Michelangelo and the Reform of Art & Painting in Renaissance Florence, 1500-1550

ALEXANDER NAGEL

Michelangelo and the Reform of Art Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000. 320 pp.; 105 b/w ills. $80.00

DAVID FRANKLIN

Painting in Renaissance Florence, 1500-1550

New Haven: Yale University Press, 2001. 272 pp.; 80 color ills., 140 b/w. $55.00

If we are accustomed to thinking that the "reform of art" in Italy began with academic, anti-Mannerist programs of study, with post Tridentine attacks on artistic license, or even with more direct Catholic responses to Protestant dissent, Alexander Nagel's debut book will prove provocative. The book not only focuses on Michelangelo, the artist against whose example such reformist critics as Ambrogio Cattarino, Giovanni Andrea Gilin da Fabriano, and Federico Borromeo all inveighed, but also devotes nearly the first two-thirds of its pages to events prior to 1517, a date that might seem to mark the start of artistic reform tout court. In its very conception, the book jars some of the basic antitheses on which constructions of the period tend to rely--Renaissance/Baroque, Reformation/Counter-Reformation--and as such, it has the potential to reshape our thinking about 16th-century central Italian art.

Michelangelo's inventiveness, Nagel argues, cannot be understood without also considering the artist's remarkable sense of moment: as a modern, he was confronted with the new ideals of the istoria; as an antiquarian, he was guided by the ancients' newly recovered examples of corporeal action and expression; as a man of deep piety, finally, he was moved by calls to sustain a' religious imagery that had its own canonical models. His impulse to "reform," accordingly, came from more than one direction. On the one hand, Michelangelo sought to restore the devotional image, strengthening its hold on a new cut of viewer; on the other, he aimed to sanctify the modern aesthetic, linking Renaissance techniques hack into archaic types. It was a project, Nagel suggests, that forced Michelangelo to explore the edges of the familiar. Whether he was making a quadro, the type of painted panel he had inherited as an altarpiece format but which would, even in his lifetime, provide the basis for the "gallery picture," or a fini shed presentation drawing, a variety of object that was becoming increasingly secular but which offered a uniquely fitting vehicle for investigating new manners of devotion, Michelangelo consistently worked between the holy image and "art." Not just in subject, but also in genre, in other words, Michelangelo's undertakings confronted, and even defined, the nonoverlapping and often competing values that governed his artistic culture.

The crucial painting for the book's argument is Michelangelo's Entombment, a work of about 1500, now in London, which accommodates a frontally presented image of the Savior to a laterally arranged scene of transport. This composition, to follow Nagel's compelling analysis, reconciled two formats, the Man of Sorrows (the popular quattrocentro Andachtsbild) and the Meleager narrative (the ancient subject, known from sarcophagi, that Leon Battista Alberti specifically recommended as a model for moderns)--and with these, two functions, the cult requirements of the altarpiece and the diachronic action of the history painting. Such a reconciliation, Nagel suggests, was groundbreaking, inasmuch as it made manifest the notion that Christian history had both a literal and a figurative dimension, consisting simultaneously of events that actually transpired and of transcendent occasions that fulfilled a larger purpose. The sacred subject of the painting, which illustrates a singular occurrence while at the same time pr oviding material for repeated, meditative viewing, works both as a narrative and as a suprahistorical presentation of the holy body. While it may announce its expansion into or extraction from a dramatic scene (one situated, importantly, in the moments after Christ's deposition from the cross and before his resurrection), it is also a cult image, and one, moreover, that uses internal, historical characters to guide external, ritual use. Both the painting's story and its interpictorial allusions, finally, are continuous with its function: if Christ's vacated body appears, paradoxically, as animated, this is both because Michelangelo has modeled his figure on ancient renderings of the swooning yet triumphant hero Bacchus and because the efficacy of the Mass, said at the altar that the painting would decorate, itself depends on Christ's offer of life through death.

What Nagel aims to demonstrate is how, in the first half of the cinquecento, the categories that guided the making of imagery themselves changed: departing from the example of Michelangelo's early altarpiece, Nagel develops a series of arguments about Michelangelo's approach to art more generally. The second part of the book jumps ahead several decades, to the years when the artist returned to the image of the dead Christ, first in a group of drawings and then in a series of sculptures, all works that, in Nagel's account, saw Michelangelo reevaluating the very media he could use. The finished drawing, made as a gift, constituted "a new category of artwork" (p. 146), one that appealed to Michelangelo because it circumvented the commission, liberated the artist's pictorial investigations from the patron's surveillance, and put the artwork itself outside the economics on which the institution of art making depended. In making and donating the drawing, Nagel suggests, Michelangelo followed the principle of Christ 's beneficio, the idea that a sacrificial gift made salvation independent of its recipient's own offerings. As Nagel sees it, Michelangelo's whole undertaking with these sheets was an experiment, one that his medium uniquely enabled, but one also doomed by the fact that drawings themselves were becoming objects for collectors; the notion of art as a gift was providing "the basis for an even more radical marketing of art as a commodity." It was the failure of the experiment that led the way to the late Pietas. Having realized that his hope of creating a new art through drawing was a "dead end," Michelangelo had no other option left in his search for a reformed art but to commit himself exclusively to sculpture, a field that, having historically preexisted painting, represented in its very medium "an earlier period of a purer and a more pious Christian art" (p. 199). Together, Nagel suggests, Michelangelo's late drawings and marbles mark a series of "retreats," retreats from the altarpiece, retreats from painti ng altogether, and, ultimately, retreats from the idea of art that collecting itself had engendered.