"Fare una Cosa Morta Parer Viva"': Michelangelo, Rosso, and the (Un)Divinity of Art Stephen J. Campbell The Art Bulletin, Vol. 84, No. 4. (Dec., 2002), pp. 596-620, Stable URL: hitp://lnks,jstor.org/siesici=0004-3079% 282002 12% 2984%3A4% 3C596%3A %22UCMPV%3E2.0,CO%3B2-F The Art Bulletin is currently published by College Art Association, ‘Your use of the ISTOR archive indicates your acceptance of JSTOR’s Terms and Conditions of Use, available at hhup:/www.jstororg/about/terms.huml. JSTOR’s Terms and Conditions of Use provides, in part, that unless you have obtained prior permission, you may not download an entire issue of a journal or multiple copies of articles, and you may use content in the JSTOR archive only for your personal, non-commercial use. Please contact the publisher regarding any further use of this work. Publisher contact information may be obtained at hup:/www jstor.org/journalsieaa.himl Each copy of any part of a JSTOR transmission must contain the same copyright notice that appears on the sereen or printed page of such transmission, JSTOR is an independent not-for-profit organization dedicated to creating and preserving a digital archive of scholarly journals. For more information regarding JSTOR, please contact support @jstor.org. hupulwww jstor.org/ ‘Sun Aug 27 13:09:13 2006“Fare una Cosa Morta Parer Viva”: Michelangelo, Rosso, and the (Un) Divinity of Art Stephen J. Campbell Because pining comes from Shades, and Seuprre from taut anon Francesc Dots 159" Whenever (as very rarely happens) a great painter makes a work that seems fale and deceit, that flseness is tuth, and greater je—attributed to Michelangelo? truth in that place would be a Michelangelo Buonarotti was not the first or the last artis 10 be called dlivine.* Yet from the close of the the Florentine artistic culture from which Michelangelo ‘emerged shows signs of a very particular preoccupation with the analogies between human making and the creative act of God. Whether implicitly or explicitly, artists claimed to pro- vide at least the appearance oflife or being, of a superhuman beauty generated from “nothing” that ultimately transcends the limitations of the visible and the material, Thus, artists grappled in their work with a tension between two modalities ‘of the image while arguably finding er ‘On the one hand, the image was a manifestation of divine authority and an authentic object of devoti Certain images that had come into being through miraculous rather than h ‘or those in which divine appro- bation was revealed through the working of miracles, occu- fifteenth century, mal att pied a fundamental place in the devotional life of the city." On the other hand, the image was a display of human virtu ‘sity, wherein a repertoire of increasingly refined artistic skills and techniques creates a powerful, emotionally affect- ing, and completely illusory simulation of presence—includ- ing divine presence By 1550, when Giorgio Vasari produced his Lives of the Antsts, Michelangelo had come to epitomize the conception, of a divine artist, to the extent that he appeared to have overcome the distinetion between the two modalities. In his near-hagiographic portrait, Vasari asserted that Michelangelo not only embodied the triumph of human art worthy of being compared with the work of God but also that he was the living ideal of the Christian artist. Moreover, Michelangelo's seem ingly divine ability to make inanimate figures seem alive was no mere emulation of God's creati sult of an auth For instance, the artist's Last judg: ‘ment is no less than the image of the “fuejudgment” and the “true resurrection” of the body, willed by God himself to men “so that they will see what fate does when supren descend to earth infused with grace and with the divine wisclom.” asari's underscoring of the artist's godlike status with piety and a divinely ordained mission arose from a dist defensive purpose, He was writing in the wake of a series of devastating attacks on Michelangelo, which insisted on the perverse, irreligious, and corrupting character of his religious painting. Yet while CounterReformation polemic may have ‘motivated Vasari's attempt to redeem artistic divinity, we shall n but the ic visionary pow mtellects, tly that his remarks stand as the climax to more than half a ‘century of intense preoccupation with the analogy of human and divine making on the part of the artists of Florence, In. the decades before Vasari wrote, certain of Michelangelo's ‘contemporaries responded to his work in terms that both, draw on and call into question the possibility ofa divine basis for human art. In the verse of the Florentine poet Francesco Berni andl in the early artistic practice of the younger painter Rosso Fiorentino, such claims, while recognized, are also subjected 1 an ironic scrutiny and even challenged, The eccentric” tendencies in the carly work of Rosso, who is usually tunderstood (not without reason) as a Michelangelo follower, can be shown to be informed by a body of theoret- ical, metaartistic concerns already circulating in the practice of his contemporaries. As will be demonstrated below, the concerns raised in Rosso’s art can be seen to have touched Michelangelo himself in a manner that is mostin evidence the Medici Chapel project of the 1520s and in the Sistine Chapel Last Judgment, the work that resulted in a massive critical backlash against the artist and an increasingly anxious. preoccupation on the part of the Church with the place of “art” in the service of religion, Michelangelo and Rosso Fiorentino ‘The context for the single documented encounter of Michel. angelo with Rosso seems at first glance far removed from the nd theoretical speculation. By all accounts their interaction was a fraught one, marked by rivalry and jealously guarded professional hierarchy. The younger artist, it appears, had overreached himself, causing. offense to the dominating (albeit absent) figure of the Ro- man artistic scene, or at least to his followers in Rome. From the letter of apology, dated! October 6, 1526, that Rosso set 1 Michelangelo in Florence, it can be inferred that Rosso was reported to have made disparaging remarks about the Sistine ceiling: “you were persuaded that 1, on getting here [10 Rome] and going into that chapel painted by you, declared that I did not wish to work in that style.” But Rosso claims he hhas been slandered. He hastens to assure Michelangelo that he had really “never pronounced it to be otherwise than divinely made (divinamente facta).” Rosso insists (perhaps too much) that both Michelangelo and his art are divine, the authentic image of each other, and asserts that he had spo- ken of the divinity “not only of that work [the Sistine] but of you and all your other works... Nor do T think you wil attribute this to vile adulation, for Tam absolutely certain that domain of artistic exchange you yourself are aware of it, since without that awareness you ‘would not be able to work. Not much has been macle of the fact that Rosso's comment isa rather precocious ascription of divinity to Michelangelo jonally held that the first to do so was ovieo Ariosto, who, in his 1516 version of Orlando Furiaso, Buonarotti. [tis con Liacclaimed “Michel pitt che mortal Angel divino.” However, the notion of artistic divinity was particularly “in the ait® in Rome following the death of Raphael in 1520, Poets such as Antonio Tebaldeo had conferred an extraordinary posthu- mous canonization and deification on Michelangelo's chief rival, comparing his death on Good Friday at the alleged age of thirythree (he was actually thiryyseven) to the death of ‘Christ: "What wonder that you lost the light like Christ / He is the God of Nature, you the one of art.™ Similarly, Rosso’s proclamation of Michelangelo's divinity seems to be a far from casual usage. Rosso urgently insists that he really means it, and that Michelangelo, too, must believe it ‘The word divine in the sixteenth century had common place sense, as it does today, with many nonliteral applica: tions.” But certain usages of divino seem stronger and more deliberate, with a polemical and defensive dimension that has not ofien been acknowledged. Those who applied the term to Michelangelo, as we will see, often explicitly drew attention to the word's primary connotations. In a letter to the artist of, 1543, Anton Francesco Doni asserted that “your marbles and, your colors deserve more honor and more reverence than the gods themselves, so that you should be adored by men and without dying be raised by angels to one of the most splendid thrones of Paradise.” A subsequent remark by Doni reveals his awareness of the potentially blasphemous nature ‘of such a comparison: “And certainly I take you to be a God,” he adds, “but with license from our fath."!? Vasari establishes Michelangelo’s superhuman character through a systematic, analogy with the sublime figures he produces and through a pointed and deliberate usage of terms such as divino. God's creation in the Sistine Chapel is worthy of being rendered ‘only through the supremely divine hands (divinssime mani) of Michelangelo, who wanted to show together “the perfection of art and the greatness of God.""" Vasar’s divinization of Michelangelo influenced a more than commonplace usage of the term at midcentury by other writers. The 1550 biography of Michelangelo very likely inspired Benvenuto Cellini’s highly literal appropriation of the role of divine artist for himself (complete with prophetic visions and halo) in his own Vita composed in the 1550s, in which a divine agency authorizes and sanctifies a deeply transgressive authorial per- ‘The very year in which Vasar’s first edition of the Lives would give the phrase “il divino Michelangelo” widespread currency, the notion of the artist's divine nature was de- ployed with particularly ruthless irony by Pietro Aretino. This was in the notorious letter to Michelangelo, published in, 1550, in which the writer roundly denounced the pagan profanity and immoderate artistic license of The Last Judg- ‘ment. For Aretino, the pretensions of Michelangelo's high style, applied to the most sublime event in sacred history, produced a spectacle worthy of a brothel or a bathhouse: “For how can that Michelangelo of such stupendous fame, that Michelangelo of outstanding prudence, that Michelan- gelo of admirable habits, have wanted to show to the people no less religious impiety than artistic perfection? Is it possible for you, rho through being divine do not condescend to the company af men, to have made this in the foremost temple of God?" Aretino’s facetious deployment of the term divino places Vasari's usage in a more defensive light, especially as Aretino, MICHELANGELO, ROSSO, AND THE (UN)DIVINETY OF ART 597 1 Michelangelo, Sistine Chapel, Rome, Vatican, detail of| ceiling: Ignudo (photo: Vatican, Vatican Museums) as we shall see, was not the first to cast ironic aspersions on Michelangelo's divinity ‘The analogy between the artist and God rests particularly ‘on what Michelangelo's defenders considered the most char- acteristic singular feature of his performance: his ability to ‘create the illusion of life, to “make” human figures with a ‘dynamic energy and superhuman beauty that betoken beings conceived in the Promethean fantasia ofthe artist rather than after human models, David Summers observes that the ignudi of the Sistine Chapel ceiling need have no other significance than to make explicit the divine ingegno that “created” them, giving them the spirit, substance, and motion that they ex: press in their ecstatic postures and gestures (Fig. 1). Michel angelo's rendering of movement was a “divine” gift, and it ‘manifested the divinely inspired furor (creative frenzy) of the artist! A text that predates Vasari singles out the sense of ‘movement through which a representation seems to demon- strate an infusion of animating spirit as the quality most associated with divinity in the rendering of human The Sienese physician Pietro Andrea Mattioli wrote in the 1530s of a decoration by Romanino at Trent showing nude male figures not dissimilar to the Sistine ignudi. In defending them against the charge of indeceney, Mattioli contended that in showing "nude bodies with lively gestures” the painter displays his art; his manifest ingigno and divin pernello (divine brush) demonstrate that, ike nature, he ean “make and