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"Fare una cosa morta parer viva": Michelangelo, Rosso, and the divinity of art - un - Rosso Fiorentino
Art Bulletin, The, Dec, 2002 by Stephen J. Campbell
The cadaverous figures in Rosso's early work have been explained in various ways, none fully compatible with the interpretation presented here. It has already been proposed that such morbid imagery may also recall a meditational practice recommended by Girolamo Savonarola and Gian-francesco Pico della Mirandola of disciplining the imagination--the essential faculty of meditation--by concentrating on images of death. (60) Yet Rosso's fantasie of death, with their animated skeletons and cadavers and their parodies of Florentine artistic tradition, conjure anything but a disciplined imagination. Another recent view relates Rosso's anatomical imagery to a more general "revival of Donatello" in Florence after 1512, and hence to the domain of Florentine cultural politics after the return of the Medici. (61) This political dimension is worth pausing on, since it provides a compelling context for the understanding of certain strategies adopted by Rosso and his contemporary Jacopo da Pontormo in the post-republican ye ars.
In 1512 the exiled Medici family was restored to power following eighteen years of republican government. The fact that the regime had been founded in 1434 following the return of its leader, Cosimo de' Medici, from exile led to a preoccupation in Medici propagandistic imagery with the theme of historical repetition, of cycles of change and rebirth. Le temps revient (The time returns), a motto associated with the "golden age" of the late Lorenzo il Magnifico, was deployed with an unwonted forcefulness under the new leaders of the family and of Florence, who included Lorenzo's sons Giuliano and Giovanni (the latter elected pope as Leo X in 1513) and his nephew Lorenzo. (62) Events of 1512 and 1515 seem indeed to have triggered an intense interest in the art of Donatello, an artist with whom the Medici took some pains to associate themselves: the Medici restoration and Leo X's ceremonial visit to Florence were marked, among other events, by the assembly of the late bronze reliefs made by Donatello for S. Lorenz o into two pulpits for the Medici church. There are indeed points of correspondence between the wraithlike saints and ascetics of these extraordinary reliefs and the cadaverous beings of Rosso's early imagery. Yet investing Rosso's figures with this citational aspect makes them look all the more intrusive, incongruous, and even subversive, especially when compared to the "official" manifestations of the revival of Donatello and the art of the Florentine past, now increasingly codified as a Medici past. (63) The cadaver motif as employed by Rosso has a dissonant character, which places it beyond the reach of appropriation by the Medici propaganda machine. Its force is to draw attention to the work of art as an illusion, to push representation alla fantasia to freakishly unnatural extremes, and to suggest that the superhumanly idealized bodies of Michelangelo or of contemporary Florentine art are generated through the suppression and denial of the grimmer facts of bodily experience.
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