"Fare una cosa morta parer viva": Michelangelo, Rosso, and the divinity of art - un - Rosso Fiorentino

Notes

I am grateful to several individuals for their constructive criticism over the past few years of work on this project, especially Megan Holmes. Suggestions and invaluable assistance were also offered by Kim Butler, Alison Cornish, Elizabeth Cropper, Charles Dempsey, Giancarlo Fiorenza, Maria Gough, Jeffrey Hamburger, Morten Steen Hansen, Diane Owen Hughes, Herbert Kessler, Robert Maxwell, Jonathan Nelson, Larry Silver, Pat Simons, Victor Stoichita, and Tom Willette, as well as by the editor and readers for The Art Bulletin. Unless otherwise indicated, translations are mine.

(1.) Doni, fol. 11r: "percise la pittura venne da l'ombra, & la Scoltura da gl'idoli."

(2.) Comment attributed to Michelangelo, in Hollanda, 109.

(3.) For instance, the 1446 memorial inscription to Filippo Brunelleschi referred to his divino ingenio. See Vasari, vol. 2, 384.

(4.) Richard C. Trexler, Public Life in Renaissance Florence (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1980), 54-78.

(5.) The distinction corresponds to that drawn by Hans Belting, Likeness and Presence: A History of the Image before the Era of Art, trans. Edward Jephcott (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994), which concludes that "at the time of the Renaissance two kinds of images, the one with the notion of the work of art, and the other free of that notion, existed side by side" (xxii-xxiii).

(6.) Vasari, vol. 7, 214-15: "e vedesi nei contorni delle cose girate da lui per una via, che da altri che da lui non potrebbono essere fatte, il vero Giudizio e la vera dannazione e resurrezione. E questo nell'arte nostra e quello esempio e quella gran pittura mandata da Dio agli uomini in terra, accioche veggano come il fato fa, quando gli intelletti dal supremo grado in terra descendono, ed hanno in essi infusa la grazia a la divinita del sapere." Doni, 91, also insists on the character of The Last Judgment as a kind of painted vision or revelation, "capable of convincing the apocalyptic visionaries Saint Jerome and Saint Bernard that it was the event itself in flesh and blood."

(7.) Rosso Fiorentino to Michelangelo, Oct. 6, 1526, in Carroll, 22-23; the complete letter is included in Franklin, 306: "et non solo questo, ma che I'habbi mai altro che si come di cosa divinamente facta parlato: et si di voi et de ogn'altra opera vostra, se non di quanto merits, almeno di quanto io son capace...." For comments on the letter with a discussion of Michelangelo's influence on Rosso, see Paul Joannides, "'Non volevo pigliar quello maniera': Rosso and Michelangelo," in Pontormo e Rosso: Atti del convegno di Empoli e Volterra, ed. Roberto Ciardi and Antonio Natali (Venice: Marsilio, 1996), 136-40.

(8.) Quoted without attribution in Konrad Oberhuber, Raphael: The Paintings (Munich: Prestel, 1999), 9. The attribution to Tebaldeo is noted in Giovanna Perini, "Raffaello e l'antico: Alcune precisazioni," Bollettino d'Arte 89-90 (1995): 116, who draws attention to the potentially necromantic and blasphemous character of "a worldly and irreverent comparison ... which the Counter-Reformation would soon seek to forestall [un paragone mondanamente irriverenle ... quale lo spirito della Riforma si curera ben presto di far emendare]."