by Jon Lackman | 28 January 2011 | Books, Renaissance
Among the new books I’ve received lately are two on Renaissance art written by distinguished scholars of literature: Michelangelo: A Life on Paper by Leonard Barkan and Blessed and Beautiful by Robert Kiely. I once took a graduate course on the Renaissance revival of antiquity with Barkan, a talented teacher who had us read classic art-historical texts by Gombrich, Panofsky, and Warburg, often in the original German. He was warm, witty and erudite. His classes felt like the best cocktail party you’d been to. His new Michelangelo book examines the interplay of words and and pictures in the artist’s papers. As he notes, a third of Michelangelo’s drawings contain text.
Sometimes, the underlying interconnections are curiously logical: a sheet on which he writes a poem concerning the difficulties of expressing his gratitude also contains the draft of a letter to the artist-biographer Giorgio Vasari reflecting the painful indebtedness Michelangelo felt for being dependent on Vasari for the building of the Laurentian Library, while next to the letter he has produced some tiny sketches of his preliminary ideas for the Library’s famous staircase. At other times, the connections are more difficult to plot: there is a sheet, for instance, on which we can trace his attempts to compose a poem concerning grief over the death of a loved one, but the writing is interrupted at a particularly painful moment in the metaphysical conceits of the verse; at this point, he apparently turns the sheet ninety degrees and produces a portrait of his own left hand, the index finger precisely touching the truncated problem spot in the rhyme.
Like Michelangelo, Blessed and Beautiful is “a book about the relationship of word and image, text and picture, imitation, invention, and interpretation,” to quote Kiely. He focuses on images of saints. In the Renaissance, he notes, they were not just beatified but beautified — they were central
to the celebration of and the pleasure in the human body … Storytellers, painters, and poets who have reflected on the lives (and bodies) of Christian saints have rarely avoided (or wished to avoid) the erotic elements intrinsic to their subjects … The artist shakes the dust off the halo and sometimes omits the halo altogether. The artist takes doctrine and text into consideration but knows that he has to work through and around them in order to touch a person, saint or sinner, model or spectator. Surprised, refreshed, intrigued, the reader returns to texts with a mind colored and to some extent shaped by pigments and forms inspired, but in no sense constrained, by script.
