In Kalías (October 1990), pp. 97–­101. Monet’s Water Lilies, Metropolitan Museum Fountain. Arts Magazine, 30 (February 1956), pp. 46–­48. Monet included in Other Criteria. Goldberg, Mitchell, Rivers, Rauschenberg. Arts Magazine, 30 ( January 1956), pp. 46–­48. Revision of comment on Rauschenberg as letter to the editor: “Footnote.” Arts Magazine, 32 (May 1958), p. 9. Pollock’s first retrospective, Jules Pascin, Picasso’s Suite Vollard. Arts Magazine, 30 (December 1955), pp. 43–­46. Pollock and Pascin included in Other Criteria. Reprint of Pollock: In Jackson Pollock: Interviews, Articles, Reviews, edited by Pepe Karmel, pp. 81–­83. New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1999. De Kooning, Modern Sculpture, Morris Graves. Arts Magazine, 30 (November 1955), pp. 46–­48. De Kooning included in Other Criteria. “Bible-­Age Relics and Jewish Art.” Commentary, 15 (August 1953), pp. 164–­66. “Metropolitan Offers Modern Americans.” New Leader, February 5, 1951, p. 26.

Letters to the Editor “The King’s Cross.” New York Review of Books, February 15, 2007, p. 62. “Max Ernst’s Blasphemy.” New York Review of Books, September 22, 2005, p. 85. “Your Teeth Are Showing.” New York Review of Books, March 29, 2001, p. 53. On Pacheco and Velázquez. Art Bulletin, 73 (September 1991), pp. 503–­5. Letter re: response to Carol Duncan on the Demoiselles d’Avignon. Art Journal, 49 (Summer 1990), p. 207. “What Did Cato Mean?” New York Review of Books, July 19, 1990, p. 53. “Saving the Last Supper.” New York Times Magazine, November 24, 1985, p. 162. “A Close Shave” (re: beardless angels). ARTnews, 80 (April 1981).

Reprint: In ARTnews, 91 (November 1992), p. 97. In support of Christo’s Gates project for Central Park, New York. New York Times, October 24, 1980, sect. A, p. 32. “Gerontophilia.” Art Journal, no. 3 (Spring 1973), p. 370. “Read Kolnik for Kollwitz.” Print Collector’s Newsletter, 3 (September–­October 1972), pp. 81–­82. “Debate with George Steiner.” Daedalus, 98 (Summer 1969), pp. 726–­29, 791–­93. “Footnote” (re: Rauschenberg). Arts Magazine, 32 (May 1958), p. 9. “Apropros Huntington Hartford.” Art Digest, 29 ( July 1, 1955), p. 4.

Other Interview for Jasper Johns audio guide, for “Jasper Johns: Gray” exhibition, the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Art Institute of Chicago, 2007–­8. “False Starts, Loose Ends” (publication of talk given at the CAA Distinguished Scholar Award, 2002). Brooklyn Rail ( June 2006), pp. 16–­20. http://www.brooklynrail.org/2006/06/art/leo. “The Burden of Michelangelo’s Painting” (synopsis of 1982 A. W. Mellon Lectures). In A. W. Mellon Lectures in the Fine Arts: Fifty Years, pp. 135–­40. Washington, DC: National Gallery of Art/CASVA, 2002. “Jacob Kainen” (obituary). Art on Paper, 4 (November–­December 1999), pp. 29–­30. “Meyer Schapiro” (obituary). CAA Newsletter, May–­June 1996, pp. 3–­4. “Albert Elsen” (obituary). CAA Newsletter, November–­December 1995. Response to “What Is the Meaning of Making a Painting Today with No Recognizable Image?” Tema Celeste, nos. 32–­33 (Autumn 1991), p. 65. Statement re: “The Power of Art.” Art Newspaper (October 1990), n.p. Reply to Paul Gardner, “What Would You Ask Michelangelo?” ARTnews, 85 (November 1986), p. 102. Double dactyl published in the second edition of Jiggery-­pokery: A Compendium of Double Dactyls, ed. Anthony Hecht and John Hollander, p. 119. New York: Atheneum, 1983. “Acknowledgments for a Book Not Yet Begun.” October, no. 13 (Summer 1980), pp. 101–­2. Reply to John Gruen’s questionnaire, “Far-­from-­Last Judgments, or Who’s Overrated and Underrated.” Art News, 76 (November 1977), p. 120. “Ten Irreverent Rimes” (limericks on Old Master prints). Print Collector’s Newsletter, 5 (October–­November 1974), p. 85. “The Symbolic Process: A Colloquium.” Proceedings of the American Psychoanalytic Association colloquium, December 11, 1969. In American Imago, 28 (Fall 1971), pp. 206–­7. Transcript of 1968 New York Studio School panel with Milton Resnick, Mercedes Matter, et al. In Out of the Picture: Milton Resnick and the New York School, pp. 213–­32. New York: Middlemarch Arts Press, 2003.

[217]

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Tribute, in Leo Castelli: Ten Years, n.p. New York: Leo Castelli Gallery, 1967. “The Cappella Paolina.” One-­hour TV program on Michelangelo’s last frescoes, filmed in the Sistine and Pauline Chapels. Broadcast on CBS-TV, Lamp unto My Feet, June 26, 1966, and February 26, 1967. “The Year Gone By: Part 1.” CBS-­TV panel discussion, moderated by Ilka Chase. Broadcast December 20, 1959.

Translations Mary, by Sholem Asch. Translated from Yiddish. New York: G. P. Putnam’s, 1949. Ashes and Fire, by Jacob Pat. Translated from Yiddish. New York: International Universities Press, 1947.

Ph oto g ra phy C r e d i ts

Fig. 1.1. Courtesy of the Fabbrica di San Pietro in Vaticano. Fig. 1.2. Arnold Newman, in Robert Coughlan, The World of Michelangelo, Time-­Life Books, © 1966 by Time, Inc. Fig. 1.5. © Sailko (Francesco Bini)/Wikimedia Commons. CC-­ BY 3.0 (Unported): https://creativecommons.org/licenses/ by-sa/3.0/legalcode. Fig. 1.9. © DeA Picture Library/Art Resource, NY. Fig. 1.14. © Marie-­Lan Nguyen/Wikimedia Commons. CC BY 2.5 (Unported): https://creativecommons.org/licenses/ by/2.5/legalcode. Fig. 1.15. www.lacma.org. Fig. 1.16. Courtesy of the Fabbrica di San Pietro in Vaticano. Fig. 1.17. Imaging Department © President and Fellows of Harvard College. Fig. 1.18. © RMN-­Grand Palais/Art Resource, NY. Fig. 1.20. Wallace Collection, London, UK/Bridgeman Images. Fig. 1.22. Imaging Department © President and Fellows of Harvard College. Fig. 1.26. © Trustees of the British Museum/Art Resource, NY. Fig. 1.27. Scala/Art Resource, NY. Fig. 1.28. Courtesy Beryl Barr-­Sharrar. Figs. 1.30, 1.36. © Trustees of the British Museum/Art Resource, NY. Fig. 1.37. © RMN-­Grand Palais/Art Resource, NY. Fig. 1.38. Courtesy Bibliothèque nationale de France. Fig. 1.39. Courtesy Bibliothèque municipale de Lyon. Fig. 1.43. © Trustees of the British Museum/Art Resource, NY. Fig. 1.44. Detroit Institute of Arts, USA/Bridgeman Images. Fig. 1.45. © National Gallery, London/Art Resource, NY. Fig. 1.46. bpk Bildagentur/Gemäldegalerie, Staatliche Museen, Berlin/Christoph Schmidt/Art Resource, NY. Fig. 1.48. Finsiel/Alinari/Art Resource, NY. Fig. 1.49. Scala/Art Resource, NY. Fig. 1.50. Scala/Ministero per i Beni e le Attività culturali/Art Resource, NY. Fig. 1.52. Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, Boston, MA, USA/Bridgeman Images. Fig. 1.54. © National Gallery, London/Art Resource, NY. Fig. 1.55. Pinacoteca Nazionale, Bologna, Italy/Mondadori

Portfolio/Electa/Bruno Balestrini/Bridgeman Images. Fig. 1.61. © RMN-­Grand Palais/Art Resource, NY. Fig. 1.62. © Trustees of the British Museum/Art Resource, NY. Fig. 1.63. © Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, Boston, MA, USA/Bridgeman Images. Fig. 1.66. © Trustees of the British Museum/Art Resource, NY. Figs. 1.68, 1.70, 1.71. Alinari/Art Resource, NY. Fig. 1.72. © Victoria and Albert Museum, London. Fig. 1.73. Private collection/Bridgeman Images. Figs. 1.74, 1.76. © Trustees of the British Museum/Art Resource, NY. Fig. 1.75. Courtesy of the J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles, and the Daniel Katz Gallery, London. Fig. 1.78. www.lacma.org. Fig. 1.79. © Ashmolean Museum, University of Oxford. Fig. 2.1. Courtesy of the Fabbrica di San Pietro in Vaticano. Fig. 2.2. Mallio Falcioni. Courtesy of the Fabbrica di San Pietro in Vaticano. Fig. 2.3. Cameraphoto Arte, Venice/Art Resource, NY. Fig. 2.4. Scala/Ministero per i Beni e le Attività culturali/Art Resource, NY. Fig. 2.5. © RMN-­Grand Palais/Art Resource, NY. Fig. 2.7. © National Gallery, London/Art Resource, NY. Figs. 2.10, 2.11. Robert Hupka. Fig. 2.13. © The Frick Collection. Fig. 2.14. © National Gallery, London/Art Resource, NY. Fig. 2.16. Arnold Newman, in Robert Coughlan, The World of Michelangelo, Time-­Life Books, © 1966 by Time, Inc. Fig. 2.17. © RMN-­Grand Palais/Art Resource, NY. Fig. 2.18. Courtesy of the Fabbrica di San Pietro in Vaticano. Fig. 2.22. Arnold Newman, in Robert Coughlan, The World of Michelangelo, Time-­Life Books, © 1966 by Time, Inc. Fig. 2.23. © Rheinisches Bildarchiv Köln, rba_mf049690. Figs. 2.26, 2.29. © Trustees of the British Museum/Art Resource, NY. Fig. 2.30. © National Gallery, London/Art Resource, NY. Fig. 2.31. © Trustees of the British Museum/Art Resource, NY. Fig. 2.37. Magda Vasillov. Courtesy of Special Collections, Fine Arts Library, Harvard University.

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Fig. 2.42. Renata Sedmakova/Shutterstock.com. Fig. 2.43. © Staatliche Graphische Sammlung München. Fig. 3.2. © Ashmolean Museum, University of Oxford. Fig. 3.3. Courtesy Simon C. Dickinson, Ltd., London. Fig. 3.6. © Ashmolean Museum, University of Oxford. Fig. 3.7. © Marie-­Lan Nguyen/Wikimedia Commons. CC BY 2.5 (Unported): https://creativecommons.org/licenses/ by/2.5/legalcode. Fig. 4.1. Scala/Art Resource, NY. Fig. 4.2. © Succession Brancusi—­All rights reserved (ARS) 2016. Fig. 4.5. Gabinetto Fotografico, Uffizi. Fig. 4.7. Royal Collection Trust/© Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II 2016. Fig. 4.9. © RMN-­Grand Palais/Art Resource, NY. Fig. 4.10. wolffchronicles.com. Fig. 4.13. © Shakko/Wikimedia Commons. CC BY-­SA 3.0 (Unported): https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by -sa/3.0/legalcode. Fig. 4.17. Vladimir Terebenin. © The State Hermitage Mu­ seum, St. Petersburg. Fig. 4.18. C. Faraglia, D-­DAI-­Rom 31.958. Fig. 4.21. CC BY-­SA 3.0 (Unported): https://creativecommons .org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/legalcode. Fig. 4.31. All rights reserved. Roger-­Viollet Agency. © Musée Carnavalet/Roger-­Viollet. Fig. 4.32. © Trustees of the British Museum/Art Resource, NY. Fig. 4.33. Courtesy National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC. Fig. 4.35. © Trustees of the British Museum/Art Resource, NY. Fig. 4.39. Barney Tobey/The New Yorker Collection/The Cartoon Bank. Fig. 4.40. Erich Lessing/Art Resource, NY. Fig. 4.42. Erik Gould. Courtesy of the Museum of Art, Rhode Island School of Design, Providence. Fig. 4.48. Courtesy National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC. Fig. 4.52. © Dea/Veneranda Biblioteca Ambrosiana/Art Resource, NY. Fig. 4.54. bpk Bildagentur/Kupferstichkabinett, Staatliche Museen, Berlin, Germany/Joerg P. Anders/Art Resource, NY. Fig. 4.56. © The Art Institute of Chicago. Fig. 4.58. Digital image courtesy of the Getty’s Open Content Program. Fig. 4.60. © Rheinisches Bildarchiv Köln, Photo, rba_132747. Fig. 4.62. © The Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge.

Fig. 4.63. © Worcester Art Museum. Fig. 4.64. Digital image courtesy of the Getty’s Open Content Program. Figs. 4.65, 4.66. © Musée du Louvre, Dist. RMN-­Grand Palais/Suzanne Nagy/Art Resource, NY. Fig. 4.67. © Trustees of the British Museum/Art Resource, NY. Fig. 5.1. © Marie-­Lan Nguyen/Wikimedia Commons. CC BY 2.5 (Unported): https://creativecommons.org/licenses/ by/2.5/legalcode. Fig. 5.5. De Agostini Picture Library/A. De Gregorio/Bridgeman Images. Fig. 5.7. Scala/Art Resource, NY. Fig. 5.11. The Detroit Institute of Arts, USA/Bridgeman Images. Fig. 5.13. © The Museum of Fine Arts, Budapest/Scala/Art Resource, NY. Fig. 5.14. Royal Collection Trust/© Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II 2009. Fig. 5.18. © RMN-­Grand Palais/Art Resource, NY. Fig. 5.23. © Anagoria/Wikimedia Commons. CC BY 3.0: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/legalcode. Fig. 5.26. © National Gallery, London/Art Resource, NY. Fig. 5.27. © Rheinisches Bildarchiv Köln, Wolfgang F. Meier, rba_d032906_01. Fig. 5.28. Scala/Art Resource, NY. Fig. 5.29. Mondadori Portfolio/Electa/Sergio Anelli/Bridgeman Images. Fig. 5.30. Italy/Bridgeman Images. Fig. 5.31. © Sailko (Francesco Bini)/Wikimedia Commons. CC BY 3.0: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/ legalcode. Fig. 5.35. Lindenau Museum, Altenburg, Germany/Bildarchiv Foto Marburg/Bridgeman Images. Fig. 5.37. Scala/Art Resource, NY. Fig. 5.38. © Stefano Baldini/Bridgeman Images. Fig. 5.39. With permission of The Ministry of Cultural Heritage and Activities and Tourism, Museums of Emilia Romagna (Ministero dei Beni e delle Attività Culturali e del Turismo, Polo Museale Emilia Romagna). Fig. 5.41. © Trustees of the British Museum/Art Resource, NY. Figs. 6.1–­6.4. © The Metropolitan Museum of Art. Image source: Art Resource, NY. Fig. 8.1. © Wellcome Library, London. CC BY 4.0 Interna­tio­nal: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/ by/4.0/legalcode.

I n de x

Boldface page numbers refer to images of artworks. Aeschylus, 176 Alain of Lille, 198n35 Alberti, Cherubino, Florentine Pietà (after Michelangelo), 11, 153, 202n24 Alberti, Leon Battista, 71–72, 75, 143, 145, 197n20 Alciati, Andrea, Emblemata, “Matrimonium,” 157, 159 Aldegrever, Heinrich: Lot and His Daughters, 13; Sofinisba Drinking Poison, 116; Susanna and the Elders, 117 Ambrose, Saint, 20 Andrea di Bartolo, 166, 207n83 Andrew of Crete, Saint, 27, 187n13 Anne, Saint, with the Virgin and Child, iconography of, 30–31, 31–32, 77, 78, 191nn57–58 Antonello da Messina, Dead Christ Supported by an Angel, 74 Antoninus, Saint, 122, 149 Apesos, Anthony, 98 Aphrodite Kuorotrophe, 115 Apostolos, Diana, 98 Aquinas, Saint Thomas, 182, 198n35 Arcangelo di Cola, 207n83 Ares Ludovisi, 199n11 Aretino, Pietro, 6, 61, 85, 157, 187n6, 187n10 Aristophanes, The Clouds, 99 Arundel, Earl of (Thomas Howard), 92–93, 95 Augustine, Saint, 20, 68, 87, 122, 149, 189n32 Aureus of Herennia Etruscilla, 140 Austrian School, Trinity with Christ Crucified, 77 Balbulus, Notker, 40 Baldovinetti, Alesso, 191n56, 192n64 Bandinelli, Baccio: Adam and Eve, 1, 62, 62; The News Brought to Olympus, 47; self-portrait, 49 Barbé, Jean-Baptiste, Madonna and Child (after Francken the Younger), 24 Bartoli, Cassandra di Cosimo, 173 Bartoli, Pietro Santi, Admiranda romanarum antiquitatum ac veteris sculpturae . . . , 175, 175 Bartolomeo, Fra, Pala di Sant’Anna, 31, 32 Bartsch, Adam von, 47 Bathsheba, 115, 117–18 Bell, Charles, 194n89 Bellavia, Marcantonio, Pensieri diversi lineati (after Carracci), 50 Bellini, Giovanni, Pietà, 65, 65, 74, 86, 192n66, 198n36

Bellini, Jacopo, Lamentation and Descent from the Cross, 64 Bellori, Giovanni Pietro, 175, 175 Bening, Simon, Christ Child Surrounded by the Instruments of the Passion, 126–27, 126 Berenson, Bernard, 205n53 Bernardino of Siena, Saint, 22, 71, 75, 88, 144, 187n13, 190n39, 204n41 Bernard of Clairvaux, Saint, 71, 138, 189n28, 190n39, 204n31 Bershad, David L., 201n10 Bertano, Pietro (bishop of Fano), 49 Bible moralisée, 190n46 Bicci di Lorenzo, 192n59 Bielecki, Czesław, 99 Binck, Jacob, 207n75 Bois, Yve-Alain, 185n6 Bolswert, Schelte à, Madonna and Child (after Parmigianino), 23–24, 24 Bonasone, Giulio: Loves of the Gods, 48; Pietà (after Michelangelo), 2, 5; Pietà (after Raphael), 80; Pietà for Vittoria Colonna (after Michelangelo), 41, 193n70; sarcophagus, 208n48; Saturn and Philyra (after Giulio Romano), 15, 15, 47; Venus and Adonis, 16 Bonaventure, Saint, 122 Bonifazio de’ Pitati, Lot and His Daughters, 47 Book of Kells, 109 Borghini, Raffaello, 95 Botticelli, Sandro: Trinity, 191n56; Venus and Mars, 1, 3 Boulenger, Jules-César, 195n98 Brancusi, Constantin, The Kiss, 96, 97, 97 Breu, Jörg (the Younger), Susanna and the Elders, 117 Brilliant, Richard, 153 Brodsky, Isaak Israilevich, Vladimir Lenin at Smolnyi, 113 Brown, Peter, 204n39 Browne, Thomas, vii Brunacci, Alessandra di Brunaccio, 173 Bugiardini, Giuliano: Madonna and Child with St. John, 165; Mystic Marriage of St. Catherine with St. Anthony of Padua and the Young St. John, 165 Burckhardt, Jacob, 102, 199n5 Bush, George H. W., 111–12 Butinone, Bernardino, Pietà, 205n43 Calcagni, Tiberio, 19, 21, 135, 189n35 Callistratus (Sophist), 53, 54–55 Cambiaso, Luca, 203n28; Mystic Marriage of St. Catherine, 23, 24; Venus Lamenting the Death of Adonis (copy by G. M. Le Villain), 18–19, 18

in dex [222]

Campi, Giulio, Jupiter and Callisto, 13, 14 Canossa, Simone da, 171 Canticles. See Song of Songs Caraglio, Jacopo, Neptune and Thetis (after Perino del Vaga), 16, 47 Caravaggio, Michelangelo Merisi da, 109; Entombment, 73, 74 Carracci, Agostino, 188n22 Carracci, Annibale: Landscape with Diana and Callisto, 188n22; Pensieri diversi lineati (copy by Bellavia), 50; Pietà, 9, 187n14 Cavalieri, Tommaso de’, 173 Cavell, Stanley, xii Cellini, Benvenuto, 54–55 Chandler, Richard, 93 Charles V (Holy Roman Emperor), 62, 95 Christ: as bridegroom, 19, 25–26, 141–45 (see also Mary, Virgin: as bride of Christ); two natures of, xiii, 19, 25, 72–73, 75, 88, 102, 128, 137, 143, 151 Chrysologus, Saint Peter, 53 Cicognara, Leopoldo, 54, 194n89, 195n98 Cimabue, Enthroned Madonna, 161 Clarac, Comte de (Charles Othon Frédéric Jean-Baptiste), 93 Clement VII (pope), 173 Clement of Rome, Saint, 200n24 Clio (Roman copy of Hellenistic sculpture), 90, 93, 93 Clovio, Giulio, Madonna and Child with Saints, 101–2, 101 Coburg School, Pietà, 8 Cologne School, Enthroned Madonna, 161 Colombo, Realdo, 180–81; De re anatomica, 181 Colonna, Vittoria, 39, 43 Condivi, Ascanio, 7, 86–87, 121, 177, 180, 203n30 Coppola, Edward, 181 Correggio, Antonio da, 192n59, 193n84 Cossa, Francesco, Pala dei Mercanti, 35, 192n62 Crivelli, Carlo: Lamentation, 144, 145; Pietà, 144, 205n43 Crosby, William H., 72 crossed legs. See Michelangelo, symbolic gestures Currin, John, 96 Cyprian, Saint (bishop of Carthage), 186n2 Cyril, Saint (archbishop of Jerusalem), 51 Daddi, Bernardo, Madonna and Child, 162 D’Amico, Rosalba, 165 d’Angoulême, Jacques, 54, 195n96, 195n97 Daniele da Volterra, 21, 54 Dante Alighieri, x, 41, 197n13 Daumier, Honoré, Ah! Séductrice tu frottes la bosse à Mayeux, 111, 111 Davent, Léon, Holy Family (after Parmigianino), 36 David (king of Israel), 115 Davies, Robertson, 98 de Bisschop, Jan, Signorum veterum icones, 92, 92 de Bray, Salomon, 200n15 Degas, Edgar, 207n77 de Gheyn, Jacques, II: Crossbowman Assisted by a Milkmaid, 12; Man and Witch Seated on a Monster, 188n21 de Gheyn, Jacques, III, 92–93 de Kooning, Willem, 96 della Bella, Stefano, Diverses têtes et figures, 110 della Robbia, Giovanni, workshop of, Pietà, 66 Dempsey, Charles, 132, 135, 136 Derveni krater, 17–18, 17

Desiderio da Settignano, Tomb of Carlo Marsuppini, 81, 82 de Villers, Traviès, Ah! Séductrice tu frottes la bosse à Mayeux (after Daumier), 111 Diana (princess of Wales), 99 Dickens, Charles, vii Digby Mystery Play, Christ’s Burial and Resurrection, 49 Discobolos, 48–49 Domenico di Michelino, Holy Trinity with Saints, 28 Donatello, 6 Durandus, Guglielmus, 138, 146–47 Dürer, Albrecht, 192n67, 193n69 Edgerton, Samuel Y., Jr., 201n30 El Greco (Doménikos Theotokópoulos), 202n24 Eliot, George, Middlemarch, 99 Emeric-David, Toussaint-Bernard, 195n98 Ephraim Syrus, Saint, 189n32 Erasmus of Rotterdam, 198n35 Euripides, 175–76 Eutychides, Tyche of Antioch, 93, 94, 115 Ezekiel, Prophet (Virgin as closed gate), 121–24, 123, 124, 126, 149 Febo di Poggio, 173 Fehl, Philipp, 132, 135, 156 Ferrara School, Portrait of a Gentleman and a Lady, 160 filiation (manifest filiation). See Michelangelo, symbolic gestures Flaminio, Marcantonio, 49–50 Flinck, Govaert, Lovers, 12 Florentine School, Pietà, 142 Florman, Lisa, 186n19 Francesca di Neri di Miniato del Sera, 170, 173 Francesco, Pseudo-Jacopino di, Pietà, 142, 204n39 Francia, Francesco, Pietà, 65 Franciabigio, 192n63 Francken, Frans (the Younger), Madonna and Child, 24 Frazer, James G., 100 French School, St. Barbara, 79 Freud, Sigmund, 151, 155, 172 Gaddi, Taddeo, Entombment, 141–42, 142, 145 Galen of Pergamon, 181 Gallonio, Antonio, 198n35 Gamelin, Jacques, Nouveau recueil d’ostéologie, 113, 113 Garofalo, Il (Benvenuto Tisi), 192n63 Garth, Helen M., 49, 51, 53 Gerhard, Hubert, Tarquin and Lucrece, 18, 18 Gerini, Niccolò di Pietro, Pietà, 143 Ghirlandaio, Ridolfo, 191n56 Ghisi, Adamo, 2, 5 Giotto, 69 Giovanni da Milano, Pietà, 68 Giovanni di Francesco Toscani, 207n83 Giovanni di Paolo, Madonna and Child with Saints, 164, 166 Girolamo dai Libri, Madonna and Child with St. Anne, 78, 192n60 Giulio Romano: Madonna and Child with St. John, 23; Saturn and Philyra, 15, 192n63 Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von, 146–47, 172 Gohr, Siegfried, 205n47

index Goldscheider, Ludwig, 188n19 Goltzius, Hendrik, 21–22 Gombrich, Ernst, xi, xiii–xiv, 149 Gossaert, Jan: Adam and Eve, 46–47; Hercules and Dejanira, 46–47 Gotti, Aurelio, 197n26 Goujon, Jean, 195n97 Gozzoli, Benozzo: Madonna and Child Enthroned with Saints, 34, 192n62; St. Anne, the Madonna, and Child, 32 Granacci, Francesco, 191n56; Trinity, 30 Greenstein, Jack, 150 Gregory the Great, Saint, 25, 53, 71, 187n13 Hals, Frans, 207n77 hand on shoulder motif. See Michelangelo, symbolic gestures Harrison, Jane, 188n24 Hartt, Frederick, 132, 133, 136–37, 146, 152, 167, 173, 196n106, 201n3, 202–3n25 Healy, George, Abraham Lincoln, 112 Helbig, Wolfgang, 93 Helvidius, 121 Hercules, 99–100, 191n52 Hibbard, Howard, 201n3 Hill, Dorothy Kent, 191n52 Hirn, Yrjo, 189n32 Hogenberg, Nicolas, The Patriarchs (after Titian), 77, 78 Holod, Renata, 98 Homer: Iliad, 186n2; Odyssey, 114 Honnecourt, Villard de, 109 Honorius of Autun, 25, 122, 139–40 Howard, Thomas (Earl of Arundel). See Arundel, Earl of (Thomas Howard) Hugh of Saint Cher, 189n32 Huygens, Constantijn (the Elder), 199n6 Huygens, Constantijn (the Younger), 199n6 Isenbrandt, Adriaen, The Crucifixion, 50, 51 Italian School, A Man and His Wife, 160 Jacopo di Cione, Trinity, 77 Jacques, Pierre, 195n96 Jahn, Johannes, 197n16 Jameson, Anna, 205n53 Jerome, Saint, 121–22, 200n26 Jovinian, 121 Joyce, James, vii, 146, 193n82 Julian of Norwich, 89 Julius II (pope), 173, 177 Kipling, Rudyard, 155 Klaczko, Julian, 194n89 Koons, Jeff, 96 Krauss, Rosalind, 186n13 Krug, Ludwig, Fall of Man, 159 La Cava, Francesco, 181–82 Lamentatyon of Mary Magdaleyne, The, 49 Lanino, Bernardino, 193n84 Lasinio, Giovanni Paolo, Venus and Adonis (after Pompeian painting), 8

Lastman, Pieter, 48 Lawrence, D. H., 198n39 Legendre, Nicolas, Pietà, 81 Leonardo da Vinci: drapery studies, 34, 36; Last Supper, 146; Madonna and Child with St. Anne, 31, 34, 35 Leo the Great, Saint, 151, 206n57 Le Villain, G. M., Venus Lamenting the Death of Adonis (after Luca Cambiaso), 18 Liberale da Verona, 207n85 Liebert, Robert S., 132, 134–35, 170–78, 208n2 Life of St. Mary Magdalen, 49 Lippi, Filippo, Madonna and Child with Angels, 140, 163, 165 Lomazzo, Giovanni Paolo, 72, 75 Longus, Daphnis and Chloe, 49 Lorenzetti, Pietro, Madonna and Child, 161, 163 Lorenzetto (Lorenzo Lotti), 1, 4, 84–85 Lotto, Lorenzo, 192n63, 207n77 Lower Rhenish School, Nativity with Moses, Aaron, Gideon, and Ezekiel, 124 Lubac, Henri de, 57 Luca di Tommè, 192n60 Luini, Bernardino, Lamentation, 145 Luther, Martin, 198n35 Lycurgus Painter, Ransom of the Body of Hector, 108, 108 Lyons Bible, Madonna and Child, 25, 26 Macrino d’Alba, 207n85 Madonna. See Mary, Virgin Maestro di Santa Verdiana, 204n39 Magdalen, Mary, 19–20, 49–53, 50, 51, 117, 118, 129–30, 132, 133, 139, 153 Mâle, Émile, 75 Mantegna, Andrea, 192n64; Dead Christ, 86, 198n36; school of, Sacra Conversazione, 33, 33 Mariotto di Cristofano, 204n39 Martin I (pope), 200n23 Martini, Simone, 166, 201n31 Marx brothers, 48 Mary, Virgin: as bride of Christ, 7–8, 19, 26–27, 87–89; as closed gate, 121–26 (see also Christ: as bridegroom); as couch, 71; as Ecclesia, the Church, 7–8, 25–26, 43, 80, 87–88, 139; as Ever-Virgin, 120–22 (see also Michelangelo, symbolic gestures: crossed legs); as mother-daughter-bride, 7, 88, 149; youth of (Roman Pietà), 6, 7, 83–87, 89 Mary Magdalen. See Magdalen, Mary Masaccio, Trinity, 86, 198n36 Master E. S., Lamentation, 76 Master I. A. M. of Zwolle, Madonna and Child, 192n62 Master I. B. with the Bird, The Faun Family, 47, 47 Master of the Housebook: Solomon’s Idolatry, 159; Young Man with Death, 158 Master of the Wolfgang Altar, Epitaph of Friedrich Schön, 124 Matilda of Canossa (Countess of Tuscany), 171 Maurus, Rabanus, 20, 49 Mechelen, St. Anne, the Madonna, and Child, 79 Melian, Return of Odysseus, 114 Melone, Altobello, 207n77 Metaphrastes, Simeon, 197n22 Métral, Denyse, 54 Michaelis, Adolf, 93, 199n12

[223]

in dex [224]

Michelangelo —copies after, viii, xiii; Florentine Pietà, 11, 11; Pietà for Vittoria Colonna, 39–40, 40, 41, 41; Roman Pietà, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5–6, 6, 7, 61–63, 82, 83, 84–85, 86, 197n29 —symbolic gestures: crossed legs, 97–101, 100, 107–9, 107–19, 111–15, 117–19, 121–24, 123, 124, 126 (see also —works: Medici Madonna under this heading); hand on shoulder (appropriation, possession-taking, nuptial symbol), 23–24, 24, 128, 138, 141–46, 142–45, 157–58, 157–66, 161, 163, 165–66; manifest filiation (issuance, birth), 28–34, 28–37, 37, 147; slung leg (nuptial symbol), 11–18, 12–13, 15, 17–19, 22–24, 23–25, 46–48, 46–47, 132–39, 146, 151, 156–57 (see also —works: Florentine Pietà under this heading); velation (bridal symbol), 140, 140, 141 —works: Bruges Madonna, 33, 33, 37, 147–48; David, 167, 172, 182–83; David-Apollo, 104, 105; Day (Il Giorno), 96–97, 98; Descent from the Cross, 51, 52; Doni Madonna, 148–49, 148, 173; Epiphany (Epifania), 37, 37, 149; Florentine Pietà, 9–22, 10, 11, 43, 47, 48–49, 53, 56, 87, 129–39, 131, 147, 151–57, 180; Lamentation, 166; Madonna and Child (drawings), 26, 27; Manchester Madonna, 172, 172; Medici Madonna, xiii, 27–28, 90, 91–95, 96–97, 97, 101, 102, 103–5, 104, 106, 107, 119–21, 126–28, 127, 149, 153–54, 161, 186n13, 190n42; Palestrina Pietà, 56, 167; Pietà for Vittoria Colonna, 38, 39–41, 43, 49, 149; Risen Christ, 147, 147; Roman Pietà, 1–9, 2–6, 49, 58, 59, 60, 61–73, 66, 67, 73, 75, 75, 78–83, 82, 83, 84–87, 86, 88, 101, 102–3, 121, 136, 169; Rondanini Pietà, 42–45, 43, 46, 149, 153; Sistine Chapel, 177; Sistine Chapel: Ancestors, 172, 208n2; Sistine Chapel: Creation of Adam, 154, 174, 178; Sistine Chapel: Expulsion of Adam and Eve, xiv, 176; Sistine Chapel: Jeremiah, 105, 105; Sistine Chapel: Last Judgment, 5–6, 149–51, 150, 176, 178, 181–82; Sleeping Cupid, 172; Taddei Tondo, xiv, 22, 23, 174–75, 174; Tomb of Julius II, 173, 190n41; Young Archer (Fifth Avenue Cupid), disattribution of, 167, 168, 169 Michiel, Marcantonio, 95, 199n13 Mignon, Jean: Descent from the Cross (after Luca Penni), 40; Women Bathing (after Luca Penni), 13, 14 Milizia, Francesco, 7, 63, 80 Milton, John, vii, 100 Molanus, Johannes, 151–52, 206n59 Monaco, Lorenzo, Madonna and Saint John with the Man of Sorrows, 143 Montfaucon, Bernard de, 175 Montorsoli, Giovanni: Pietà (after Michelangelo), 1, 4, 61–62; Saint Cosmas, 104 Moretto da Brescia, 193n84 Murray, Linda, 202n10 Musurillo, Herbert A., 190n39 Nanni di Baccio Bigio, Pietà (after Michelangelo), 1, 2, 5, 6, 7, 62, 85 Neapolitan School, Madonna and Dead Christ, 69 Neri di Bicci, 191n56 Niccolò di Bartolomeo Pisano, Holy Family and Saints, 125, 126 Nicolson, Benedict, 132–33 Nuvolone, Carlo Francesco, Susanna and the Elders, 117, 118 Odo of Cluny, Saint, 53 Odysseus. See Penelope Oedipus Painter, Oedipus and the Sphinx, 107 Origen, 144 Overly, Norris, 99 Ovid, Metamorphoses, 99–100

Pacheco, Francisco, 119, 200n18 Pallucchini, Rodolfo, 91 Panofsky, Erwin, xi, 139, 175, 188n24, 197n22 Paolo di Giovanni Fei, Madonna and Child Enthroned, 163, 166 Parmigianino: Holy Family (engraved by Master L. D.), 36, 192n63; Madonna and Child, 23, 24, 166; Madonna and Child (study for), 37 Parronchi, Alessandro, 132, 135–36, 156, 201n3 Parthenon, Hera and Zeus, 140 Pater, Walter, 167 Paul, Saint, 75, 186n2 Paul III (pope), 152 Paul IV (pope), 152, 157 Penelope (wife of Odysseus), 91, 92, 92, 114, 114, 154 Penni, Luca: Descent from the Cross, 40; Women Bathing, 13, 14 Perino del Vaga, 47; Neptune and Thetis, 16 Perugino, Pietro, Pietà, 64 Pesellino, Francesco, Trinity with Saints, 29, 40 Petrarch, 88, 149 Philostratus the Elder, 193n88 Philostratus the Younger, 53, 54 Picasso, Pablo, Les Demoiselles d’Avignon, xii Piero di Cosimo, 192n63 Pietà, iconography of, 6–7, 8–9, 38–40, 64–66, 65, 68, 68, 69, 70, 74, 75, 76, 80, 81, 83–84, 84, 85, 141–45, 142–45, 166 Pilon, Germain, 55 Piroli, Tommaso: Ecclesia (after Giulio Romano), 116; Pax (after Giulio Romano), 116 Plato, 112 Pliny the Elder, Natural History, 55, 100 Polidoro da Caravaggio, Two Seated Youths, 110 Pontormo, Jacopo da, 49, 192n64 Pope-Hennessy, John, 91, 129–30, 132, 136, 186–87n5, 190n41 Pourbus, Pieter, Allegory of True Love, 13 Poussin, Nicolas, 188n22 Prater, Andreas, 156 Prato Master, 192n62 Primaticcio, Francesco, Venus and Cupid, 23, 25 Pseudo-Jerome, Expositio in cantica canticorum, 25 Puligo, Domenico, 22, 192n63 Raffaello da Montelupo, Saint Damian, 104, 127, 201n32 Raimondi, Marcantonio, Mars and Venus, 159 Ramdohr, Friedrich von, 63, 67 Rancour-Laferriere, Daniel, 196n112 Raphael, 22, 166; Colonna Madonna, 207n83; Isaac fresco, 15, 47; Madonna del Granduca, 164; Pietà, 80; school of, Isaac and Rebecca Spied on by Abimelech, 15, 16, 17, 47; Trinity with Sts. Sebastian and Roch, 191n56 Rauschenberg, Robert, xi, xii Reinach, Salomon, 195n98 Rembrandt, 192n64; Bathsheba at Her Bath (Bathsheba with King David’s Letter), 117–18, 119 Reuther, Rosemary, 204n32 Riccio, Andrea: Satyr and Satyress, 46, 47; Satyr Uncovering a Nymph, 116 Rilke, Rainer Maria, 187–88n16 Ripa, Cesare, Iconologia, “Irresolution,” 111, 111 Roberti, Ercole, Pietà, 8

index Robetta, Cristofano: Allegory of Envy, 46; Man of Sorrows (after Schongauer), 70 Rochester, 2nd Earl of ( John Wilmot), “The Wish,” 56–57 Rodin, Auguste, xi; Christ and Mary Magdalen, 50, 50; Le Baiser, 48 Rohan Hours, Pietà, 76 Romanino, Girolamo, 207n77 Rosa, Salvator, The Academy of Plato, 112, 112 Rosso Fiorentino, 187n15 Rousseau, Victor, 202n10 Rubens, Peter Paul: Bathsheba Receiving David’s Letter, 118; Holy Family with Sts. Elizabeth and John the Baptist, 119, 119, 199n15; Penitent Magdalen and Martha, 118; Shepherd and Shepherdess, 47; Susanna and the Elders, 117–18, 118 Ruhmer, Eberhard, 207n85 Rupert of Deutz, 139 Ruskin, John, 194n89 Sabbatini, Lorenzo: Deposition (after Michelangelo), 11; Pietà, 202n24 Salamanca, Antonio, 1–2, 5, 85 Salzburg School, Pietà, 84 Sangallo, Francesca da, St. Anne, 32, 192n61 sarcophagi: Achilles Dragging the Body of Hector around the Walls of Troy, 115; Amazonomachy, 158; Annona, 158; Hector’s Body Returned to Troy, 71; L. Pullius Peregrinus, 108; Medea, 175–76, 208n18; Orestes, 176 Sarto, Andrea del, 22, 192n63, 207n77; Madonna and Child, 164, 166; Medici Holy Family, 23 Sassetta (Stefano di Giovanni), Madonna of Humility, 163 Savage, Edward, The Washington Family, 112 Savonarola, Girolamo, 26–27, 53, 56–57, 121, 187n10, 187n13, 189n28, 200n25 Scalza, Ippolito, 62 Scheeben, Matthias Joseph, 57 Schiller, Johann Cristoph Friedrich von, 146 Schongauer, Martin, Man of Sorrows, 69, 70 Schulz, Juergen, 91, 132, 133–34 Scotus, Adam, 150–51 Scultori, Adamo: Hercules at the Crossroads, 110, 111; Madonna and Child, 128 Scultori, Giovanni Battista, 128 Seated Girl (Roman copy), 93, 94 Sebastiano del Piombo, 146, 192n63, 207n77 Shakespeare, William, vii, 48, 192n64, 193n82, 203nn27–28, 205n45 Shearman, John, 48 Shiff, Richard, viii Shikegawa, Joan, 99 Shrimplin-Evangelidis, Valerie, 156–57 Signorelli, Francesco, 192n59 Signorelli, Luca, Coronation of the Virgin, 88, 89 Siricius, Saint (pope), 121 Sirikit (queen of Thailand), 99 slung-leg motif. See Michelangelo, symbolic gestures Smollett, Tobias, 186n1 Sodoma, Il (Giovanni Antonio Bazzi), 192n63 Song of Songs (Canticles), 7, 19, 24–26, 87–89, 139–41, 144, 152 Soye, Philippe de, 50 Spector, Jack, 129–30, 132, 134, 136, 202n23 Stammheim Missal, Nativity, 123 Stechow, Wolfgang, 189n31

Steen, Jan, The World Upside Down, 48 Steinberg, Ronald, 53 Sterba, Edith and Richard, 176 Sterne, Laurence, vii Stockade, Nicolaes van Helt, 200n15 Strasbourg School, Death of the Virgin, 88 Stubblebine, James, 91 Susanna, 117–18 Swift, Jonathan, vii Symonds, John Addington, 194n89 Tacha Spear, Athena, 132, 153–56, 202n10 Tarasius, Saint, 200n27 Thode, Henry, 53, 155–56, 188n18, 194n90 Thulden, Theodor van, Prodigal Son in a Brothel, 12 Tiarini, Alessandro, Annunciation, 140, 141 Tickhill Psalter: David before Saul, 110; David Spying on Bathsheba, 115 Tintoretto, Sacra Conversazione, 90, 91–92, 94–95, 119 Tissot, James, “How Happy I Could Be with Either,” 111, 111 Titian: Annunciation, 140, 141; The Patriarchs, 78; Portrait of Pope Paul III, 49 Titian follower, Mythological Scene, 47 Tobey, Barney, 113 Tolnay, Charles de, 19, 20, 28, 39, 46, 146, 152, 153, 191n53, 196n106, 201n10, 203n25 Tomb of the Shields (fresco from Tarquinia), 157 Torrigiani, Pietro, 172 Traini, Francesco, Madonna and Child with St. Anne, 31 Trinity (Throne of Grace, Gnadenstuhl), iconography of, 28–30, 28–30, 40, 75, 77, 77 Tura, Cosimo, 205n49, 206n58; Dead Christ Supported by Angels, 39; Madonna and Child, 192n62; Pietà, 85, 166 Ugolino di Nerio, 201n31 Urbino (Michelangelo’s servant), 21, 133, 134–35, 152 Valentiner, W. R., 188n18 Valeriano, Pierio, Hieroglyphica, “Impedimentum,” 100, 100 van der Weyden, Roger, Descent from the Cross, 48 van Dyck, Anthony, 207n77 van Leyden, Lucas: Betrothal, 207n77; David before Saul, 110 van Mander, Karel, 21–22 van Meckenem, Israhel, St. Anne, the Madonna, and Child, 78 van Merlen, Abraham, Madonna and Child, 26, 26 Varchi, Benedetto, 197n13 Vasari, Giorgio, 2, 7, 11, 20–22, 48, 72, 75, 85–88, 106, 133, 152, 156 Vázquez, Juan Bautista, Pietà (after Michelangelo), 85, 86 Veneziano, Agostino, The News Brought to Olympus, 47, 47 Veneziano, Domenico, Annunciation, 123–24, 125 Vesalius, Andreas, 181 Vigenère, Blaise de, 53–56 Virgin of Dom Rupert, 123 Vitale de Bologna, Madonna del Ricamo, 162, 163, 165, 166 Vittoria, Alessandro, Pietà, 61, 62 Viviani, Antonio, 188n19, 206n58 Volkmann, Johann Jakob, 196n7 von der Vogelweide, Walther, 109, 200n29 von Einem, Herbert, 63, 156, 188n18

[225]

in dex [226]

Vorsterman, Lucas, Susanna and the Elders (after Rubens), 118 Wallace, William, 197n29 Ward, Artemus, 202n18 Wasserman, Jack, 189n29, 189n35, 190n36, 193n73, 201n5 Weiditz, Hans, II, Pietà, 84 Weil-Garris Brandt, Kathleen, 196n1, 197n29 Wierix, Hieronymus, 207n84 Wilde, Johannes, 134, 201n10 Wilmot, John (2nd Earl of Rochester). See Rochester, 2nd Earl of ( John Wilmot)

Wilson, Charles Heath, 194n89 Witkowski, G. J., 72–73 Wittkower, Rudolf, 182, 186n5 Witz, Konrad, Pietà, 69 Wölfflin, Heinrich, 63, 81, 196n8 Xanto Avelli da Rovigo, Venus and Mars, 47 Zoppo, Marco, 192nn66–67, 205n49 Zuccaro, Federico, Artists Drawing in the Medici Chapel, 103, 103