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Drawing Christ’s Blood: Michelangelo, Vittoria Colonna, and the Aesthetics of Reform*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  20 November 2018

Una Roman D’Elia
Una Roman D’Elia*
Affiliation:
Queen’s University
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Abstract

This article discusses Michelangelo’s drawings for Vittoria Colonna in relation to poetry and prose by Michelangelo, Colonna, and their circle. It focuses on the intersection between debates about Church reform and the polemic about disegno (drawing or design) and colore (color or finish). Vittoria Colonna used the distinction between disegno and colore repeatedly in her spiritual poetry. In these and other writings, reform-minded thinkers did not offer consistent aesthetic and theological positions, but rather consciously articulated contradictions. Likewise, Michelangelo’s drawings for Vittoria Colonna display a strategy of deliberate paradox, in that they are highly colored black-and-white drawings of a tearless tearfulness and a bloodless bloodiness.

Type
Research Article
Information
Renaissance Quarterly , Volume 59 , Issue 1 , Spring 2006 , pp. 90 - 129
Copyright
Copyright © 2006 Renaissance Society of America

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Footnotes

*

I am grateful to Stephen Campbell and to the other, anonymous reviewer for Renaissance Quarterly, and to Creighton Gilbert, Lino Pertile, the late John Shearman, Stuart Lingo, Katherince MacDonald, and Anthony D’Elia for their invaluable assistance. Alexander Nagel was particularly generous in reading and responding in detail to an argument very much indebted to, but not entirely in agreement with, his own work on the subject. Unless otherwise noted, all translations are my own (though done with much assistance from Lino Pertile and Creighton Gilbert).

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