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

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

In another poem, Michelangelo describes the reactions of the faithful to Christ's torments:

  It no more grieved and vexed the chosen spirits
  than made them glad, that you, not they, had suffered
  death, and had thus reopened with your blood
  to earthly man the heavens' shuttered gates.
  Glad that you had redeemed him from the first
  sin of his wretched lot, whom you had made,
  grieved when they knew your torment, sore and hard,
  becoming on the cross servant of servants.
  Of who and whence you were Heaven gave such sign
  that it darkened its eyes, split earth apart,
  made mountains tremble and the waters churn,
  snatched the great fathers from the shadowy zone,
  the ugly angels drove to greater hurt,
  and only man rejoiced, baptized, reborn. (73)

Here, the theme is dual--the pain of the Crucifixion and the sadness that it inspires, and the Salvation of the Crucifixion and the joy that it brings. Michelangelo focuses on Christ's blood and suffering, but from the beginning makes it clear that the faithful should not simply mourn for Christ, but should feel a balance of opposite emotions. Again, the difficulty in disentangling Michelangelo's syntax suggests the complexity of faith, with its infinite paradoxes. He sets up the contrast in the first line and emphasizes it by repeating the terms "Lieti" and "tristi" and the beginning of the fifth and seventh lines. He then focuses on the horror of the Crucifixion until the last line, which concludes with rejoicing. Here Michelangelo dramatizes the conflict that is latent in the Beneficio di Cristo between different ways of meditating on the Passion.

The mourning angels in Michelangelo's drawing can also be related to problematic passages in the writings of his circle. Ochino preached that the angels rejoiced at Christ's death. (74) Vittoria Colonna wrote a sonnet about the angels' mourning. (75) Even the angels, who can see God and therefore the plan of Salvation, are so horrified that they would rather die than have Christ suffer. In his 1558 commentary on this poem, Rinaldo Corso (1525-82?) felt that Vittoria Colonna's theology was in need of defense: "This [angels' mourning] seems impossible, because angels are blessed, and beyond any passion, but nevertheless Bernard, in the place in which he speaks of the lament of the Virgin, affirmed it for the following reason. Just as it was possible that God made himself man and died, so it was possible that the angels in the hour of that death felt pain." (76) The angels' mourning is an expression of the fundamental paradox of Christ's humanity, suffering, and death. These angels seem to have been important to Vittoria Colonna, as in a letter to Michelangelo she singled them out for praise. (77) Michelangelo's mourning angels gesticulate, but do not seem to shed tears, just as Christ sheds little blood.

Michelangelo's drawing of Christ on the Cross embodies the tensions in reform circles between a focus on physical suffering and a more intellectualized meditation. In his poetry and in this drawing, he emphasizes this tension as an aesthetic strategy by making an image that is both fleshy and bloodless, both colorless and minutely finished. It is also surely a religious strategy, in that the emphasis on paradox points to a higher truth, a learned ignorance (to paraphrase Ochino) not accessible to earthly understanding. Corso also refers to the lament of the Virgin, another moment of pathos that was much debated in Michelangelo's circle, and is the subject of Michelangelo's other surviving drawing for Vittoria Colonna.