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

Stephen J. Campbell

... because painting comes from Shades, and Sculpture from Idols.--Anton Francesco Doni, 1549 (1)

Whenever (as very rarely happens) a great painter makes a work that seems false and deceitful, that falseness is truth, and greater truth in that place would be a lie.--attributed to Michelangelo (2)

Michelangelo Buonarotti was not the first or the last artist to be called divine. (3) Yet from the close of the fifteenth century, 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 provide at least the appearance of life 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 creative sustenance in it. On the one hand, the image was a manifestation of divine authority and an authentic object of devotional attention. Certain images that had come into being through miraculous rather than human means, or those in which divine approbation was revealed through the working of miracles, occupied a fundamental place in the devotional life of the city. (4) On the other hand, the image was a display of human virtuosity, wherein a repertoire of increasingly refined artistic skills and techniques creates a powerful, emotionally affecting, and completely illusory simulation of presence--including divine presence. (5)

By 1550, when Giorgio Vasari produced his Lives of the Artists, Michelangelo had come to epitomize the conception of a divine artist, to the extent that he appeared to have overcome the distinction 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 seemingly divine ability to make inanimate figures seem alive was no mere emulation of God's creation but the result of an authentic visionary power. For instance, the artist's Last Judgment is no less than the image of the "true judgment" and the "true resurrection" of the body, willed by God himself to men "so that they will see what fate does when supreme intellects descend to earth infused with grace and with the divine wisdom." (6)

Vasari's underscoring of the artist's godlike status with piety and a divinely ordained mission arose from a distinctly 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 Counter-Reformation polemic may have motivated Vasari's attempt to redeem artistic divinity, we shall see 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 of a divine basis for human art. In the verse of the Florentine poet Francesco Berni and in the early artistic practice of the younger painter Rosso Fiorentino, such claims, while recognized, are also subjected to an ironic scrutiny and even challenged. The "eccentric" tendencies in the early work of Rosso, who is usually understood (not without reason) as a Michelangelo follower, can be shown to be informed by a body of theoretical, meta-artistic 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 most in evidence in 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 Michelangelo with Rosso seems at first glance far removed from the domain of artistic exchange and 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 Roman artistic scene, or at least to his followers in Rome. From the letter of apology, dated October 6,1526, that Rosso sent to Michelangelo in Florence, it can be inferred that Rosso was reported to have made disparaging remarks about the Sistine ceiling: "you were persuaded that I, on getting here [to Rome] and going into that chapel painted by you, declared that I did not wish to work in that style." But Rosso claims he has been slandered. He hastens to assure Michelangelo that he had really "never pronounced it to be otherwise than divinely made [divinamentefacta]." Rosso insists (perhaps too much) that both Michelangelo and his art are divine, the authentic image of each other, and asserts that he had spoken of the divinity "not only of that work [the Sistine] but of you and all your other works.... Nor do I think you will attribute this to vile adulation, for I am absolutely certain that you yourself are aware of it, since without that awareness you would not be able to work...." (7)

Not much has been made of the fact that Rosso's comment is a rather precocious ascription of divinity to Michelangelo Buonarotti. It is conventionally held that the first to do so was Ludovico Ariosto, who, in his 1516 version of Orlando Furioso, acclaimed "Michel piu che mortal Angel divino." However, the notion of artistic divinity was particularly "in the air" in Rome following the death of Raphael in 1520. Poets such as Antonio Tebaldeo had conferred an extraordinary posthumous canonization and deification on Michelangelo's chief rival, comparing his death on Good Friday at the alleged age of thirty-three (he was actually thirty-seven) 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." (8) 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 a commonplace sense, as it does today, with many nonliteral applications. (9) But certain usages of divino seem stronger and more deliberate, with a polemical and defensive dimension that has not often 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 faith." (10) 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 (divinissime mani) of Michelangelo, who wanted to show together "the perfection of art and the greatness of God." (11) Vasari'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 persona.

The very year in which Vasari's first edition of the Lives would give the phrase "il divino Michelangelo" widespread currency, the notion of the artist's divine nature was deployed 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 Judgment. 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 Michelangelo of admirable habits, have wanted to show to the people no less religious impiety than artistic perfection? Is it possible for you, who through being divine do not condescend to the company of men, to have made this in the foremost temple of God?" (12) Aretino's facetious deployment of the term divino places Vasari's usage in a more defensive light, especially as Aretino, 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 characteristic 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 of the 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 express in their ecstatic postures and gestures (Fig. 1). Michelangelo's rendering of movement was a "divine" gift, and it manifested the divinely inspired furor (creative frenzy) of the artist. (13) A text that predates Vasari singles out the sense of movement through which a representation seems to demonstrate an infusion of animating spirit as the quality most associated with divinity in the rendering of human figures. T he 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 indecency, Mattioli contended that in showing "nude bodies with lively gestures" the painter displays his art; his manifest ingegno and divin pennello (divine brush) demonstrate that, like nature, he can "make and unmake [Il tutto ritratto con grand'ingegno/E dimostro che col divin pennello/Fare, e disfar sapea qualco[l] sa anch 'ello]." The arbitrary creativity of Nature parallels, in other words, the license of the artist. (14)

The notion of the artist as a "second nature" who creates something new rather than a mere copy or replica after nature had received its most ambitious formulation in Leonardo's writings and is implicit in Vasari's text. This concept stems in part from the view that the artist works not according to a principle of mimesis, which is limited to what nature presents to the eye, but according to a higher principle grounded in the fantasia, or image-forming faculty of the mind. While this faculty is conditioned by discipline and knowledge (such as the investigation of human anatomy in Michelangelo's case), it is also capable of generating new images of its own. Cennino Cennini and Paolo Pino, writing more than a century apart, both asserted an artist's right to create 'what does not exist" through the notion of fantasia. (15) Albrecht Durer, an occasional visitor to Italy, wrote of the faculty that allowed the artist to create "new shapes of men and other creatures the like of which was never seen before nor thoug ht of by any other man." (16) The fantasia, moreover--especially in the tradition of Dante's Commedia Divina and Giovanni Boccaccio's defense of poetry--was a faculty associated with the reception of dreams and visions, as well as with the quality of inspiration, which in Michelangelo's case is identified with divine origins.

The artist, in other words, creates by analogy with God, not through copying God's creation. In his figures, Michelangelo seemed to be giving unprecedentedly vivid form to a longstanding commonplace, expressed in Angelo Poliziano's epitaph for Fra Filippo Lippi, "with my fingers I could give life to lifeless paints, and long deceive the mind to expect them to speak," (17) or in the poet-painter Francesco Lancilotti's claim in 1509 that painting is no less than "another God and another nature [Un altro Iddio e un'altra natural" with the power to "make a dead thing appear alive [fare una cosa morta parer viva] " (18) Vasari developed the topos, with repeated insistences that Michelangelo "brings life" to that which is dead: Adam on the Sistine ceiling seems more to have been "newly made by his Creator than through the disegno of man"; the statue Moses appears as if the actual body of the patriarch had been recomposed and prepared for his "resurrection at the hands of Michelangelo." (19) Vasari also devoted cons iderable efforts to demonstrating his hero's independence from mimesis, charging his creative license with the aura of divinity, and in a manner that seems to transcend poetical commonplace. Equally exalted statements on the divinity of art came from Francisco de Hollanda in his Dialogos em Roma, placed in the mouths of Michelangelo and some of his associates. According to this text, the divine quality arises largely from a capacity to visualize and to reveal the invisible and the otherworldly. (20)

It is by no means certain that Michelangelo himself subscribed to these views or saw his art as a manifestation of a divine persona. Occasionally in his poetry, Michelangelo drew on the concetto of the artist as a reanimator who, like Pygmalion, infuses spirit into lifeless and inert matter: "Even if you were made of stone, I believe I could love you with such faith that I could make you walk with me more than one step, and if you were dead I would make you speak...." (21) Even in this instance, the verses (composed in 1531-32) begin a set of grotesque and parodic stanzas that undermine the divine pretensions of the opening. In 1542, the year after the unveiling of The Last Judgment, Michelangelo commented to Nicolo Martelli on the excessive praises bestowed on him in a volume of sonnets "al divino Michelagnolo Buonarotti": "Truly they give me such praises, that if I had paradise in my breast, they would scarcely be insufficient [Vero e che mi danno tanto lodi, che, se io havessi in paradiso in seno, molte ma nco sarebbono a bastanza]." (22) There are, as he must have realized, certain risks in claiming to create as God does, not the least of which must have been laying oneself open to the castigations of an Aretino, or to the vein of skepticism that pervades some of the earliest uses of the term. (23)

Berni, Rosso, and the Nondivine

A reader at this point may reasonably object that such characterizations of the artist as divino, no matter how intensely proposed, are finally "merely" rhetorical, extravagant variations on a topos. This point can be conceded right away, because whether or not Vasari meant the term literally, what matters is not that anyone ever actually believed Michelangelo to be a god but that the image of divine artistic identity produced a counterimage that gave rise to some ironic and even disturbing reflections on the nature of art and the "truth" it served. In the end, the degree to which the work of the artist was not like divine creation opened more interesting paths. The very unsustainability of the notion of the truly divine artist became a point of departure for two fellow Florentines, likely acquaintances in Rome before the sack of 1527, who were among the earliest to ascribe divinity to Michelangelo in texts addressed to the artist. The first, as we have seen, is the young painter Rosso, and the other is Franc esco Berni, the poete maudit of Clement VII's Rome.

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.

Berni's poetic project was indeed defined as an assault on the conventions of Petrarchan idealism, either through parody or through enlarging their reference to areas of experience and to human characteristics that were never admissable within the decorum of the Petrarchan lyric. The elevated claims for poetry's status were also targeted in a prose work, the Dialogo contra i poeti, which appeared anonymously in 1526. (27) Berni here characterized the urge to write poetry as a form of dark madness, a condition of being possessed, or spiritato, and he opposed this condition to the idealizing claims of divine inspiration. (28) At one point a speaker associates poets with thieves and necromancers; elsewhere, they are portrayed as concerned only with making illusions (like painters) through prospettive and color, while nonetheless claiming a divine or prophetic vocation. (29) Yet this nondivinity becomes the core of Berni's own poetic persona, and it is often apparent that it is not just "mortality" that stands as the alternative to "divinity." His erratic career frequently led to apologies for his own perversity and compulsive nature, and in one extraordinary poem, "Vero spirito d'inferno per amore," he writes of his resemblance to an infernal spirit.

Both Berni and Michelangelo wrote anti-Petrarchan love poems that often parody, in grotesque and misogynist terms, the catalogue of physical attributes of the ideal beloved: "Tu ha' 'l viso piu dolce che la sapa" (You have a face sweeter than boiled grape juice (30)); "Chiome d'argento fino, irte e attorte" (Hair of the finest silver, shaggy and twisted), itself a parody of a poem by the arch-Petrarchist Pietro Bembo. (31) The verse quoted above in which Michelangelo avails of the Pygmalion topos has itself been identified as an exercise in the idiom of Berni. The intimations of divinity in its opening stanzas are progressively undone through a series of bathetic and grotesque images of corporeal discomfort (apparently indigestion) as the immagine of the donna bella possesses the poet's body through his eyes. (32) Through Berni, in summary, Michelangelo is presented with the possibility of thinking in a far more ironic and distanced way about the aggrandizing claims made on behalf of poetic fantasia and about the idealizing fictions of art. Yet Berni is not the only point of contact with this alternative, anti-idealizing, "nondivine" view of creativity in the years between the completion of the Sistine ceiling and the commencement of The Last Judgment.

Another figure who can be identified with this countercurrent, or anti-ideal tradition, is the painter Rosso Fiorentino, who, like Berni, was a Florentine expatriate living in Rome in the 1520s. Rosso's remarkable drawing of a nude female model emphasizes the woman's distinguishing bodily attributes without idealizing them and invests her with a hollow-eyed, masklike quality (Fig. 2). The materiality of the body is emphasized with a strange pathos, in a way that conspicuously departs from the superhumanly heroic bodies in the drawings of Michelangelo, and with an effect that the enameled perfection of the artful figures in Rosso's mature painting would deny. Though the figure seen here is not grotesque, in her haunted appearance and nonideal character she evokes the grotesque realism of Berni. Something is acknowledged in Berni's often grim parodies of Petrarchan idealism with regard to the body: the impossibility of the canonical attributes, the fact of aging and vulnerability, the materiality and pathetic c orruptibility of the flesh. The pathos of Rosso's figure, which manifestly does not correspond to the canon of attributes defining the Petrarchan ideal of feminine perfection, (33) arises from the acknowledgment of mortal process, of physical deterioration, and in this respect it evokes the anti-ideal bodily descriptions of Berni: "Love and death," Berni writes of his aging beloved in Chiome d'argento fino, cruelly reversing a topos favored by Petrarch and Michelangelo, "leave their arrows in her face."

Returning to the letter of apology Rosso sent to Michelangelo in 1526, Rosso implies that if Michelangelo had not really believed himself to be divine, then he was painting in a kind of bad faith and that the divinity of the work was but a simulation by a nondivine impersonator of divinity. Coming from Rosso, this ambivalent praise is intriguing. It provokes reflection on this artist's own work, and how he may have conceived its relation to Michelangelo's. Rosso's work may have more to say about the alleged divinity of the artist.

Rosso's Cadavers

Rosso's early career in Florence, and then in Rome, was beset by a series of controversies beyond the alleged slandering of Michelangelo. These other controversies involved dissatisfied patrons, reacting to what Vasari calls Rosso's "astonishing excesses [terribilita di cose stravaganti]" or to his endowment of his saints with "cruel and desperate airs [arie crudele e disperate]," so that (as Vasari reports) they were mistaken in one case for demons. (34) Vasari characterizes Rosso's controversial fierezza (wildness) and stravaganza as the manifestation of "a contrary idea," but he does not specify what, if anything, this contrary position was defined against. On moving to Rome, and following the failure of a major commission, Rosso produced designs for prints that often appear to resort to a language of parody, a parody directed against the classical tradition and the art and reputation of Michelangelo. (35)

The Fury (Fig. 3), one of several remarkable engravings designed by Rosso before the sack of Rome, is among other things a refashioning of a recently discovered work of art, the Laocoon. (36) The Laocoon in particular was heavily identified with Michelangelo's emulation of the antique, and he had been the prime interpreter of its significance for modern artistic practice since its rediscovery in 1506. (37) Already celebrated as an exemplum of the pathos of physical suffering, the statue has been adapted here into a truly terrible image of psychic as well as physical torment, fully visible in the figure's violent, thrashing movements and agonized expression. Through the rendering of a naked figure in an extravagantly dynamic posture, Rosso also evokes Michelangelo's equally decontextualizing responses to the ancient sculpture--above all, in the ignudi of the Sistine ceiling. The ecstatic movement of those figures relates to no visible external stimulus but (as we saw from Mattioli) could be referred to the ins pired ingegno of the artist who created them (Fig. 1). (38) But now we are directed to think in a rather different way about the animation of the figure and its causes: Should a figure who is flayed, castrated, and apparently desiccated be moving at all? The image holds forth two possibilities: either that this is a living figure in the grip of an obsessive and wasting passion (a reading possibly strengthened by the poem printed with the image, which underscores the sensation of delirium and anguish) or--given the state of his physique--that this is a dead body, reanimated by means other than natural. Could the image amount to a Berni-like reflection on the ecstatic movement of Michelangelo's "divine" figures?

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)

In its evocation of the ignudi and in its own extravagantly macabre character, Rosso's figure may be placing the matter of poetic or artistic fantasia particularly at issue. (42) Beyond alluding to a demonic corruption of the fantasia, whether that of the artist or that of the figure itself, on a far more direct and sensational level Rosso's image raises the specter of death and reanimation, together with more sinister insinuations about Michelangelo. The figure's apparent castration and his cadaverous, withered form may even reflect contemporary beliefs about the effects of witchcraft and necromancy, especially the reports in classical and contemporary texts that witches engaged in the demonic reanimation of the dead (Berni's word spiritato, or inspirited, is also appropriate here) (43) The swan, which the poem below the engraving identifies as singing, points not only to a dimension of artistic creativity but also to one of death. Furthermore, as a dead and reanimated body, Rosso's monstrous wraith unmistak ably refers to an artistic practice, through which Michelangelo above all was held to demonstrate the mnemonic and synthetic powers of fantasia. As Vasari tells us, the figure is identifiable as "una figura di notomia secca," a desiccated cadaver that was used in the teaching of medical anatomy and, increasingly, in the anatomical researches of painters and sculptors. (44) Florence was the center of this artistic pursuit of anatomical knowledge, an area of expertise that was increasingly identified as the province of artists. Here again it was Michelangelo who had set the standard, with a command of disegno that Vasari presents as the end result of a painstakingly analytic and synthetic procedure: "in flaying dead bodies, to study anatomical matters, he began to perfect the great sense of design that he later acquired [scorticando corpi morti, per studiare cose di notomia, comincio a dare perfezione at gran disegno ch'egli ebbe poi]." (45) Michelangelo prepared his great cartoon for The Battle of Cascina in t he hospital of S. Onofrio, dissecting many cadavers in order to internalize mentally the physical structure of the human body. As Vasari understood it, the invention of the figure in such a work comes from a training of the memory, which enables the artist to imagine human figures, more beautiful than any one example might present to the eyes, in difficult and extreme poses, which could hardly be studied from a live studio model--another instance, in effect, of art surpassing nature. (46) The composition of figures alla fantasia, through memory and imagination, has nothing to do with copying. It involves instead constructing human figures literally from the skeleton outward, "clothing" each figure with its flesh--the very reverse of anatomical procedure (which, of course, dismembers the human body and hastens the onset of decomposition). In Pino's terms, "A cadaver is ordered first anatomically, then it is covered with flesh, distinguishing the veins, the ligatures and members, bringing them by true means to a whole perfection." (47) The painter, again, is a reanimator, one who reverses the work of death; hence for Vasari, who constantly draws on the topos of resurrection, the artist appears the more like God. For Vasari, moreover, the lifelike animation with which Michelangelo infuses the figures of The Battle of Cascina is directly indexical to the artist's own divine virtuosity, to his inspiration: "Some in seeing his divine figures declared that it was impossible for any other spirit to attain to its divinity." (48)

Before Vesalius systematized the study of anatomy through dissection and even long after the publication of his De humani corporis fabrica in 1543, the practice had not lost the taint of infamy and improper curiosity. (49) Vesalius himself sought to distinguish his practice of anatomy from that of practitioners of the occult. In discussing one of the bones of the foot, he mentions the belief, which he then defers to theologians and "gloomy philosophers," that this bone was the seed from which the entire body would be regenerated at the Last Judgment; he also provides a lurid anecdote about three Venetian courtesans who sought to extract this bone from a living child, along with his heart. (50) The macabre side of anatomy, its association with artists of an obsessive or morbid temperament, is manifest throughout Vasari's Lives. One such is the sculptor Silvio Cosini, who removed the corpse of a hanged man from a grave one night "and after dissecting it in the interests of art, being fanciful and perhaps believ ing in charms and such follies, he flayed the body and made himself a leather tunic of the skin"; or the reclusive Bartolomeo Torri, who kept body parts under his bed and lived in isolation, "like a philosopher," until he became mortally ill amid a decaying mess of anatomical debris. (51) Even the most dispassionate later writers on anatomical study, such as the Florentine Alessandro Allori or the Faentine Giovanni Battista Armenini, referred to the sense of melancholy and disgust normally aroused by anatomy or by artists who made too great a display of their knowledge of the body's internal structure. (52) It was associated with secrecy (as in the references in art literature to "secrets of anatomy"), with knowledge gained in mortuaries or dark cellars, with pursuits under cover of night, with the appalling fate even beyond death of the executed criminal or those who died without a family to bury them. Gian Paolo Lomazzo's later characterization of Michelangelo and his works refers to the artist's "melanchol y" and "terrible" figures, "drawn from the profound secrets of anatomy." (53) In Rome in 1515, during his fruitless sojourn in the entourage of Giuliano de' Medici, Leonardo da Vinci had his anatomical researches denounced before the pope by one of his own assistants, and he was prevented from making further dissections. Michelangelo's practice of dissection was not immune from rumors and scandal; according to the Anonimo magliabeechiano, when working on The Battle of Cascina, Michelangelo "entered into a crypt, where there were many deposits of dead, and there he made anatomies of many bodies and cut and gutted them." It turned out that one of these otherwise nameless corpses possessed an identity and a celebrity; Michelangelo had inadvertently gutted and flayed one of the Corsini, to the outrage of his family. (54) The transgressive and implicitly undivine nature of this aspect of artistic practice is suggested in Rosso's Fury, where the resurrection topos regarding the animating power of art is made to see m sinister, perhaps even blasphemous, in its identification with the practice of anatomy.

A contemporary Roman engraving in the same genre as the Fury indicates a yet more heightened element of blasphemy and necromancy with regard to Michelangelo: the so-called La stregozzo (Fig. 4), attributed to Marcantonio Raimondi or Agostino Veneziano, where nude Michelangelesque youths, among them a running nude copied directly from The Battle of Cascina, draw a witch's chariot made from dragon bones and bizarre combinations of animal body parts. The figure bending rudely on all fours is another borrowing from Michelangelo: the figure of God in the Sistine Creation of the Sun and Moon. (55) The basic invention appears to be drawn from an episode in Lucan's De bello civili, or one of its vernacular redactions, in which the witch Erichto is described as preying on infants and slaying healthy young ephebes to press them into her service. (56) Beyond the specific textual sources, however, Lo stregozzo seems engaged with the making of art itself and with its current legitimating mythologies. In particular, the en graving calls to mind the animated, anatomically perfected male nude of Michelangelo and the role of fantasia in his artistic enterprise. The engraving is especially striking for the degree to which it makes reference to the compositional process. The main armature of the composition is in the form of a skeleton--the "bones," in other words, of the composition, and the human figures appear to be assembling the very chariot of bones they are drawing. The elephant-eared, beaked, and clawed creatures are fantastic assemblages, evoking the unbridled operations of the combinatory fantasia, or the recomposition of bodies by the "reverse anatomy" of artists like Michelangelo. Leon Battista Alberti had proposed the construction of figures from the skeleton outward, in a series of layers--bones, flesh, clothing--reversing the actual processes of bodily dissection and decomposition. (57)

Rosso notoriously went further in including such cadaverous figures in his religious compositions: the Virgin and Child with Saint Anne [?] and Saint John (Fig. 5), the Saint Jerome in the Buonafede Altarpiece (Galleria degli Uffizi, Florence), the aged figures in the drawing Saint Rach Giving Alms (Musee du Louvre, Paris), and Judith and Her Maidservant (Fig. 6). I would suggest that Rosso, conscious of claims regarding Michelangelo's divinity, is here expressing, in a grimly literal vein, the commonplace regarding the power of art, in Lancilotti's words, "to make something dead appear alive," endowing something dead with "living gestures." For Alberti, this had been the basis for acclaiming the divinity of art: "Painting contains a divine force that not only makes absent men present, as friendship is said to do, but moreover makes the dead appear alive after centuries [Nam habet ea quidem in se vim admodum divinam non modo ut quad de amicitia dicunt, absentes pictura praesentes esse faciat, verum etiam defu nctos longa post saecula viventibus exhibeat]"; "The faces of the dead are brought to life again through painting [Itaque vultus defunctorum per picturam quodammodo vitam praelongam degunt]." So Alberti had written, at the beginning of the second book of De pictura, addressing the memorial function of art; but here the topos of art restoring the dead to life is given a wittily macabre twist. The layered, sketchlike surfaces of Rosso's earlier painting might also be seen as evoking bodily decomposition, and thus standing in a metaphoric relation to the cadaverous figures (Saint Jerome and Saint Anne) whose bones are visible through their skin. Such a practice may also refer to the layered compositional procedure recommended by Alberti and Vasari of establishing the bones and muscles of a figure before "clothing" them with skin; (58) the figures can be seen as animated by the furious, improvisatory character of the painted surface. Such a layered construction follows the process of producing artificial perfecti on from natural imperfection later recommended by Vasari, but given the unfinished state of these figures, the act of spontaneous invention is preserved. The figures retain a "cruel and desperate" appearance; "fury" of execution produces Furies. (59)

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.

Rosso recovered an aspect of Donatello that can hardly be said to be part of an official program of reinventing Florentine tradition. The official view is characterized by artists such as Jacopo Sansovino, Benedetto da Rovezzano, and Andrea Ferrucci, who in their Apostle figures for the cathedral (before 1518) turned to the more "classical" Donatello of the Orsanmichele Saint Mark or Saint Louis; or on occasion Pontormo, who drew on Donatello's Pazzi Madonna for his Virgin and Child of 1521; or the artist (probably Francesco da Sangallo) who carved the ephebic Saint John the Baptist now in the Bargello. (64) Rosso, however, focused on the wraithlike figure types of the late reliefs or the Mary Magdalene. This particular choice of models may have a political resonance, but it is anything but celebratory. While the festivals of the restored Medici in 1513 were dominated by the imagery of regeneration and rebirth, their return was grimly anticipated in a bizarre carnival pageant directed by Piero di Cosimo the y ear before, in which the city was engulfed by hosts of the Living Dead. Vasari recorded that the trionfa della morte, in which the dead arose from their coffins to sing "Fummo gia come voi siete; Vo'sarete come noi" was interpreted in political terms, but he disingenuously asserts this significance to be pro-Medici: "And this was meant to refer to the Medici's return home, as if it were a resurrection from death to life, and the expulsion and downfall of their opponents..." (65) More than once in the second decade of the sixteenth century, the Medici myth of a deathless golden age is countered by the figure of the cadaver. Vasari laconically reports on the ironic death of the unfortunate child who, wearing only gold paint, personified "The Golden Age Resurrected" in the Medici carnival of 1513. (66) By the end of 1513, Machiavelli was reporting to Francesco Vettori on the widespread popular belief that Florence would experience cataclysmic ruin, plague, and fire: "That for eighteen years there has been here a devil in a human body--and he has said mass. That well over two million devils were unleashed in order to supervise the above mentioned activities. That they would enter into many dying bodies and not allow those bodies to putrefy so that false prophets and clerics might resuscitate the dead and be believed...."(67)

Rosso's art thus constitutes what might be called a counter-memory. (68) The past contains memories that will not be effaced, that refuse to succumb to the erasure of historical memory manifest in Medici assertions of continuity. Rosso's use of the past hardly aligns with the official and programmatic vision of the golden age heralded by the Medici motto Le temps revient. Something else, it is suggested, has also returned.

At stake is the consciousness of art as a simulating surface, a phantasmic veil of illusory life and presence that seeks to displace historical and physical reality rather than merely represent it. Such an understanding explains some of the curious and disturbing features of the work not only of Rosso but also of his artistic generation, and it is manifest above all in a strikingly new approach to drawing from the model. Instead of a deathless ideal beauty generated only by fantasia, the drawings of Rosso (Fig. 2), or of his sometime colleague Pontormo, convey a sense of bodies marked by aspects of physical existence--aging, discomfort, fear, privation--which are normally reversed and denied in the completion of a work of art (and which had appeared only very marginally in the work of Michelangelo). (69) Pontormo's supremely serene and refined figures resulted from an encounter with very different human models, of which the drawings leave a perturbing record (Figs. 7, 8). Such drawings, preserved by artistic heirs and collectors, serve as an ironic "underside" to the body as it appears in the finished works: elaborately fashioned specimens of implausible perfection, as immune from corruption as enamel or ivory. In Pontormo's work, art seems to be a process of creating fictions of beauty from carnal decay, a beauty that expunges the memory of death. The drawings emphasize art's specious reanimating power. Pontormo himself later wrote that the goal of painting is "to surpass nature in attempting to give spirit to a figure and to make it appear to be alive," and that in its divine and miraculous nature, the work of the painter did not merely emulate the work of God but surpassed it. God, after all, had the advantage of modeling figures in the round, while the painter had to produce the same effect through two-dimensional means. (70)

The True Veil and the Lying Mask

Pontormo's comment on the divinity of the artist was made much later, in 1549, but it aligns him with concerns central to his generation, which were forcefully thematized in Florentine art in the early cinquecento. Before turning again to Michelangelo, I want to outline briefly this dimension of metacritical and self-reflexive imagery of the preceding decades, against which the "contrary idea" of Rosso in the 1520s can be seen less in terms of personal eccentricity and more as an available position of critical dissidence. For Michelangelo was not the only artist whose artifice demanded to be measured against the workmanship of God. The emulation of divine workmanship was already a recurrent theme in the work of Rosso's peers, though none had yet received the epithet divino. In their religious images, these artists self-consciously presented their work as art "made by human hands" while frequently intimating a comparison with another, higher order of image: the acheiropoieton. These are images, like the sudari um of Veronica or the image of the Santissima Annunziata of Florence, that were held to possess a degree of participation in the essence of the supernatural being they represented. Some were considered divine in origin, works not made by human hands. In his painting The Virgin of the Harpies of 1517, Andrea del Sarto alluded to such cult images in which divine presence was manifest: his Virgin is conceived as a statue that "comes to life" amid clouds of votive incense (Fig. 9). (71) Leonardo had written of such miraculous images that answered the prayers of the faithful, which they venerated "as if the goddess were present in person." He insinuated that this was a result of the psychological power of simulacri (images) in themselves--a power that could be wielded by the artist who made them rather than the divinity who allegedly acted through them. (72) Sarto's painting renders this effect of divine presence in literal terms, as if emulating the condition of the miraculous icon, but the passage from represent ation to presence is rendered through the virtuoso human artifice of color and sfumato. Alexander Nagel's comments on sfumato are particularly suggestive here: "Eliminating all evidence of the work and process of painting, sfumato likened painting to divine creation, which brought things forth from nothing. It also invoked the example of the unmediated manifestation of the divine in the legendary image of Christ 'made without human hands.'" (73)

Hans Belting has suggested that the Renaissance be seen as a moment when, with regard to the image, the "old aura of the sacred" is replaced by the "new aura of the masterpiece," just as the "divine image" is supplanted by the commonplace of the "divine artist." (74) His account of the devotional image in medieval Europe concludes with the confrontation and dialogue of image and art. It seems reasonable, however, to adduce a third category of image, one that presents itself as lying between these two dispensations, and which by self-consciously artistic means claims to enact a metamorphosis from representation into presence itself.

Sarto's Virgin is one such image; Piero di Cosimo's Annunciate Virgin is another (made for the church of SS. Annunziata, it might be said to position itself quite literally between the dynamically "alive" cult image of the Annunciation in the church and the famous host of "nonalive" but life-size wax votive effigies from the secular world, which occupied the cloister). There is nothing ostensibly subversive about Sarto's or Piero's images in theological terms; however, they seem irresistibly to evoke the vicious pagan antitype to the Christian icon, toward which their renderings of the "living" image might seem to skirt dangerously close. This is the demonic and "fallen" imagery of the pagans, long figured in Christian art as the idol on a column. The portrayal of a standing Virgin in Sarto's altarpiece is itself a recapitulation of a type found in Byzantine icons, and its revival corresponds with the appearance of the idol as a theme in Florentine religious art.

The stained glass of the Strozzi Chapel, designed by Filippino Lippi in the 1490s, depicts a standing Virgin. The anti-type for the image of the standing Virgin appears in a fresco on the adjacent wall showing Philip, the name saint of the patron, performing an exorcism before a pagan statue (Fig. 10). This statue, an idol of Mars, is represented as an animated sculpture, and the "art" that gives it such a prodigious semblance of life is explicitly demonic in origin. Counter-posed to such diabolical artifice is the sacred prototype of holy icons, pictured on the painted frame above the idol: the sudarium of Veronica. If the idol corresponds in an extreme degree to the risks of image making and the complicity of human artifice with a diabolical impersonation of divinity, the sudarium is the ideal image, free from the mendacity of human artistry and part of the order of creation itself rather than merely simulated creation. Yet the confrontation of idol and sudarium is not without irony, given the manifest iden tification of Lippi's own art with that of pagan antiquity and the rich and copious all'antica invention in which his ingegno is most fully manifest; the fantastic pagan idol and its temple are the culmination of the extravagant antiquarian embellishment that the artist lavished on the entire chapel. (75) Human artifice is always potentially "fallen," and this is the case the more "true" (illusionistically animate, or present) it appears. While Lippi was completing the Strozzi commission, Florentines were listening to Savonarola inveighing against the deceitful seductions of modern painters:

I want to give you some good advice. Avoid those artifacts that belong with the riches of this world. Today they make figures in churches with such art and such ornamentation that they extinguish the light of God and of true contemplation, and in these you are not contemplating God but the artifice of the figures. (76)

Rosso's cadaver serves the same function as the theme of the idol: it raises questions about the boundaries between human and divine creation, about the degree to which one might stand in the place of the other, as well as the godlike power of the artist to imbue "dead things" with a sense of life. Whereas in Lippi's fresco the animated statue marked the difference between two incommensurable kinds of creative act, the human and the divine, Sarto's painting suggests a harmony and an identity between the divinely wrought animation of the image and its animation through painterly skill. In 1515, Pontormo produced his own confrontation of the human and divine origins of art with his Saint Veronica, painted on the occasion of Leo X's triumphal possesso of Florence (Fig. 11). The figure is artfully foreshortened, engaging in a sweeping contrapposto to provide a virtuoso "frame" for the sudarium, the origin of all cult images, made without human hands from the face of Christ. Yet here, too, human and divine art are presented as a choice, or as a paragone. Rather than holding the sudarium frontally before her, in accordance with iconographic convention, Veronica turns it to one side, so that the artifice of her powerfully sculptural body (an emulation of Donatello's Judith) is set forth for admiration. Another unconventional note is the fact that it is Veronica's gaze alone, rather than that of Christ on the cloth, that engages the spectator.

Do such images finally mark the difference between the artifact and the vera icon (true image), or do they seek to transcend such a distinction? Where was human art to be located on the spectrum between idol and divinely charged icon? These Florentine works seem to confront a long-standing fear and mistrust that images could arouse, for which Petrarch (long before Savonarola) had been a noteworthy spokesman in his De remediis utriusque fortunae, where "the lifelike gestures, the movement in these unmoving pictures, the figures jutting forth from their places, the faces that seem about to breathe' are held to constitute a dangerous lure (periculum) for the beholder. (77) This is a fear of a kind of excess in representation, of the image as a substitute that might eclipse what it stands for. (78) These are the critical reflections that Rosso also engaged in his work, above all the topos of investing what is dead with a spurious quality of life. In his art, however, the uncanny life of the idol is replaced by th at of the "living cadaver" in order to relate it more directly to the anatomical virtuosity of Michelangelo. The concerns set in motion by juxtaposing figures of art with figures of "real presence" are remarkably compatible with Jean Baudrillard's formulations on the simulacrum. For Baudrillard, the simulacrum is the representation that no longer merely stands for something else, it actually takes the place of what it stands for, substituting for it with its "murderous capacity" and becoming a "usurper." The icon, the image of the divine, epitomizes Baudrillard's simulacrum: it ultimately contains the reminder that it is neither reflection of the divine nor false substitute for the divine. Rather, in their claim to point to a truth beyond themselves, such simulacra offer the inference that such a truth may not exist, that there is no truth beyond the image. Images are the "truth which conceals that there is none." (79)

The substitutive potential of the image--even its capacity to substitute for divine presence itself--was a capacity of painting that Leonardo da Vinci had celebrated in his own account of the simulacro, where he asks the reader to consider why people undertake arduous pilgrimages to see particular holy images: "you will concede that it is the simulacro, for all the writings could not bring about this effect, in representing both the form and the potency of the divinity [tu confesserai essere tale simulacro, il quale far non po tutte le scritture che figurar pottessino in effiggia, e in virtu tale Iddea]." (80)

For subsequent writers on art, the distinction between "true image" and "idol," and its implications for current artistic practice, entailed much anxiety, especially in the wake of the Protestant attack on the Christian use of images. (81) Some cinquecento writers reflected on the fictiveness, pernicious sensuality, and compulsive force of the simulacrum, as it was identified in a long tradition stretching from late antiquity to the Reformation. In his treatise Disegno, Doni wrote of instances among the ancients in which young men beguiled by "the delusions of the Devil" succumbed to lust for idols of Venus. Michelangelo's Aurora in the Medici Chapel, a work that Doni acclaims as a triumph over Nature, can nowadays have the same effect, he says, even though "it does not have the Devil inside it, like the ancient idols [non ha il Diavolo dentro come gl'antichi Idoli]." (82) Doni insists, nonetheless, that Michelangelo's voluptuous simulations of sacred bodies are potentially divine in origin. He presents Miche langelo's rendition of the Virgin with nursing child in the chapel (a theme he apparently derived from an icon in the church of S. Lorenzo (83)) as the result of a supernatural vision. The Virgin, he claims, revealed herself to the artist when he was carving her image for the Magnifici Tomb, and thus the statue is the product of more than merely human art. (84)

In this, Doni is responding to the kinds of critical scrutiny that Michelangelo's extravagant artifice, with its claims of divine inspiration, could incur. His coy comparison of the figures in the Medici Chapel with both pagan idols and divinely authorized icons is strangely apposite--for it is already strongly implicit in the work itself. Part of the disquieting effect produced by this monument results from the irony with which Michelangelo invested it, the degree to which representation has been subordinated to simulation and replication. For Michelangelo's power to invest artistically fashioned figures with a sense of life and with a kind of erotic sensual compulsion is emphatically marked as an effect of the simulacrum.

Some scholars have drawn attention to the singularly ironic way in which Michelangelo conceived the function of funerary chapel and dynastic memorial (in all likelihood with the encouragement of the patron, Clement VII) (85) For example, even allowing for the chapel's unfinished state, it is curious that there are no inscriptions, epitaphs, or heraldic signs anywhere visible. The commemorative function is sustained by sculptured effigies of two dead Medici princes, which, as contemporaries noted, were arbitrary constructions by the artist; the creation of ideal heroic bodies substituted for the conventional funerary portrait. "In a thousand years," Michelangelo is said to have remarked, "nobody will know that they looked any different." (86) The theme of uncanny and even erotic substitution appears in other commentators: Doni wrote that in its artificial perfection, the figure of Dawn surpassed the sexual appeal of a real woman; Hollanda praised "the melancholy of a dead man who appeared to live." (87) Others responded to the manifestly hybrid and composite character of the anatomies, the knowledge of nature that they revealed, and the artefizio (artifice) with which they were assembled. (88) Replication and substitution, whether of icons or historical individuals, is constantly foregrounded in the imagery of the chapel itself. The two Medici capitani wear cuirasses that were singled out for their "divinity" by Vasari, drawing attention perhaps to their uncannily sensate and even animate character (Fig. 12). These cuirasses suggest a second skin, and the very distinction between the body and its coverings is at first glance uncertain. There is the striking sense that the entire monument announces its status as a phantasm or simulacrum. The sign of phantasmic simulation--its capacity to displace the subject of memory--is the ubiquitous mask that appears beneath the figure of Night, on the armor of the capitani, and in the friezes of architectural ornament by Silvio Cosini (the sometime wearer of human skin) (Figs. 13, 14). Sculpture, like painting, is thus proclaimed to be an art of ambiguous surfaces, and, as Doni realized, it has even more obvious affinities with the pagan idol. (89) Medici history and Medici portraiture have been supplanted by an uncanny, disquieting, more-present-than-life simulation of bodily surface and the illusion of animate life. The evocation of dreams and false visions (both can be designated as laruva, the Latin word for mask, or as ombra, the word for ghost) corresponds to an embrace of art as erotic, beguiling, and fearsome. In Doni's terms, just as sculpture descends from the pagan idol, so painting has its origins in the ombra, which comprehends not just the shadow of bodies but the "ghosts," shades, or phantasms of bodies. The artist's capacity to form images is identified not with Dante's alta fantasia but with the nocturnal domain of dreams, of ghosts and illusions, not with a higher power of the mind but displaced downward, grounded in the lower body-specifically, in 'Night's invol untary generation of forms from her womb; she gives birth to an owl, to poppies, and to inchoate forms left incomplete by the sculptor. This conception of artistic generation is something with which Michelangelo had come to identify; in a series of sonnets composed in tandem with his work on the chapel, Michelangelo addressed Night as an inspiring force and even declared himself to resemble Night. (90)

The imagery of masks, skins, ambiguous surfaces calls to mind an important classical locus for the identification of simulacra with dreams and illusions, one that Michelangelo could well have been familiar with. This was the De rerum natura of Lucretius, a text that scarcely three decades before had occupied a singular status in the artistic and poetic culture of Lorenzo de' Medici himself (generating inventions for Sandro Botticelli, Luca Signorelli, and Piero di Cosimo (91)). In discussing human vision, Lucretius adopts the term simulacra to define the optical "phantasms" that objects present to the human eye, throwing these off not like rays of light but "as often when cicadas drop their neat coats [tunicas] in summer, and when calves at birth throw off the caul [membranas] from their outermost surface, and also when the slippery serpent casts off his vesture amongst the thorns (for we often see the brambles enriched with their flying spoils)." (92) "It is these same [simulacra]," he writes, "that encounte ring us in wakeful hours, terrify our minds, as also in sleep, when we often behold wonderful shapes and simulacra of the dead, which have often aroused us in horror while we lay languid in sleep." (93) The Medici Chapel thus appears under the sign of the substitute or the simulacrum; it is by no means evident that "divine" artistry is being put on display here in anything like as deliberate a sense as the fictiveness of art.

Michelangelo's subsequent and deeply controversial work, the fresco of The Last Judgment in the Sistine Chapel, is also informed by a self-reflexive concern with the virtual life of images, as well as with the analogy of human and divine creation--or, rather, "resurrection" (Fig. 15). The difference is that, as with Rosso, the always incipient tension is here taken to bizarre and unsettling extremes. It is not hard to demonstrate that Michelangelo's contemporaries, whether hostile, like Giovanni Andrea Gilio, or defensive, like Ascanio Condivi, saw the work as a theoretical demonstration, a visual summary of the power of art: "Michelangelo expressed all that the art of painting can do with the human body, leaving out no attitude or gesture whatever..., apart from the sublime composition of the narrative, we see represented here all that nature can do with the human body." (94) Vasari adds to such assertions a characterization of the work as a divine vision. His sense of the centrality of The Last Judgment as an epitome of art itself and of the divine enterprise of the artist as epitomized by Michelangelo is manifest in his frontispiece to the 1568 edition of his Lives. The woodcut uses the resurrection topos--the notion of investing the dead with life--to convey simultaneously the power of art and the power of writing. In this image of the Last Judgment, inscribed "so long as [art] shall live, never shall I accept that men are truly dead," heroic Michelangelesque figures rise from the earth, presided over not by Christ and the angels but by female personifications of painting, sculpture, and architecture (Fig. 16). (95)

This was one way of understanding The Last Judgment as a painting "about art." But during the same decade another artist--one frequently measured against Michelangelo--seems to have responded to other visual cues in the fresco, or perhaps to the darker characterization of Michelangelo's enterprise, which had emerged in the Medici Chapel. Giulio Clovio, who had known Rosso, Michelangelo, and the anatomically obsessed Bartolomeo Torri, made an image that expresses the disquieting role of the artist in producing the appearance of life from the study of the physical and the mortal. In the margins of a miniature in a lectionary, Giulio Clovio placed a flayed cadaver partly wrapped in a sheet, a pair of masks and a weeping put to at his feet (Fig. 17). Significantly, the scene depicted within the frame is The Last Judgment. The flayed body immediately raises the context of anatomical study. (96) The mask, or larva, is once again a symbol of a particular density; it denotes the dream, or illusion, as well as the unc anny apparition or ghost. (97) The divine reintegration and reanimation of the bodies of the dead by God on Judgment Day is counterposed with the artist's illusionistic generation of life through the anatomical study of the dead. The enlivened corpse, like the mask, like the artist's anatomically based inventions of the figure, are all phantasmic simulacra of truly divine creation; all of them are parodies of authentic life. Clovio's miniature was produced at a time of increasing concern that the artistic presentation of Christian truth would be contaminated, as one commentator put it, by "fabulae et somnia quorundam curiosorum hominum" --the fables and dreams of fanciful men. (98)

Today, we are perhaps far more preoccupied than were Renaissance viewers with the fact that Michelangelo placed an empty skin at the center of the epic composition, and that it cannot be fully explained as the attribute of Saint Bartholomew, who holds it beneath the gaze of the judging Christ. The flayed skin in The Last Judgment has the status of a mask; an entire body, putatively that of the author, has been turned into a larva, an empty and inanimate persona void of inspiriting energy (Fig. 18). It is now conventional to interpret this feature in terms of an agonistic, confessional self-portrayal, a self-castigation by the artist for his own audacity, and hence a guarantee of his sincerity. The "self-portrait" has given modern scholars material to defend Michelangelo from the charges of excessive license leveled against him in the sixteenth century. (99) Yet any interpretation that sees the fresco solely in terms of personal testimony and doctrinal orthodoxy leaves much to be explained. (100) The fresco, a s some of Michelangelo's most articulate critics pointed out, seems to court scandal, to exult in the equivocality of gesture and posture far exceeding that in any previous work by the artist. Far from achieving the intended effect of the sublime in their eyes, the artist produced results that are unnaturally forceful and violent in the rendering of the figure and its movements. Both Gilio and Aretino noted a constant transgressive logic of inversion, a descent from high to low, operating in the work. For Gilio, the vivid gestures and poses betokened not the inspiration of the artist, the ecstasy of the blessed, or the dignity of man in God's image but the vulgar antics of acrobats and stage performers; the tumultuous movements of the crowds of beati in heaven make them appear "more like people at a market or a fair [piuttosto gente di mercato o di fiera]." As regards the elevated claims of artistic inspiration, he proposes instead that Michelangelo acted with the disorderly passions of an innamorato who will adopt any means to satisfy his worldly beloved. Instead of being legitimated by a claim to poetic fury, Michelangelo is one of a class of "notomisti del furioso"--crazed anatomists who generate uncanny and perverse and disorderly bodies, making "nature weep and art laugh." Lomazzo reports Pope Paul IV's intention to have the fresco destroyed on account of its "wicked exhibition of nakedness and buffooneries." (101)

Although these reactions were obviously partisan and, in Aretino's case, certainly opportunistic, perhaps the writers were more attuned than modern commentators to the disconcertingly insistent, sexualized physicality of the figures, to a persistent and even purposeful ambiguity in the rendering of the body and its sensations. It is tacitly acknowledged that the body is a dangerously unstable symbolic vehicle, even in the visual propaganda for a religion that has as its core the mysteries of incarnation and resurrection--and the consequent redemption of the flesh. Others were perturbed by the passionate embraces and kisses exchanged by the blessed in heaven, a concern that may have been exacerbated not only by the fact that these figures are nude but also that they appear in each case to be male (Fig. 19). (102) The authors of several texts allow themselves a moment of burlesque indulgence in describing the depiction of Saints Catherine and Blaise, whose copulatory juxtaposition was heavily altered by Daniele da Volterra, although it continued to circulate in prints after the fresco. These figures invariably appeared as a contamination from another context, that of the "low" visual genre of pornography, especially to an audience that would have remembered an earlier artistic scandal in Rome: Giulio Romano's pornographic illustrations for Aretino's own I modi, published in 1524.

To remark on the fresco's scandalous character is not at all to call into question its status as a work of religious propaganda, painted in an "epic" or metaphoric style that was no longer tolerable in the changed religious climate of the 1540s, but merely to underline that the work needs to be described and explained in terms of more than just its official program. For it is necessary to raise the possibility, consistent with the visual experience of Renaissance commentators and with our own, that The Last Judgment is also a transgressive painting--in fact, that no other kind of painting was possible at this point, given the avowedly artificial basis of Michelangelo's figurative language and the recognition of artifice that is implicit in a series of parodies or exaggerations of artistic divinity.

Yet in the light of the preceding discussion, of the theme of art as "resurrection" and its confrontation by Rosso, followed by its interrogation by Michelangelo himself in the Medici Chapel, the juxtaposition (we might say contrapposto) of supernaturally animate, dynamically three-dimensional bodies with an unresurrected cadaverous husk seems particularly suggestive. Before reading anything into its portrayal, the skin should be recognized as a hollow and empty surface, a mere mask; life, substance, and identity have been evacuated from it. The skin is a sign of inauthenticity; one of its purposes may have been to evoke the missing antitype of idols and false images: the sudarium of Veronica, the paradigm of the divinely authenticated likeness, and the very relic that prefigured the face-to-face encounter with Christ in the Last Judgment. (103) As is normal in representations of the Last Judgment, the sudarium does not appear among the arma christi born by angels in the uppermost zone of the fresco. (104) In stead of the face of Christ impressed on linen, we have the inchoate features of a disembodied human skin. But this substitution could point to the fact that the sudarium is absent in a double sense: Rome's greatest relic, for centuries the prime attraction for pilgrims seeking to gaze on the face of Christ, had been desecrated and lost during the 1527 sack of Rome. I propose that we see this loss of the sudarium, the divinely authored foundation for the image of divinity, acknowledged in the fresco itself, in the substitution of a larval "mask" (possibly bearing the features of the artist) and in the complete arbitrariness of the image of Christ, an astonishing and, for some, a scandalous departure from iconographic convention. (105)

If we take the skin persona as a self-portrait, it might signify that the artist has been supplanted as the origin of meaning within his own creation; thus, it would stand as a final liquidation of the divine persona of the artist, in whom no authenticating force of divine inspiration can be seen operating. (106) The work is delivered to the gaze of others; its maker can no longer function as an intention who can stabilize and determine the significance of his ambiguously beautiful figures. The images of the fantasia acquire a phantasmic, dreamlike "life of their own," severed from the immobilized control of the artist. (107)

The reading of the skin as a figure of authorial disengagement or absence--a not-self or antiportrait--may be strengthened by another noteworthy absence within the fresco. In preparatory drawings for the fresco, one of the standard protagonists of traditional Last Judgment iconography occupied a prominent place. Marcia Hall has pointed out that Michelangelo "began with a conservative, traditional conception: a seated Christ, with Saint Michael standing below." (108) Michael the Archangel is, of course, Michelangelo's namesake, and those who elaborated on the theme of Michelangelo's divinity often played on his identification with the angel. (109) Yet this figure is manifestly missing from the final fresco, thus forestalling any risk that the artist might be identified among the figures of sacred narrative. The divine persona of Michelangelo no longer operates here.

The notion of a nondivine basis for artistic inspiration is presented in one remarkable final irony within the fresco: through the perverse anatomical hybrid based on Dante's Minos (Fig. 20). It has been observed that Michelangelo's Minos is prompted by a little devil derived from the angelic genius who inspires Isaiah on the ceiling. (110) In a further citation of inspired figures from the Sistine vault, Minos is a transgendered, monstrous parody of the figure of the Cumaean Sibyl, with the same profile, corpulent body, and massive breasts (Fig. 21). Inspired figures of the ceiling are thus reborn in a grotesque, hybrid form, and the artistic fabrication of beautiful bodies through a composite procedure is transformed into a generation of monsters.

We need, in summary, when dealing with complex works of art (especially when the very category of "art" is problematic), to consider the degree to which they might point away from the beliefs and ideologies into whose service they are pressed. Doing so does not entail insisting on revolutionary, subversive, or "reformist" intentions on the artist's part; the artist's intention is seldom knowable or available as a principle from which meaning can be stabilized. In the case of Rosso, Pontormo, and Michelangelo, who allow contradiction to resonate in their work, such dissidence may result as much from a posture of alienated detachment as from a conscious engagement. Michelangelo's intimations of a passive, nondivine, artificial persona appear in a work that reaches new heights of inventiveness, that offers a paradoxical reassertion of the worldliness of art and the transgressive pleasures of artistic license. The body is the sign not of sublime animation betokening inspiration, and thus of legitimating truth and divine authenticity, but a means of emptying truth from the image. What is this if not an attempt to free the image from the burden of authenticity that had been charged to the icon? Ultimately, what we have here is a valorization of the surface, aligning the image with the new and possibly undivine category of art, which makes the image available for other kinds of understanding. Such a move is actively resisted, even thwarted by the institutional pronouncements on art in the mid-sixteenth century--and by a hagiography of Michelangelo the martyr that continues to the present day.

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]."

(9.) See the cautionary words of Charles Hope, "In Lorenzo's Garden," New York Review of Books, June 24, 1999, 65, who points out that "poets are regularly called divine ... as are other painters and sculptors ... noble women, courtesans, historians, calligraphers, and even the bronze horses of San Marco in Venice." This leveling approach tends to underestimate the departures from commonplace usage of the epithet in Michelangelo's case, where the topos of divinity resonates with other distinctively "superhuman" attributes--the artist's name, his realization of "impossible" feats of painting and sculpture, his re-creation of the Book of Genesis on the Sistine vault, his ability to fabricate human figures and to infuse them with an apparent quality of vital spirit. The significance of divinity is discussed in Vasari, La vita di Michelangelo nelle redazioni del 1550 e 1568, ed. Paola Barocchi and Rosanna Bettarini (Florence: Sansoni, 1966), vol. 2, 21; and in Summers, 527. See also Ernst Kris and Otto Kurz, Lege nd, Myth, and Magic in the Image of the Artist: A Historical Experiment, trans. Alastair Lang (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1979), 38-59; Patricia Emison, High and Low Style in Italian Renaissance Art (New York: Garland, 1997), 152-59; and Michael Cole, "Cellini's Blood," Art Bulletin 81 (1999): 215-35.

(10.) Anton Francesco Doni, "A Michelangelo Buonarotti," Jan. 12, 1543, in Doni, Lettere (Venice, 1546), fols. 20v-21, included in Doni, fol. 91: "ch'i vostri marmi e i vostri colori meritano piu onore e maggior riverenza che gli Dei; che voi devreste essere adorato da gli uomini e senza altrimenti morire levato da gli angeli in un seggio de i piu belli del Paradiso." "E certo io vi tengo per uno Iddio con licenza della nostra fede."

(11.) Vasari, vol. 7, 180: "... cosi nell'altra, quando divide l'acqua dalla terra: figure bellissime ed acutezze d'ingegno degne solamente d'essere fatte dalle divinissime mani di Michelangelo"; "Senza che egli, per mostrare la perfezione dell'arte e la grandezza di Dio, fece nelle istorie il suo dividere la luce delle tenebre...."

(12.) Pietro Aretino to Michelangelo, Nov. 1545 (emphasis mine), in Giovanna Poggi, witls Paola Barocchi and Renzo Ristori, eds., Il carteggio di Michelangelo, 5 vols. (Florence: SPES, 1979), vol. 4, 215: "... Adunque quel Michelagnolo stupendo in la fama, quel Michelagnolo notabile in la prudentia, quel Michelagnolo ammiranno nei costumi ha voluto mostrare a le genti non meno impieta di irreligione che perfettion di pittura? E possibile che voi, che per essere divino non degnate il consortio degli huomini, haviate cio fatto nel maggio tempio di Dio?"

(13.) Summers, 69, 175. On movement and the inspired figure, see also Edgar Wind, "Michelangelo's Prophets and Sibyls," in Art and Politics in Renaissance Italy, ed. George Holmes (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993), 280-91.

(14.) Given that the argument regards the artist's license to "make a well-formed naked body [ben formare un corpo ignudo]," a sexual sense may also be intended by "pennello" here. The passage is discussed and translated in Thomas Frangenberg, "Decorum in the Magno Palazzo in Trent," Renaissance Studies 7, no. 4 (1993): 370-72.

(15.) Cennino d'Andrea Cennini, The Book of the Art / Il Libro dell'arte, trans. D. V. Thompson Jr. (New York: Dover, 1960), 1: "an occupation known as painting, which calls for imagination, and skill of hand, in order to discover things not seen, hiding themselves under the shadow of natural objects, and to fix them with the hand, presenting to plain sight what does not actually exist." Paolo Pino, Dialogo della pittura (Venice, 1548), in Trattati d'arte del cinquecento, ed. Paola Barocchi, 3 vols. (Bari: Laterza, 1960), vol. 1, 115: "perche la pittura e propria poesia, cioe invenzione, a qual fa apparere quello che non e...."

(16.) Albrecht Durer, quoted in Erwin Panofsky, The Life and Art of Albrecht Durer (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1955), 280.

(17.) Angelo Poliziano, quoted in Vasari, vol. 2, 630: "Artifices potui digitis animare colores, / Sperataque animos fallere voce diu...."

(18.) Francesco Lancilotti, Tractato di pictura (Rome 1509), ed. Hessel Miedema and Pieter De Meijer (Amsterdam: Kunsthistorisch Institut, 1976), 14, 18: "Fare un cosa morta parer viva / Quale iscienza e piu balla che questa? / O felice colui cha qui arriva!"

(19.) Vasari, vol. 7, 180, 166: "...Adamo, figurato di bellezza, di attitudine e di dintorni, di qualita che e' par fatto di nuovo dal sommo e primo suo Creatore, piuttosto che dal pennello e disegno d'uno huomo tale"; "... Moise puo piu oggi che mai chiamarsi amico di Dio, poiche tanto innanzi agli altri ha voluto mettere insieme e preparargli il corpo per la sua resurrezione per le mani di Michelagnolo...."

(20.) Hollanda, 81-82: "[painting] reveals to us death and what we are more gently than in any other way; it shows us the torments and dangers of Hell and, in so far as may be, the glory and peace of the blest, and that incomprehensible image of the Lord our God.... It plunges our mind and spirit in ecstasy beyond the stars, in contemplation of that celestial glory...." The speaker is Vittoria Colonna, who several times refers to paintings ability to make the dead present to the living; Lattanzio Tolomei adds that "man can have no weapon against his mortality and against envious time save painting only. And Pythagoras was of much the same opinion when he said that in three things alone were men like unto immortal God: in knowledge, painting, and music."

(21.) Michelangelo, no. 54, in Saslow, 140 (amended translation): "Io craderrei, se tu fussi di sasso, / amarti con tal fede, ch'i' potrei / farti meco venir piu che di passo; / se fussi morto, parlar ti farei...." Saslow notes that the ironic and grotesque tone of the stanzas shows the poet's awareness of Francesco Berni in these years (1531-32). Michelangelo, it appears, found it necessary to assume an ironic distance from the conceit of deus artifex. The one occasion where he clearly makes an alignment between his own workmanship and that of God stresses the distance between his own "crude hammer [rozzo martello]" and the divine workmanship of God; see no. 46 in Saslow, 128.

(22.) Michelangelo to Nicolo Martelli, Jan. 20, 1542, in Poggi et al. (as in n. 12), vol. 4,125.

(23.) Michelangelo's verse occasionally evokes the powers of a spirit, which has apprehension of things divine, but often this spirito seems fugitive, alienated from a poetic self that is frequently dramatized in terms of corporeality and mortality. In the sonnet "Se ben concetto ha la divina parte," artistic divinity is identified with a power to animate stone, which art alone cannot achieve. Yet this power is identified not with the speaker of the poem but with the "noble and worthy lady [donna alta e degna]" who perfects and refines the poet himself. Sadlow, 400, no. 236. It is often apparent that it is the mortal body that speaks in the verse, the "tired skin [stanca spoglia]," 317 (no. 161), or "dangerous and mortal veil [periglioso e mortal velo]." In no. 153, the self is a hollowed-out container, waiting to be filled like a sculptural mold. No. 185 further polarizes the division of the self: "my soul, stripped of me...." A fragmentary composition from 1552, 473 (no. 282), suggests that the enterprise o f the artist might be less than divine, and that the "falsi concetti" with which the artist sculpts "cose divine" might be a danger to the soul: "In such slavery, and with so much boredom / and with false conceptions and great peril / to the soul, to be here sculpting divine things [Con tanta servitu, con tanto tedio / e con falsi concetti e gran periglio / dell'alma, a sculpir qui case divine]." A recent trajectory of inquiry focuses on the apparent problematization of artistic and poetic agency by Michelangelo. See William Kennedy, "Petrarchan Authority and Gender Revision in Michelangelo's Rime," in Interpreting the Italian Renaissance: Literary Perspectives, ed. Antonio Toscano (New York: Forum Italicum, 1991), 55-66; and Laura Agoston, "Sonnets, Sculpture, Death: The Mediums of Michelangelo's Self-Imaging," Art History 20, no. 4 (1998): 535-55.

(24.) Francesco Berni: Poesie e Prose, ed. Ezio Chiorboli, Biblioteca dell'Archivium Romanum, 1st ser., 20 (1934): 167-68: "... Che fate voi da poi che vi lasciai / Con quel di chi noi siam tanto divoti, / Cha non e donna, e me ne inamorai? / Io dico Michel Agnol Buonarroti, / che quand'i' '1 veggio mi vien fantasia / D'nrdergli incenso at attaccargli voti; / E credo che sarebbe opra piu pia / che farsi bigia o bianca una giornea, / Quand'un guarisse d'una malattia. / Costui cred'io che sin la propria idea / Della scultura e dell'architettura, / Come della giustizia mona Astrea, / E chi volesse fare una figura / Che le rapresentasse ambe due bene, / Credo che faria lui per forza pura. / Poi voi sapete quanto egli e da bene, / Com'ha giudicio, ingegno e discrezione, / Come conosce il vero, il bello e 'l bene. / Ho visto qualche sua composiziona: / Son ignorante, e pur direi d'avelle / Lette tutte nel mezzo di Platone; / Si ch'egli e nuovo Apollo a nuovo Apelle: / Tacete unquanco, pallide viole / E liquide cris talli e fiere snelle: / E'dice cose a voi dite parole. / Cosi, moderni voi scarpellatori / Et anche antichi, andate tutti al sole...."

(25.) Charles de Tolnay, Michelangelo: The Final Period (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1961), 31, writes that Michelangelo "avoided any purely decorative treatment of the human body in the fashion of the Mannerists. His work imparts neither the illusionistic image of the Renaissance artists nor the effect of the artificial and arbitrary 'figure arabesques' of the Mannerists--he seems to conjure up an ontological reality."

(26.) Michelangelo, no. 85 (amphasis mine), in Saslow, 201: "...II Bernin ringraziate per mio amore / che fra tanti lui sol consc'il vero / di me; che chi mi stim'e 'n grand errore. / Ma In sun disciplina el lum' intero / mi puo ben dar, a gran miracol fia, / a far an uom dipint'un uom da vero."

(27.) For a modern edition and translation, with a discussion of the circumstances of the work's composition and publication and of the author's masking strategies, see Ann Reynolds, Renaissance Humanism at the Court of Clement VII: Francesco Berni's "Dialogue against Poets" in Context (New York: Garland, 1997).

(28.) Ibid., 180: "[Sanga] ... hanno piacer di esser chiamati pazzi, dicendo che son furiosi e che hanno il furor divino e volano sopra le stelle e cotali altre schiochezze.... [Berni] ... Da putto ho fatto qualche verso: ora ne son guarito, a ben ne ringrazio messer Domenedio, a ne ho tanta allagrezza coma se fussi guarito della spiritato" (emphasis mine).

(29.) See ibid., 194: "Ma che piu bella prova della lor malignita? Non dicono eglino che a versi possono tirare la luna dal cielo, cavar li spiriti delle sepoltura, tramutare un campo di biada ad an altro e far mile ribalderie, sino a far crepar Ia serpi?"; and 200: "Che soie mi? E've n'o oldi dir tant mal ch'a pens ch'i' sian qualche nagromant, o smarrivuo, o ladre."

(30.) Michelangelo, no. 20, in Saslow, 90-92.

(31.) See Patrizia Bettella, "Discourse of Resistance: The Parody of Feminine Beauty in Berni, Doni, and Firenzuola," Modern Language Notes 113 (1998): 192-203. Contact with Berni may have prompted Michelangelo to take up the grotesque mock-Petrarchan idiom, which he would have known of in examples by Poliziano and Lorenzo de' Medici. Saslow, 72 n. 14, comments on the presence of a Berniesque image, the "Syrian bow," in Michelangelo's early grotesque poetic self-portrait "L'ho gia fatto an gozzo in questo stento."

(32.) Michelangelo, no. 154, in Saslow, 142: "...cosi l'immagin tua, che fuor m'immolla / dentro per gli occhi cresca, ond'io m'allargo / coma pelle ove gonfia la midolla; / entrando in me per si stretta viaggio, / che tu mai o'esca ardir creder non aggio...."

(33.) Roberto Ciardi, L'officina della maniera: Varieta e fierezza nell'arte fiorentina del cinquecento fra le due repubbliche 1494-1530 (Venice: Marsiglio, 1996), 364, writes that the figure is "certainly contrary to the canons of female beauty theorized by Italian writers of the first half of the sixteenth century (Castiglione, Firenzuola, Pino)." Sea also Carroll, 58-60. For the tradition that Rosso portrayed Berni in the figure of Saint James in his SS. Annunziata fresco of the Assumption, painted in 1517, when Berni left Florence for Rome, see Berni (as inn. 24), v-vi; and Franklin, 26. Falciani, 31-38, has also connected Rosso with anti-Petrarchan tendencies, linking them to a quattrocento revival-- embracing Burchiello and Donatello--favored by his anti-Medicean and politically exiled patrons Carlo Ginori and Giovanni Bandini.

(34.) A relationship between Berni and Rosso, while they were in Rome in the 1520s, is highly conceivable. Rosso was in Rome by late 1523, and although he was clearly not on good terms with the Florentine artistic community, he may have made (Or remade?) the acquaintance of Berni. Both Rosso and Berni were Tuscan expatriates and marginal dependents on the Roman or curial aristocracy, the society in which Michelangelo, despite occasional brusque expressions of disinterest, was far more successful in actualizing his social ambitions. Rosso and Berni shared a deidealizing view of the more elevated claims of their artistic professions, in which inspiration gives place to an ironic self-vilifying character nod gestures of parody (of Bembo, of Michelangelo) supplant more reverential forms of imitation. Much of Rosso's religious painting places the body in a sexual register, either facetiously or as a personal elaboration of corporeal symbolism. His Moses and the Daughters of Jethro is a dynamic composition centered on the genitals of Moses, and in his Ginori altarpiece, Saint Vincent Ferrer attests with his thumb and forefinger to the virility of the youthful Joseph. Few have been willing to deal with this ribald element in Rosso's work. See Graham Smith, "Rosso Fiorentino's Sposalizio in San Loreozo," Panthecon 34 (1976): 24-30.

(35.) The design for Rosso's Pluto and Ceres print is a close imitation of two of the Sistine ignudi, except they are arranged in a copulatory posture. As Bette Talvacchia notes, Taking Positions: On the Erotic in Renaissance Culture (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1999), 153, this irreverent borrowing "integrates the reference from a religious work into a profane setting, accenting a touchy issue with regard to the propriety of Michelangelo's nudes in their original sacred surrounding."

(36.) Eike D. Schmidt, "Fnror und imitatio: Visuelle Topoi in den Laokoon-Parodien Rosso Fiorentinos and Tizians," forthcoming in the acts of the conference "Topoi: Gedankenfiguren in der Kunst and Kunstliteratur der Renaissance," Kunsthistorisches Institut in Florence, May 8-11, 2000, also proposes a reading of the figure in terms of furor and inspiration, but in a more positive vein than in the reading proposed here.

(37.) Leonard Barkan, Unearthing the Past: Archaeology and Aesthetics in the Making of Renaissance Culture (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1999), 14.

(38.) Indeed, the very authorship of the invention--the boundary between Michelangelo and Rosso, the distinction of originality and imitation--is problematized in this image. The head of the figure literally reproduces (or is reproduced by?) a drawing made by Michelangelo for Gherardo Perini in the 1520s. Michael Hirst, Michelangelo and His Drawings (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1988), 109, assumes Rosso's derivation from Michelangelo's drawing. Creighton Gilbert, "Un viso quasiche di furia," in Michelangelo Drawings, ed. Craig Hugh Smyth (Washington, D.C.: National Gallery of Art, 1992), 220-21, reluctantly raises the possibility, only to dismiss it, that Michelangelo may have drawn on Rosso's invention, since the subject has no other parallel in Michelangelo's work at that time but was a specialty of Rosso's. Even if Michelangelo's Fury came first, the differences in effect are substantial in Rosso's version, and the work is more a critical reinterpretation than a copy. For additional discussion of Gia n Giacomo Caraglio's print after Rosso, see Carroll, 72; Franklin, 134-35; Falciani, 82-86; and A.W.G. Poseq, "Michelangelo's Self-Portrait on the Flayed Skin of St. Bartholomew," Gazette des Beaux-Arts, 6th ser., 124 (1994): 4.

(39.) Berni (as in n. 24), 175-76, no. 65. The poem probably postdates the Rosso/Caraglio print, but there is a generic similarity between Berni's verse and the descriptive poem inscribed beneath the print. Berni's poem is entitled "Vero spirito d'inferno per amore": "Vero inferno e il mio petto, / vero infernale spirito son io, / e vero infernal foco e l' foco mio. / Quell'arde, e non consuma, e non si vede; / e la mia fiamma e tale / che, perch'io vivo e non la mostro fore, / madonna non la crede. / Privo d'ogni speranza di mercede, / e del divino aspetto, / e lo spirito misero infernale; / et io gli sono eguale, / e vivo senza 'l mio vitale obietto, / ne speme ha la mia fede, / et ostinato in una voglia e l' core. / Anzi stats migliore / han gli spirti laggiu, che giustamente / ardono in foco, et io ardo innocente: / quegli spregian sovente / e bestemmion ['autor dell'esser loro, / et io chi mi tormenta amo et adoro." For the "fearful spirit of love [pauros spirito d'amore]" in the poetry of Dante's contem poraries, see Robert Klein, "Spirito Peregrino," in Form and Meaning: Essays on the Renaissance and Modern Art (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1981), 62-85; on spirits and spiritelli in Renaissance art, see Charles Dempsey, "Donatello's Spiritelli," in Ars naturam adiuvans: Festschrift fur Matthias Winner, ed. Victoria Flemming and Sebastian Schutze (Mainz: P. Von Zabern, 1996), 50-61; also idem, Inventing the Renaissance Putto (Chapel Hill, N.C.: University of North Carolina Press, 2001).

(40.) The violent convulsions of the possessed body are described in the episode of the demoniac boy in the Gospels of Matthew 17:14-20, Mark 9:13-28, and Luke 9:37-43. Such symptoms are also described in the Malleus maleficarum, Pt. 2, quaestio 1, cap. x; see The Malleus Maleficarum of Heinrich Kramer and James Sprenger, trans. Montague Summers (New York: Dover, 1971), 128ff.; and by the Florentine physician Antonio Benivieni, De abditis morborum causis (Florence, 1507), ed. and trans. Charles Singer (Oxford: Blackwell, 1934), 35-37, who attests that certain cases of epilepsy are demonic in origin. The symptoms of possession (rolling eyes, frenzied movement, speaking in tongues) are described in numerous 16th-century sources, including Jean Fernel, De abditis reruns causis (Paris, 1548); and the Sacerdotale Romanum (Venice, 1579), 329. On suds later sources, see Daniel P. Walker, Unclean Spirits: Possession and Exorcism in France and England in the Late Sixteenth and Early Seventeenth centuries (Philadelphia : University of Pennsylvania Press, 1981).

(41.) On "inspirited" figures, see now also Michael Cole, "The Figure Sforzala: Modelling, Power, and the Mannerist Body," Art History 24, no. 4 (2001): 529.

(42.) The contemporary discourse on demonic possession gave a particular weight to "phantasia" or imaginatione" as a human faculty that was particularly at risk from the interference of demons. Such discussions reflect strong anxiety regarding both the power and vulnerability of the imagination, its susceptibility to false notions and deluding visions, and its general permeability with regard to inimical external forces. Like the authors of the Malleus Maleficarum, Gianfrancesco Pico della Mirandola devoted much troubled speculation to the risks of demonic intervention in the workings of the imagination. While he held that those with sufficient purity of mind and habits could have apprehension of divine things and "become one with the blessed spirits," those with less robust moral faculties were dangerously vulnerable to phantasmic illusion and to the operation of nefarious spirits: "... it is from his phantasy, which has set up to be his prince and mistress, that man becomes a brute in life and character; an d by reason of his own evil nature, he is so much lower than the beasts as he destroys and perverts the order of divine majesty, degenerating into that bestial nature which was created to find in human nature its proximate end"; Pico della Mirandola, On the Imagination, ed. and trans. Harry Caplan (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1930), 45. For a more recent edition, see Pico della Mirandola, Uber die Vorstellung: De Imaginatione, ed. Eckhard Kessler, with essays by Charles Schmitt and Katherine Park (Munich: W. Fink, 1984).

(43.) The most famous instance is Lucan's De bello civili 6.508ff., concerning the Thessalian witch Erichto, who preys on desiccated corpses and summons the dead to life in order to know the future. Lucan's text was transmitted in a vernacular version, Li fait des Romains, from the 13th century, and more contemporaneously by the Pharsaglia in ottava rima by Cardinal Montichiello, printed in Milan in 1492. Editions of the Pharsaglia appeared in Rome the same year (published by Eucharium Silber, alias Franck), and in Venice and Bologna by 1495. See Louis-Ferdinand Flutre, Li fait des Romains dans les litteratures francaise et italienne du xiie au xvi siecle (Paris: Hachette, 1932), 310-11; and David P. Beneteau, "Per un'edizione critica dei Fatti dei Romani," Italianistica: Rivista di Letteratura Italiana 26 (1997): 401-11. Drawing on different source materials, Falciani, 82-86, also argues for a connection with witchcraft.

(44.) Vasari, vol. 5 (Life of Marcantonio Bolognese), 424: "una sua figura di notomia secca, che ha una testa di morte in mano e siede sopra un serpente, mentre un cigno canta...." On the notomia secca, sac Monique Kornell, "Rosso Fiorentino and the Anatomical Text," Burlington Magazine 131, no. 1041 (1989): 843-47.

(45.) Vasari, vol. 7, 146.

(46.) On the anatomical researches for Time Battle of Cascina, see James Elkins, "Michelangelo and the Human Form: His Knowledge and Use of Anatomy," Art History 7, no. 2 (1984): 176-86; and Bernard Schultz, Art and Anatomy in Renaissance Italy (Ann Arbor, Mich.: UMI Research Press, 1985), 89. The connection between anatomy, memory, and fantasia is outlined in Vasari, vol. 1, 172: "Design cannot have a good beginning if it has not continually been engaged in the portrayal of things in nature and studied from the paintings of excellent masters and ancient reliefs, as has many times been said. But above all, the best is the living nude male anti female figure, and to have memorized from continued practice the muscles of the torso, the back, the legs, the arms, the knees, and the bone structure, and to have ensured from much study that without having an actual model poses of every kind can be formed from the fantasia alone. In the same way, having seen bodies flayed in order to know how the skeleton is arranged and the muscles and nerves, with all the rules and terms of anatomy, to be able correctly and with great certainty to place the members of the body, and to arrange the muscles of the figures [... il qual disegno non puo avere buon'origine, se non s' ha doto continuamente opera a ritrarre cose naturali e studiato pitture d'eccellenti maestri ed istatue antiche di rilievo... Ma sopra tutto, il meglio e gl'ignudi degli uomini vivi e femine, e da quelli avere preso in memoria per lo continovo uso i muscoli del torso, delle schiene, delle gambe, delle braccia, delle gnocchia, e l'ossa di sotto, e poi avere sicurta per lo molto studio che senza avere in naturali inanzi si possa formare di fantasia da se attitudini per ogni verso; cosi aver veduto degli uomini scorticati per sapere come stanno l'ossa sotto et i muscoli et i nervi con tutti gli ordini e termini della notomia, per potere con maggior sicurta e piu rettamente situare le membra nell'uomo e porre i muscoli nelle figure...]" (emphasis mine). The goal of t his composition of the figure is "good grace and beautiful style [buona grazia e belle maniera]."

(47.) Pino, Dialogo della pittura, quoted in Summers, 402.

(48.) Vasari, vol. 7, 160: "Onde veduto si divine figure, dicono alcuni che le viddero, di man sua e d'altri, ancora non essere mai piu veduto cosa, che della divinita dell'arte nessuno altro ingegno possa arrivarla mai." Michelangelo's figures, and those of his followers, were constantly appraised for their disclosure or revelation of the internal structures of the body. It is perhaps this circumstance, more than any psychological one, that leads to the adaptation of figures by younger artists like Perino, Giulio Romano, Rosso, and Hans Baldung Grien as anatomical templates in mid-16th-century medical texts; their figures were seen as already the product of dissection and anatomical knowledge. For the Michelangelesque body as a revelation of internal structure, see Elkins (as in n. 46). For 16th-century testimony, see Gian Paolo Lomazzo, Trattato dell'arte della pittura, scultura, ed architettura (1584), in Gian Paolo Lomazzo" Scritti sulle arti, ed. Roberto Paolo Ciardi, 2 vols. (Florence: Marchi e Bertolli , 1974), vol. 2, 33, stating that Michelangelo "fiercely" exaggerated the rendering of musculature to demonstrate his anatomical knowledge: "Michelangelo, in order to demonstrata his perfect knowledge of anatomy, tended to go a little further in the accentuation of muscles, so as to show as more eminent and fierce that which nature had made more subtly in actual bodies [E si come Michel Angelo, per dimostrare la perfetta cognizione ch'egli avea de l'anatomia, volse inchinare un poco a l'estremo e rilevare alquanto piu i muscoli, per dismotrargli eminenti e fieri in que' corpi ne' quali la Natura gl'avea assotigliati....]."

(49.) On the practice of autopsy, dissection, and the teaching of anatomy in Italy, see Katherine Park, "The Criminal and the Saintly Body: Autopsy and Dissection in Renaissance Italy," Renaissance Quarterly 47 (1994): 1-33. As a corrective to earlier historical approaches, Park and other scholars stress the widespread nature of dissection and the liberal principles underlying its regulation; she elsewhere emphasizes the difference in attitude between Italy and northern Europe, where taboos against the opening of the body after death were more enduring; see Park, "The Sensitive Corpse: Body and Self in Renaissance Medicine," Fenway Court, 1990-91: 77-87. Andrea Carlino, Books of the Body: Anatomicai Ritual and Renaissance Learning, trans. John Tedeschi and Anne C. Tedeschi (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999), 213-25, however, argues that the permissive attitude in Italy coexisted with anxiety and repugnance, emerging from religious scruples about the violation of the corpse and from revulsion at the spectacle of dismemberment. He cites the elaborate propitiatory rituals for the burial of the cadaver following public anatomy lessons in Rome, in which medical students and professors sometimes participated, and quotes Vesalius's remark that his contemporaries "never have... seen anything as offensive as the dissection of human bodies," 98-115, 206. Yet his most abundant evidence for fear and revulsion comes from non-Italian sources, such as the defenses of anatomy by Johannes Dryander (1536) and Folker Coiter (1572), 223-25.

(50.) Vesalius, De humani corporis fabrica libri septem (Basel, 1543), bk. 1. xxviii; see the recent English edition, On the Fabric of the Body, trans. William Frank Richardson and John Burd Carma (San Francisco: Norman, 1998), 299.

(51.) For Cosini, see Vasari, "Vita di Andrea da Fiesole," vol. 4, 483; for Torri, see idem, "Vita di Giovan Antonio Lappoli," vol. 6, 16. See also Mimi Cazort, Monique Kornell, Katherine B. Roberts, The Ingenious Machine of Nature: Four Centuries of Art and Anatomy (Ottawa: National Gallery of Canada, 1996), 51. Piero Camporesi, The Incorruptible Flesh: Bodily Mutation in Religion and Folklore, trans. T. Croft-Murray (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), describes several incidences of corpses being despoiled of fat, skin, and other substances in which magical virtue or curative properties were believed to reside. The practice emerges from a belief in the ongoing incipient life of the body after death.

(52.) Alessandro Allori, Il primo libro de' ragionamenti delle regole del disegno d'Allesandro Allori con M. Agnolo Bronzino, in Scritti d'arte del cinquecento, ed. Paola Barocchi (Milan: Ricciardi, 1973), vol. 2, 1948. For Giovanni Battista Armenini's comments, see his On the True Precepts of the Art of Painting, ed. and trans. Edward J. Olszewski (New York: Burt Franklin, 1977), 140.

(53.) Lomazzo, Idea del Tempio della Pittura, in Lomazzo (as in n. 48), vol. 1, 292: "Perche egli ha dato alle figure sue una forma terribile cavata da i profondi secrati dell'anatomia, da pochissimi altri intesi, tarda, ma piena di dignita e maesta, con le arie a gli affetti maninconici, quali sono degli uomini dati allo studio et all contemplazione. E perche egli era tale ancora nei suoi costume, si puo dire che sia stato fra pittori come un Socrate."

(54.) Jean Paul Richter, The Literary Works of Leonardo da Vinci (London: Oxford University Press, 1939), vol. 2, 338, no. 1353. L'anonimo magliabecchiano, ed. A. Ficarra (Naples: Fiorentino, 1968), 124, cited in Schultz (as in n. 46), 90.

(55.) As pointed out in a stimulating recent discussion by Patricia Emison, "Truth and Bizzarria in an Engraving of Lo stregozzo," Art Bulletin 81 (1999): 623-36. I share Emison's view that Lo stregozzo presents the viewer with an interpretative dilemma, between understanding the image in terms of fantasia--as pure fiction or poetic invention--or in terms of mimesis, that is, as an actual visual chronicle of the activities of witches. Her conclusion, that ultimately the image should be seen as a kind of broadside or visual propaganda related to the Mirandola witch trials, is more questionable, as is her attribution of the invention to Battista Dossi. For the attribution of the invention to Girolamo Genga, see the entry by Achim Gnann, in Roma e lo stile classico di Raffaello, ed. Konrad Oberhuber (Milan: Electa, 1999), 192-93.

(56.) Lucan, De bello civili 6.516-62, ed. and trans. J. D. Duff (London: Heinemann, 1928), 343-45: "Haggard and loathly with age is the face of the witch; her awful countenance, overcast with a hellish pallor and weighed down by uncombed locks, is never seen by the clear sky; but if storm and black clouds take away the stars, then she issues forth from rifled tombs and tries to catch the nocturnal lightnings. Her tread blights the seeds of the fertile cornfield, and her breath poisons air that before was harmless.... The smoking ashes and burning bones of the young she snatches from the centre of the pyre, and the very torch from the hands of the parents.... In the same way she pierces the pregnant womb and delivers the child by an unnatural birth, in order to place it on the fiery altar; and whenever she requires the service of a strong and savage spirit [saevis ac fortibus umbris], she takes life with her own hand. Every death of man serves her turn. She tears off the bloom of the face on the young man's b ody, and her left hand severs the lock of hair on the head of the dying lad [Illa genae florem primaevo corpore volsit / Illa comam laeva morienti abscidit ephebo]."

(57.) Leon Battista Alberti, On Painting and On Sculpture: The Latin Texts of De Pictura and De Statua, ed. and trans. Cecil Grayson (London: Phaidon Press, 1972), 73-75. For a contemporaneous instance of an artist using Alberti's compositional method in a highly literal sense, building the figure from the skeleton outward, see Charles Rosenberg, "Raphael and the Florentine Istorio," in Raphael before Rome, ed. James Beck (Washington, D.C.: National Gallery of Art, 1986), 175-88. Baccio Bandinelli, or Rosso himself, produced a macabre composition of animated skeletons and cadavers known as Allegory of Death and Fame, engraved by Agostino Veneziano in 1518. This invention is very much in the same genre as the Fury; it is not only macabre but also a parody of compositional procedures heavily identified with the Tuscan tradition. The image evokes the kind of group composition familiar from a Lamentation or sober groupings of gesturing figures such as seen in the Tribute Money by Masaccio. It also draws several o f its emaciated, gesticulating figures directly from a work probably identified as a product of anatomical research, Leonardo's Adoration of the Magi. Sea Sydney J. Freedberg, Painting of the High Renaissance in Rome and Florence (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1961), 544. Carroll, 54-58, follows the modern attribution to Rosso, as does Ciardi (as inn. 33), 344-47. For the reinstatement of an earlier attribution to Bandinelli, see Franklin, 275 n. 50; and Cazort et al. (as in n. 51), 141-42. For an interpretation of the image in exemplary and moralizing terms, see Erwin Panofsky, "Mors vitae testimonium: The Positive Aspect of Death in Renaissance and Baroque Iconography," in Studien zur Toskanischen Kunst: Festschrift fur Ludwig Heinrick Heydenreich (Munich: Prestel, 1963), 232-36. On the animated cadaver, see also Luisa Vertova, "La morte secca," Mitteilungen des Kunsthistorisches Institut im Florenz 36 (1992): 103-27.

(58.) Alberti (as in n. 57), 74: "Tum oportet nervos et musculos suis locis inhaerere, denique extremum carne et cute ossa et muscolos vestitos reddare." A drawing by Raphael for his Baglione Deposition, now in the British Museum, shows this procedure of studying the figures as skeletons; see Cazort et al. (as in n. 51), 110-13.

(59.) On the aesthetics of furia, see Summers, 60-70.

(60.) On fantasia and death, with regard to Savonarola, see Summers, 114; Carroll, 54-58; and Falciani, 86-92. For other readings of Rosso's imagings of the body, especially of his Dead Christs, in terms of the devotional thought of reformist circles in Rome and their influence on the imaging of the Dead Christ, see Alberto Mugnaini, "Feritas, Humanitas, Divinitas nell'opera del Rosso: II problema degli influssi religiosi, letterari e scientifici," in Ciardi and Natali (as in n. 7), 128-36.

(61.) The most systematic study is Christopher Fulton, "Present at the Inception: Donatello and the Origins of Sixteenth-Century Mannerism," Zeitschrift fur Kunstgeschichte 2 (1997): 166-99. For a recent account of Rosso and the imitation of the Florentine tradition, see Eike D. Schmidt, "Rosso Fiorentino um 1520: Beobachtung zu Vorbildern und Wirkungen von Werken der ersten toskanischen Schaffenszeit," Pantheon 57 (1999): 78-89.

(62.) For a detailed account of this Medicean approach to historical time, see Janet Cox-Rearick, Dynasty and Destiny in Medici Art: Pontormo, Leo X, and the Two Casinos (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1984).

(63.) On historiography following the Medici restoration, see Felix Gilbert, Machiavelli and Guicciardini: Politics and History in Sixteenth-Century Florence (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1965), 236ff.

(64.) For the cathedral commission, originating in 1503 (in a contract with Michelangelo) and revived by Giuliano de' Medici in 1515, sea Bruce Boucher, The Sculpture of Jacopo Sansovino (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1991), vol. 2,318. For a discussion of the Donatello revival, see Ciardi (as in n. 33), 294, 366.

(65.) Vasari, vol. 5, 137: "... fu opinione in qual tempo, else questa invenzione fussi fatta per significare la tornata della Casa de' Medici, del dodici in Firenze; perche allora che questo trionfo si fecie erano esuli, a come dire morti, che dovessino in breve resuscitare; ed a questo fine interpretavano quelle parole che sono nella canzone: 'Morti siam, come vedete; / Cosi morti vedren voi: / Fummo gia come voi siete; / Vo'sarete come noi, ec.' volendo accenare la ritornata loro in casa, e quasi come una resurrezione da morte a vita, a la cacciata ed abasamento de' contrarj loro...."

(66.) Vasari, vol. 6, 254-55: "I will not omit to mention that the gilded boy, a baker's son, died soon after from the discomforts he suffered to earn ten scudi [Non tacero che il pullo dorato, il quale era ragazzo dun fornaio, per lo disagio che pati per guadagnare dieci scudi, poco appresso di mori']."

(67.) Letter to Francesco Vettori on the prophecy of Fra Francesco da Mantepulciano, Dec. 19, 1513, in James B. Atkinson and David Sices, Machiavelli and His Friends: Their Personal Correspondence (DeKalb, Ill.: Northern Illinois University Press, 1996), 267. For the observation that the letter reflects an "apocalyptic" climate in Florence at the return of the Medici, see Ciardi (as in n. 33), 37-38.

(68.) On countermemory, see Michel Foucault, "Counter-Memory: The Philosophy of Difference," in Language, Counter-Memory, Practice: Selected Essays and Interviews, ed. Donald F. Bouchard (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1997); and Jan Assmann, Moses the Egyptian: The Memory of Egypt in Western Monotheism (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1997): "Counter-memory opposes both a different construction of the past and a different construction of the present. It strives at keeping present in the world of today an image of yesterday that contradicts it" (220), and "You remember it this way, but I remember it differently because I remember what you have forgotten". (12).

(69.) For example, some of the decorative nudes in simulated bronze in the Sistine Chapel ceiling.

(70.) Jacopo da Pontormo, Lettera a Benedetto Varchi (1549), in Salvatore S. Nigro, L'orologio di Pontormo: Invenzione di un pittore manierista (Milan: Rizzoli, 1998), 77-79 (emphasis mine): "Ma quello che io dissi troppo ardito ch'e la importanza, si e superare la natura in volere dare spirito a una figura e farla parere viva, a farla in piano; cha se almeno egli avesse considerato che, quando Din creo l'uomo, lo fece di rilievo, come cosa piu ficile a farlo vivo, e' non si arebbe preso uno soggetto si artifitioso a piu tosto miracoloso e divino." For some suggestive remarks on Pontormo's letter and Bronzino's Galatea, see Elizabeth Cropper, Pontormo: Portrait of a Halbardier (Los Angeles: J. Paul Getty Museum, 1997), 92-98.

(71.) John Shearman, Only Connect...Art and the Spectator in the Italian Renaissance (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1992), 59-60.

(72.) Claire J. Farago, Leonardo da Vinci's Paragone: A Critical Interpretation with a New Edition of the Text in the Codex Urbinas (New York: Brill, 1992), 188. Leonardo da Vinci uses the word simulacro (or simolacro) to designate an image that stands in place of a desired and powerful object (a divinity or the beloved) and also as an optical term, to signify a transmitted likeness; see also Farago, 180.

(73.) Alexander Nagel, "Leonardo's Sfumato," RES: Anthropology and Aesthetics 24 (autumn 1993): 18.

(74.) Belting (as in n. 5), 484.

(75.) See Stephen J. Campbell, Cosme Tura of Ferraro: Style, Politics, and the Renaissance City, 1450-1495 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1997), 151. Jonathan Nelson's forthcoming book on Lippi will provide a fuller examination of the theme of idolatry in the Strozzi Chapel.

(76.) Girolamo Savonarola, "Predica duodecima," quoted in Belting (as in n. 5), 472; see F. Cognasso, ed., Prediche Italione at Fiorentini II: Giorni festivi del 1495 (Perugia: La Nuova Italia, 1930), 161-62: "E pero io to voglio dare uno buono consiglio: fuggi le cose artificiali, come sono le richezze. Vedi che oggi si fa le figure nelle chiese con tanto artificio a tanto ornate a tirate che guastono il lume di Din e la vera contemplazione e non si considera Iddio, ma solo lo artificio che e nelle figure. Questo medesimo fanno a canti figurati e li organi. Pero bisogna darvi alla simplicita e non a tante cose artificiali a stare forti nella sola contemplazione di Dio." The entire sermon begins with an excursus on the dangers of mistaking the accidenti of appearances for the reality or essence, such as a man who chooses a wife on the basis of her portrait or "the ancients," "who contemplating only the accidental refinements of art, fall into sin and followed only the senses."

(77.) Petrarch, De remediis utriusque fortunoe (Venice: Paganini, 1515), XL: "Pennicello et coloribus delectaris in quibus at precium et ars placet ac varietas at curiosa disparsio. Sic exanguium vivi gestus atque immobilium motus imaginum at postibus erumpentes effigies, at vultum spirantium liniamenta suspandunt ut hinc erupturas paulo minus praestolaris voces, et est haec in ra periculum quod iis magna maxime capiuntur ingenia: itaque ubi agrestis laeto at brevi stupore praetereat illic ingeniosus suspirans ac venerandus inhaereat."

(78.) On simulacra and idolatry, see Michael Camille, The Gothic Idol: Ideology and Image-Making in Medieval Art (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), 43. For patristic and medieval views of oneiric simulacra and phantasmata with regard to ghosts and demons, see the discussion in Jean-Claude Schmitt, Ghosts in the Middle Ages: The Living and the Dead in Medieval Society, trans. Teresa L. Fagan (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997), 20-34.

(79.) Jean Baudrillard, "The Precession of Simulacra," trans. Paul Foss and Paul Patton, in Art after Modernism: Rethinking Representation, ed. Brian Wallis (New York: New Museum of Contemporary Art, 1984), 256: "...perhaps at stake has always been the murderous capacity of images, murderers of the real, murderers of their own model as the Byzantine icons could murder the divine identity. To this murderous capacity is opposed the dialectical capacity of representations as a visible and intelligible mediation of the Real. All of Western faith and good faith was engaged in this wager on representation: that a sign could refer to the depth of meaning, that a sign could exchange for meaning, and that something could guarantee this exchange--God, of course. But what if God himself can be simulated, that is to say, reduced to the signs which attest his existence? Then the whole system becomes weightless, it is no longer anything but a gigantic simulacrum--not unreal, but a simulacrum, never again exchanging for wha t is real, but exchanging in itself, in an uninterrupted circuit without reference or circumference." See also Baudrillard, Symbolic Exchange and Death, trans. I. H. Grant (London: Thousand Oaks, 1993).

(80.) Leonardo, in Farago (as in n. 72), 188, and also 230, on the force of the "effigy" to "overpower the ingegno" and to cause the beholder to fall in love, or to incite spectators to lewdness. See also 232: "If you were to describe the figure of any of the gods, such writing would not receive the same veneration as the painted goddess, because to such a picture votive offerings and prayers will constantly be made, and various generations will converge upon it from diverse countries and across foreign seas [se tu scriverai la figura d'alcuni dei, non sara tale scrittura nella medessima veneratione che la iddea dipinta perche a tale pittura sara fatto di continuo voti et diverse orationi, et a quella concorrea varie generationi de diverse provintie e per li mari orientali]."

(81.) Silvano Razzi, in a dialogue featuring Bronzino and Benedetto Varchi as speakers, addressed the Protestant polemic by theorizing the distinction between simulacrum and icon: Varchi defends the legitimacy of images against "the error of certain persons who make no distinction between the idols of the gods and the images of Christ anti the saints [l'errore d'alcuni che non facevano distinzione ne differeaza fra i simulacri degli dei e l'imagini di Christo e de'santi]"; Razzi, Della economica christiana e civile (Florence: Semartelli, 1568), 79, quoted in Massimo Firpo, Gli affreschi di Pontormo a San Lorenzo (Turin: Einaudi, 1997), 259-60.

(82.) Doni, Disegno, fol. 11r: "Pins Pittore: Io ho ben letto in Luciano che un giovane si inamoro della Dea Venere, & una notte s'ascose nel tempio, & e tratto dalla sua stoltitia, & dall'inganno del Diavolo, uso con quella statua: o che bestialita. Silvio Scultore: Se on havessi veduto l'Aurora di Michel Agnolo, laquale non ha ii Diavolo dentro come gl'antichi idoli, forse che ou foresti entrato in maggiore stimolo di carnalita che non fece quel giovane. Pino Pittore: Io ho ben udito dire cose da fare stupire la Natura, & l'Arte di quelle figure che sono in quella sagrestia di San Lorenzo di Fiorenza."

(83.) On the derivation, see Sheryl E. Reiss, "A Medieval Source for Michelangelo's Medici Madonna," Zeitschrift fur Kunsutgeschichte 50, no.3 (1987): 394-400.

(84.) Doni, Disegno, fol. 48r: "la sagrestia di Michel Agnolo, & habbiate avertenza non vi rapire in estasi nel considerare quelle figure di marmo, & non vi trasmutare in pietra. La stanza dove lavora, che v'e una Madonna che scese di Paradiso a farsi ritrarre."

(85.) Charles Dempsey, "Loreozo's Ombra," in Lorenzo il Magnifico e il suo Mondo, ed. Gian Carlo Garfagnani (Florence: Olschki, 1994), 341-55; and Richard C. Trexler and Mary E. Lewis, "Two Captains and Three Kings: New Light on the Medici Chapel," Studies in Medieval and Renaissance History 4 (1981): 91-177.

(86.) Michelangelo, quoted in John Pope-Hennessy, Italian High Renaissance end Baroque Sculpture (London: Phaidon, 1970), 336. This is according to a letter of Niccolo Martelli, July 28, 1544: "non tolse dal Duca Lorenzo, ne dal Sig. Giuliano il modello apunto come la natura gli avea effigiati e composti, ma diede loro una grandezza, una proportione, un decoro ... qual gli parea che piu lodi loro arrecassero, dicendo che di qui a mille anni nessuno non ne potea dar cognitione che fossero altrimenti."

(87.) Doni (as in n. 10), fol. 91: "la sagrestia di San Lorenzo nostro non pure fa maravigliare gli spiriti, ma ruba l'anime di colore che la mirano e di piu quella Aurora fa lasciar della piu belle e piu divine donne che si vedesser mai, per abbracciare e baciare lei, e io per me suavita maggior ho trovato in lei che infinite altre di quelle che la natura ci ha dato per nostra consolazione." Hollanda, 90.

(88.) Francesco Bocchi, Le bellezze della citta di Fiorenza (1591; Farnborough, U.K Gregg, 1971), 272-73 (on Dusk): "And with so much beauty the artifice is clear, so that it appears that the whole is made by nature, or rather by a superhuman talent, and in this statue the one certain and rare intelligence of Buonarotti in the formation of the human body is to be recognized as wondrous and without fault [& in cio con tante bellezza e chiaro l'artefizio, che pare, che il tutto sia fatta dalla nature, anzi da virtu sopra humana, & mirabile senza fallo in questa statua si conosce una sicura, & rara inteligenza del Buonarotto nell afabbrica del corpo humano....]"; and 273-74: "Because witlsout the aid of anatomy--which, as many say, was not known to the ancients--artists cannot aptly express what the human body consists of. On the contrary this has been handled by Buonarotti with unbelievable dedication, and employing it industriously in this undertaking lie has made his figures with better artifice than has ever been seen among the ancients or the moderns [Perche senza aiuto della Notomia, laquale, come si dicono dilti, non fu nota a gli antichi, non possono esprimere felicemente quello gli artefici, che nel corpo humano si contiene; come per lo contratio con incredibile industria e stato fatto dal Buonarotto; il quale usato in questo affare con somma industria, ha fabrricate le sue figure col miglior artifizio, che giamai tra gli antichi, e tra moderni si sia veduto]."

(89.) This exegesis of the masks in the Medici Chapel is proposed by Dempsey (as in n. 85), 341-55; see also idem, 2001 (as in n. 39), 220-31. For the proposal that the mask under Night is a self-image of the artist, see John Paoletti, "Michelangelo's Masks," Art Bulletin 74 (1992): 423-40. If the mask is indeed a physiologically distinct portrait, this would stand in an ironic contrapposto to the fact that the portraits, in their nonresemblance to their subjects, have the status of masks.

(90.) Michelangelo, no. 104, in Saslow, 234: "e a me consegnaro il tempo bruno, / come a simil nel parto a nella cuna...."

(91.) On Lucretius and mythic invention in Florence, see Charles Dempsey, The Portrayal of Love: Botticelli's "Primavera" and Humanist Culture at the Time of Lorenzo the Magnificent (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1992), 40-52. See also Sharon Fermor, Piers di Cosimo: Fiction, Invention, and Fantasia (London: Reaktion, 1993), 73-81.

(92.) Lucretius, Dc rerum nature 4.58-62, trans. W.H.D. Rouse (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1975), 281.

(93.) Ibid., 4.34-37, 279.

(94.) Ascanio Condivi, The Life of Michelangelo, trans. Alice Sedgwick Wohl (University Park, Pa.: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1972), 83, 87.

(95.) "Hac sospite nunquam hos periisse viros, victos aut morte fatebor." A version of the same impresa had appeared at the conclusion of the 1550 edition. For a recent discussion of the frontispiece, see Georges Didi-Huber-man, "Le disegno de Vasari, on le bloc-notes magique de l'histoire de l'art," L'Art de l'Oeil 6 (1993): 30-51.

(96.) In this regard, see the brief mention in Cazort at al. (as in n. 51), 51, which, however, identifies the cadaver as a "newly resurrected figure"; the positioning of the figure beyond the frame of the image and the presence of the masks render such an identification problematic.

(97.) Dempsey (as in n. 85). It is of some interest that another craftsman in the service of the Farnese, Vanoccin Biringuccio, wrote in 1540 of the "fantasmic notions [ombre di maschere]" of certain alchemists and necromancers who "with many arguments want it to be believed that a human being or any other animal can be generated and formed outside the womb, with flesh and bones and nerves, and can be animated with a spirit, and with any other refinement that could be sought for. And similarly, that they can make trees and plants grow with art, without their natural seed.... [con molts...ragioni vogliano che si creda che fuor del ventre feminile generar e formar si possa uno homo et ogni altro animale con carne et ossa e nervi, et ahcho animarlo dispirito con ogni altra convenientia che se gli ricercha. Et similmente far nascere gli arbori e l'herbe con l'arte senza il seme lor naturale....]": Biringuccio, Dr la pirotechnia, ed. Adriano Carugo (Milan: II Polifilo, 1977), fol. 8r.

(98.) Corrado Bruno, quoted in Gillo, 87.

(99.) Pursuing a different line of argumentation to that presented here, Charles Burroughs, "The Lost Judgement of Michelangelo, Pictorial Space, Sacred Topography, and the Social World," Artibus et Historiae 32 (1995): 78, implies that the skin motif is a sign identifying the entire work as a simulacrum: "The Dantesque citations and the self-portrait on the flayed skin of St. Bartholomew betray the gulf between the active products of artistic invention and divine truth." Discussions of the flayed skin have occupied a vast amount of the scholarly literature on the painting since its (re)discovery by A. della Cava, Il volto di Michelangelo in Giuadizio Finale (Bologna: Zanichelli, 1925). The debate regarding its status as a likeness is most usefully surveyed by Leo Steinberg, "The Line of Fate in Michelangelo's Painting," in The Language of Images, ad. W.J.T. Mitchell (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980), 97-104. Alexander Nagel, Michelangelo and the Reform of Art (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press , 2000), 196-98, aptly remarks that the "flat, hanging skin represents...an abnegation, quite literally a deflation of the ideal body" that contradicts "the trumphant claims of the work as a whole." Nonetheless, like earlier commentators, he proceeds to see this as an autobiographical testimony, identifying Michelangelo's gesture with a pious pursuit of "medieval artlessness," a grafting of his own portrait onto the type of the "Man of Sorrows." Nagel cites a sonnet from the 1550s that many commentators have taken as a literal statement of repentance on Michelangelo's part, a rejection of "the fond fantasy that made art my monarch and my idol.... [l'affetuosa fantasia / che l'arte me fece idol e monarce....]." However, Robert Williams, in Art, Theory, ane Culture in Sixteenth-Century Italy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 13, has pointed to a very particular rhetorical context for this declaration: "Voiced as it was in the context of a letter about his work on St. Peter's, this renunciation of p ainting and sculpture can be taken, in the first, most immediate sense, as a rejection of the figural arts for architecture--especially for the architecture of the chruch, symbol of Christ's body." For other discussions of the skin, see Tolnay (as in is. 25), 44-45; Poseq (as in a. 38); Barnes, 105-8; and Agoston (as in n. 23), 546.

(100.) For theological aspects of the painting, see Leo Steinberg, "Michelangelo's Lost Judgement as Merciful Heresy," Art in America 63 (1975): 48-63; Marcia Hall, "Michelangelo's Lost Judgement: Resurrection of the Body and Predestination," Art Bulletin 58 (1976): 85-92; idem, After Raphael: Painting in Central Italy in the Sixteenth Century (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 132-36; Charles Dempsey, "Mythic Inventions in Counter-Reformation Painting," in Rome in the Renaissance: The City and the Myth, ed. P. A. Ramsey (Binghamton, N.Y.: Medieval and Renaissance Texts and Studies, 1982), 55-75; Jack Greenstein, "How Glorious the Second Coming of Christ: Michelangelo's Last Judgment and the Transfiguration," Artibus et Historiae 10 (1989): 33-57; Valerie Shrimplin, "Sun-Symbolism and Cosmology in Michelangelo's Lent Judgment," Sixteenth Century Journal 21 (1990): 607-44; and Loren Partridge, "Michelangelo's Last Judgment: An Interpretation," in Michelangelo: The Lent Judgment; A Glorious Restorat ion (New York: Harry N. Abrams, 1997), 8-155.

(101.) Lomazzo, quoted in Barnes, 87.

(102.) See the defense of Michelangelo in Gregorio Comanini's Il Figino of 1591, now available as The Figino, or On the Purpose of Painting, trans. Ann Doyle-Anderson and Giancarlo Maiorino (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2001), 88: "The exchange of kisses that [Michelangelo] has portrayed among some of the saints in heaven greatly annoys the rigid censors of painting. They say that he certainly fell into impropriety with this gesture, since it is not plausible that the blessed should kiss in this manner when they have been restored to their bodies, no matter how much they may love one another and rejoice in one another's glory."

(103.) The prayer of Innocent III on the Veronica explicitly evokes the Last Judgment, anticipated as a future "face-to-face" encounter in the sudarium. On the hymn and on the loss of the sudarium in the sack of Rome, see Belting (as in n. 5), 220-21, 543.

(104.) On the arma christi at the Last Judgment, see the comments by Gerhard Wolf in Il volto di Cristo, ed. Giovanni Morelli and Gerhard Wolf (Milan: Electa, 2001), 201-2.

(105.) As Gilio noted, 71-72.

(106.) As has been pointed out by several authors, most recently by Barnes, 106-7. Dante had adopted the Ovidian topos of the flaying of Marsyas as an image of his own "corporeal sheath," which he prayed would be filled by divine inspiration (Paradiso, canto 1, lines 13-21). Yet it is crucial to any interpretation of this motif in terms of Dante that, in the fresco, no inspiration has come, the "corporeal sheath" remains empty, and the authorial persona is eliminated as the source of the work. There remains the possibility that the motif of the skin might be theological in origin; the figura of skin is used in an eschatological context by Saint Augustine in Confessions 13.15.16, trans. Henry Chadwick (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991), 282: "Who but you, O God, has made for us a solid firmament of authority over us in your divine scripture? For 'the heaven will fold up like a book' (Isa. 34:4), and now 'like a skin it is stretched out' above us (Ps. 103.2)....You know, Lord, you know how you clothed huma n beings with skins when by skin they became mortal (Gen. 3:21). So you have stretched out the firmament of your book 'like a skin,' that is your words which are not mutually discordant, and which you have placed over us by the ministry of mortal men." If this is the source for Michelangelo's skin motif, it does not render the painting more "orthodox," given the self-referential and potentially personal use Michelangelo has made of the motif.

(107.) Michael Fried, in "Thoughts on Caravaggio," Critical Inquiry 24 (1997): 13-44, provokes broader historical reflection on the scenario of authorship described here. In the work of Michelangelo's most famous namesake, who also appears to pose as a posthumous rival and to reject the idealizing basis of Michelangelo's art, the violent effect of this severance of work from artist is greatly magnified. This is itself the result of an aggressively different representational mode, which in its realism eschews the fantasia as the basis of the work of art, as it had been for Michelangelo, Rosso, Pontormo, and their generation. The fantasia is supplanted by the mirror, whose activity of reflection becomes both metaphor and apparatus of the artistic procedure of describing visible and tangible reality.

(108.) Hall, 1976 (as in n. 100), 89. See also Barnes, 55-56. Saint Michael is not essential in depictions of the Last Judgment, as Gilio, 60, himself points out--but in the papal city, which was often thought to be under the protection of Saint Michael, his absence is surprising. Saint Michael was prominent in a Florentine rendering of the subject by Fra Bartolomeo made not long before Michelangelo's, and in several subsequent imitations of Michelangelo's work, the figure of the archangel is prominently reintroduced.

(109.) Such a play on the artist's name had already been made by Ariosto, and by the poet whose lines on the figure of Night are reported in Vasari. Michelangelo himself in 1555 cited his angelic namesake humorously in a sonnet probably written to Vasari: "All my resources are so far outweighed / that I must give the scales back to Saint Michael [resta si vinta ogni fortuna mia / ch'i rendo le bilance a san Michele]"; no. 299, in Saslow, 496. Bronzino also addressed sonnets to Michelangelo that acclaim him as both God and as the Archangel Michael; see Janet Cox-Rearick, Bronzino's Chapel of Eleonora in the Palazzo Vecchio (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993), 106. See also the ridiculous letter of Andrea Calmo in Le Lettere di Messer Andrea Calmo, ed. Vittorio Rossi (Florence, 1888), 204: "My, what beautiful hands are yours! Worthy indeed of an angel Michael, who makes with art what nature has not the license to make [Ohime mo che dolce manine xe le vostre! Ben proprio do an anzolo Michiel, che fe ' con l'arte quel che natura non ha podesta di far con l'autoritate]."

(110.) By Barnes, 121.

Frequently Cited Sources

Barnes, Bernardine, Michelangelo's Last Judgment: The Renaissance Response (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998).

Carroll, Eugene A., Rosso Fiorentino: Drawings, Prints and Decorative Arts (Washington, D.C.: National Gallery of Art, 1987).

Doni, Anton Francesco, Disegno (1549), ed. M. Pepe, facsimile ed. (Milan: Electa, 1970).

Falciani, Carlo, Il Rosso Fiorentino (Florence: Olschki, 1996).

Franklin, David, Rosso in Italy (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1994).

Gilio, Giovanni Andrea, Dialogo nel quale si ragiona degli errori e degli abusi de' pittori circa l'istorie, in Trallali d'arte del cinquecento, ed. Paola Barocchi (Bari: Laterza, 1961), vol. 2, 3-97.

Hollanda, Francisco de, Dialogos em Roma (1538), ed. G. D. Folliero-Metz (Heidelberg: Winter, 1998).

Saslow, James, ed., The Poetry of Michelangelo: An Annotated Translation (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1991).

Summers, David, Michelangelo and the Language of Art (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1981).

Vasari, Giorgio, Le vite de' piu eccellenti pillori scultori ed architellori, ed. Gaetano Milanesi, 9 vols. (1878-85; reprint, Florence: Sansoni, 1998).

Stephen J. Campbell, professor in the history of art, has published Cosme Tura of Ferrara: Style, Politics, and the Renaissance City, 1450-1495 (1997) and several articles on fifteenth-century Ferrarese painting. He is currently engaged in research on mythological painting in Manlua and Ferrara around 1500 [Department of the History of Art, the Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore, Md. 21218].

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