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

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

Nevertheless, the authors of this treatise do not offer vivid ekphrases of Christ's torments, but rather interpretations, in line with Ochino's demands for intellectual understanding. Even more than Michelangelo's drawings, the Beneficio di Cristo is strangely bloodless. Christ's blood is invoked repeatedly as the only guarantee of Salvation. The hearts of the faithful are supposed to be "drunk" with his blood, but the tract does nothing to induce such fervor. (43) The torments of the Passion are only mentioned, never described with any emotion. (44) This is far from the vivid expositions in popular devotional handbooks. Ambrogio Catarino (1484-1553), however, in his tract accusing the Beneficio of heresy, argued that the book was particularly insidious because it was popular. (45) He said that it was meant to appeal to weak women and children with its sweet and deceptively simple ideas about faith. These remarks are reminiscent of the criticisms of the popular surface charm of colore. Here the contradiction seems to be the fruit of a somewhat awkward struggle to express a new type of religious sentiment which is neither abstract and philosophical, nor popular and sentimental.

3. A VIRTUALLY BLOODLESS CHRIST ON THE CROSS

As Ascanio Condivi (1525-74) noted, Michelangelo chose to depict an unusual moment in the Christ on the Cross: "He made also for her [Vittoria Colonna's] love a drawing of a Christ on the Cross, not seeming to be dead, as is commonly done, but with the action of a living man, with his face raised up to the Father, because he was saying, 'Eli, eli,' in which you see his body not falling like an abandoned dead body, but like a living man feeling the harsh torment and writhing." (46) The "Eli, Eli," is Christ's lament on the Cross: "My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?" (47) Giorgio Vasari (1511-74) wrote that Michelangelo showed Christ commending his soul to God, a much less disturbing moment and one that seems to accord less well with the violence of the drawing. (48) In his engraving of this composition Giulio Bonasone (ca. 1510-ca. 1576) added an inscription that reads "in your hands, Lord," as well as a halo, crown of thorns, and other traditional attributes not included in the drawing, perhaps to make it more palatable for publication (fig. 3). (49) Michelangelo's drawing, in contrast, includes no such comforting symbolism, but instead offers an unmitigated image of Christ's suffering.

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As Condivi suggested, almost all fifteenth- and sixteenth-century Italian artists showed Christ dead on the Cross (fig. 4). Artists of the High Renaissance tended to emphasize Christ's divinity by endowing his body with a classical beauty and calm, and so minimized the appearance of suffering. Michelangelo's Christ has the muscles of a classical hero, but his body bends into a complex three-dimensional spiral, which is released--possibly in imitation of the Laocoon--in the upturned ecstatic head, contracted brow, parted lips, and rolling eyes. (50) The Cross is barely drawn, a flat symbol, and the angels are so lightly sketched that some scholars have doubted their authenticity. (51) Christ, however, is shaded with dark pockets of shadow that convey bulging muscles, executed with the finest technique so that the shadows seem more like a finely stippled mist than strokes of chalk. (Vittoria Colonna reported that she examined one of these drawings with a magnifying glass and found it wonderfully finished. (52)) This soft, fleshy colorito, added to the muscular disegno, gives the figure an almost sensual aspect, emphasized by the diaphanous veil slipping off his hips. (53)