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

By 1534 the notion of Michelangelo's divinity, in the sense of a literally godlike status, had become sufficiently well known to be parodied by Berni in a poem known as a capitolo dedicated to Sebastiano del Piombo:

What have you done since I left with that thing to which we are so devoted, which isn't a woman but which I would yet love? I'm speaking of Michel Agnol Buonarroti, who whenever I see him the fantasia comes to me to burn incense to him and to attach votive offerings to him. And I believe that this would be a more pious act than wearing the habit of a friar when one is cured of a sickness. For I believe of him that he is the very idea of sculpture and of architecture, just as Madonna Astraea is of Justice, and whosoever might wish to make a figure that would express both of these ideas well--I believe that he might find it in him. Now you know how much goodness there is in him, how much he has of judgment, genius, discretion, how he has knowledge of the true, the beautiful, and the good. I've seen some of his poetry; although I'm ignorant I can yet say that I find a Platonic vein in them. Whether he's the new Apollo or the new Apelles, be quiet all you poets with your "pallid violets" and "crystal streams" and "slender creatures"; he says things and you [poets] say words: so too, you modern stonecutters, and you ancient ones, all of you just take a break in the sun.... (24)

It is hard to resist the vein of irony in Berni's verses (although some have done so) and not see them as a precocious caricature of some of the tendencies of the Michelangelo cult as it persists into modern times: the conflation of the artist with his work, the vehement assertion of his virtuous intentions, the claim that his work transcends representation to produce "an ontological reality" (as Charles de Tolnay has it (25)), the insistence on Platonic evasion in reading the love sonnets. Michelangelo certainly understood Berni's praise in facetious terms; he directed the following response "in maschera," adopting the persona of Fra Sebastiano (del Piombo), in which he claims that the poet's "divine odes" have lifted him to heaven "a thousand times an hour," but that the poet has correctly revealed the artist to be no more than a painted man, an idol:

And as that faithful friend of yours and mine said, after seeing your lovely verses, "People light candles to pictures and hang prayers on them.

Therefore I, too, am numbered among those things Brought forth by a clumsy, worthless painter with his brushes and his pots of paint.

For my sake, then, please give my thanks to Berni, who alone among many knows the truth about me; for one who regards me well is greatly mistaken.

But his teaching could well provide for me full light, and it will be a great miracle to make a painted man into a real one.... (26)

Aware of being treated as a precious artifact, of being ascribed the characteristics of his own work, Michelangelo avows that only Berni's preposterous and ironic praise had hit the mark; the satirist's unmasking of the fabricated idol at the center of the Michelangelo cult reveals a distinction between the artist and what he produces. The "real" Michelangelo, it appears, acquires actuality and substance through the recognition of a poet strongly identified with reduction to gross materiality, to the carnal and corporeal domain.