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Michelangelo as a Baroque Poet

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  02 December 2020

Robert J. Clements
Robert J. Clements*
Affiliation:
New York University, New York 3
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Extract

Michelangelo Buonarroti's influence upon baroque sculpture is now widely recognised by historians. Ever since that morning in 1506 when he and the Sangalli, father and son, watched the white Pentelic marble of the Laokoön emerge from the farmland of Felice de Freddis near the Baths of Titus, Michelangelo's restless mind found authority in antiquity for a revision of his aesthetic canons. In this agonising group Michelangelo found justification for moving beyond the symmetry, restraint, and proportione divina of the Donatellian mode of sculpture, the static scientism of Da Vinci's painting, and the Vitruvian rules of architecture—even though he paid lip service to those rules and even recited them to popes. Whereas Michelangelo did not acknowledge this influence in writing, or apparently in speaking, his contorted and anguished Haman (1511–12) on the spandrel of the Sistine Vault was an admission of the influence of this Rhodian group —just as El Greco's newly-restored Laokoön in Washington acknowledges it as the one work of art which initiated European baroque. Moreover, the anguishes of the Vatican Laokoön and the expressions thereof were to parallel those tensions—visible even in his death mask—of Michelangelo's own soul and to leave an imprint upon his poetry. Laokoön, it should be remembered in view of his impact upon European baroque, was a militant, ritualistic priest.

Type
Research Article
Information
PMLA , Volume 76 , Issue 3 , June 1961 , pp. 182 - 192
Copyright
Copyright © Modern Language Association of America, 1961

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References

Note 1 in page 182 Ernst Steinmann and Rudolf Wittkower, Michelangelo Bibliographie (Leipzig, 1927). In discussing the difference between the Pietà in Saint Peter's and the Deposition of the Florentine Duomo Charles Morgan declares “The one group may be called the climax of the Early Renaissance, the other an introduction to the Baroque, a period which Michelangelo before all others forced into being.” The Life of Michelangelo (New York, 1960), p. 229.

Note 2 in page 182 Carl Frey, Die Dichktn^en des Michelagniolo Buonarroti (Berlin, 1897), poem cix, 79. All poems hereafter in the body of the text will be identified by the number assigned to them in Frey.

Note 3 in page 182 Helmut Hatzfeld, “Baroque Style: Ideology and the Arts,” Bucknell Review, vii, 2 (December 19S7), p. 71.

Note 4 in page 182 Valerio Mariani, La poesia di Michelangelo (Rome, 1941); N. Façon, Michelangelo Poet (Bucharest, 1939).

Note 5 in page 182 Helmut Hatzfeld, “LTtalia, la Spagna e la Francia nello sviluppo del Barocco letterario,” in La critica stilistica e il Barocco letterario (Florence, 1957), p. 214.

Note 6 in page 182 Giorgio Vasari, Le Vite (Florence, 1878–82), vii, 280.

Note 7 in page 183 Still most useful is René Wellek, “The Concept of Baroque in Literary Scholarship,” Journal of Aesthetics, v (1946), pp. 77–109, with its full bibliography.

Note 8 in page 183 Michelangelo's interest in Brutus and the parallels with Judas are recorded in Donato Giannotti, Dialoghi de' giorni die Dante consuma nel cercare PInferno e 'I Purgatorio (Florence, 1939).

Note 9 in page 184 Giovanni Papini, Vita di Michelangiolo nella vita del suo tempo (Milan, 1949), pp. 126–127.

Note 10 in page 184 Cesare Guasti edition of the Rime (Florence, 1863), p. xl.

Note 11 in page 184 Francisco de Hollanda, Dialogos em Roma (Porto, 1930), pp. 235–236.

Note 12 in page 185 Ceriello edition of the Rime (Milan, Rizzoli, 1954), p. 276.

Note 13 in page 186 See note 10 above.

Note 14 in page 188 So called by Odette de Mourgues, Metaphysical, Baroque and Précieux Poetry (Oxford, 1953), p. 85, where other baroque treatments of the theme are discussed.

Note 15 in page 189 Helmut Hatzfeld, “A Clarification of the Baroque Problem in the Romance Literatures,” Comparative Literature, Spring 1949, pp. 128–129.

Note 16 in page 190 Flights to Venice (1529) and Bologna (1494) resulted from this panic; in the latter case, two dreams of Andrea Cardiere started Michelangelo off: Milanesi, Leilere di Micltelangelo Buonarroti (Florence, 1875), p. 457 and Condivi, Vita, sec. xiv.

Note 17 in page 190 These admissions by Michelangelo are reproduced in the Girardi edition of the Rime (Bari, 1960), pp. 356, 410.

Note 18 in page 190 El mdgico prodigioso, iii, 21–24.

Note 19 in page 191 Austin Warren, Richard Crashaw (Ann Arbor, 1957), pp. 81–90.

Note 20 in page 191 Margaret MacLean, “The Horns on Michelangelo's Moses,” Art and Archeology, vi (August, 1917) 97–99.

Note 21 in page 192 Quoted in De Mourgues, p. 84.

Note 22 in page 192 “Una visione del Buonarroti,”Il Buonarroti, iv (April 1866) 103.