Drawing Christ's blood: Michelangelo, Vittoria Colonna, and the aesthetics of reform

Renaissance Quarterly, Spring, 2006 by Una Roman D'Elia

Intellectuals who associated with Michelangelo (1475-1564) were central to a burgeoning interest in art theory. One of the most well-known aesthetic questions of the day was the polemic over the relative importance of disegno (drawing or design) and colore (color or finish). (1) The same writers who discussed such issues were also caught up in debates about Church reform. These discourses intersect in the poetry of Vittoria Colonna (1490-1547), who is perhaps best known as the pious friend and patron of Michelangelo. Vittoria Colonna was connected to many of the intellectuals promulgating reform ideas in Italy. Although she also had close ties to artists, she could hardly be called an art critic. Indeed, her written responses to Michelangelo's art are often brief and have more to do with literary conventions than aesthetics. (2) Nevertheless, she uses the distinction between disegno and colore repeatedly in her spiritual poetry as a metaphor. These references have not been discussed by previous scholars.

In Michelangelo's drawings for Vittoria Colonna, aesthetics and reform spirituality are similarly intertwined. Two of these drawings survive, a Christ on the Cross (fig. 1) and a Pieta (fig. 2). (3) The Christ on the Cross and Pieta are obviously black chalk drawings, without color. They are made, however, with a carefully crafted colorito, which does not mean "coloring" so much as "finish." (4) In this case the strokes are so refined that they are invisible and suggest the softness of skin and the wandering curls of Christ's hair. Colonna praised this high degree of finish in Michelangelo's drawings. (5) As argued below, writings about disegno and colore in the Cinquecento carried with them a host of wider associations, many of which had moral and spiritual implications. Colorists (such as Flemish and Venetian painters) were known for their ability to paint tears and blood, while Michelangelo is reported to have disdained such a sentimental form of religiosity. Colore was thought to appeal to the emotions of a more vulgar audience than the intellectual rigors of disegno. The question, therefore, of the appropriate relationship between emotion and intellect in viewing art, and in meditating on the Passion through art, is connected to the disegno/colore controversy. Michelangelo's drawings for Vittoria Colonna have a particularly complex relationship to these theoretical debates, as they are finished but not colored drawings that show the most pathetic of subjects--Christ's abandonment on the Cross and the Virgin's mourning over her dead son--but with no tears and almost no blood.

Scholars have debated the attribution of these drawings and how they relate to the notoriously-difficult-to-interpret passages that seem to refer to them in the letters between Michelangelo and Vittoria Colonna. (6) Reinhold Haussherr and Emidio Campi studied the drawings as reflections of the theology of Vittoria Colonna and her reform-minded circles. (7) Alexander Nagel convincingly argued that the visual form of the Pieta was connected to reform, focusing on the notion of art (and the Grace of God) as a gift. (8) The very medium of the work, a presentation drawing, is thus an enactment of spiritual ideals. In Nagel's analysis, these ideals are also conveyed by an innovative fusion between narrative and the iconic imago pietatis (Man of Sorrows). His contention is not that formal innovation is a product of religious ideas, but rather that the two "converged" in these drawings, that the relationship between the claims of art and those of religious reform was "mutual." (9)

[FIGURE 1 OMITTED]

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This essay follows from Nagel's work in that it explores the interactions between the innovative aesthetics of the drawings and notions of religious reform. It offers, however, a different conclusion. One of Nagel's larger arguments is that in depictions of the dead Christ Michelangelo reacted against the tendency to emphasize Christ's suffering: "Removing the blotches of blood and the wounds from Christ's body like so many overpaintings and disfigurations, Michelangelo offered instead a pristine and radiant dead Christ based on the models of ancient sculpture." (10) Nagel posits that Michelangelo chose innovative aesthetic strategies to emphasize the transcendental, suprahistorical, and figural aspects of Christ's sacrifice. Nagel reads similar reform tendencies in Michelangelo's poems, Vittoria Colonna's writings, and the works of thinkers in their immediate circle. This essay argues, however, that Michelangelo's drawings, his poems, the writings of Vittoria Colonna, and reform thought in general exhibit a deep ambivalence toward the contemplation of Christ and Mary's suffering during the Passion. The suffering is both insisted upon to an unusual degree and denied, often in the same work. In some cases, this ambivalence could be subconscious, but in Michelangelo's drawings and Vittoria Colonna's poems, the notions of disegno and colore, faith in Salvation, and despair at the suffering of Christ are articulated and artfully juxtaposed, so that the tension between them animates the works. This study explores how paradox and ambiguity function as aesthetic and religious strategies in these closely related drawings and poems.