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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
Rosso's invention can in part be understood in terms of poetic conventions for representing erotic madness or obsession; it is an extreme depiction of the predicament of the impotent and benighted lover, vastly exaggerating the portrayal of loss, blindness, and sensual confusion in the poetry of Petrarch or, indeed, of Michelangelo.
Such nightmarish exaggerations of Petrarchan conventions are prominent in the verse of Francesco Berni, who often elaborated on the association of furious passion not just with the lover but also with the poet and his claims of furor and inspired madness. In Berni, poetic imagination is stirred by dark passions that correspond to the poet's suffering or sensory confusion. Berni, as we saw, had characterized the urge to write poetry as a condition of being possessed or bewitched (spiritato), and he opposed this to the idealizing claims of divine inspiration. His Rima no. 65 is a disquieting invocation of an infernal spirit (a demon or a damned soul) whom he has come to resemble: "M y very heart is a hell, a hellish spirit in truth am I, and a hellish fire is my fire.... Bereft of all hope of reward, and from the divine countenance, is the wretched spirit of Hell--and I am like unto him." (39) Rosso's figure may be the spirito d'inferno itself, or the image of one in the grip of a passion who has come to resemble a hellish spirit. One of the symptoms of being spiritato was a pronounced bodily convulsion and a contortion of the limbs and facial expression. (40) The demoniac boy in Raphael's Transfiguration presents a famous contemporaneous example, while Rosso's teacher Andrea del Sarto had depicted the healing of a possessed woman, shown with head thrown back and arms extended, in a fresco at SS. Annunziata in 1510. (41)
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