Page 114 - Art In The Age Of Exploration (Great Section on Chinese Art Ming Dynasty)

MICHELANGELO 1492

Giulio Carlo Argan

M, . ichelangelo's debut has a date, 1492;
and his career was a long one, lasting beyond
the midpoint of the following century. We know
that he always worked with and for the highest
civil and religious powers; no other artist had
such authoritative influence on the dramatic
historical conditions of his time. Before him
Leonardo had thought to make of art the
method and instrument of knowledge, thus
opening for it new and unlimited horizons.
Michelangelo, twenty years younger, did not
follow in that progressive direction; radically
opposing Leonardo, he denied that the purpose
of art was the knowledge of the objective world
and devoted himself to the study of the thought
of the human being, its reason for existence,
and its final destiny. His aim was not progress,
but rather a return to that humanism which,
moving out from Dante and the great artists of
the fourteenth century, gave Florence a cultural
superiority that then became political suprem-
acy. In 1492 he was seventeen years old and was
living in the palace of the Medici; he had stud-
ied sculpture technique with the older Bertoldo
and was in direct contact with Lorenzo il Mag-
nifico, Botticelli, and Poliziano.
His activity in sculpture began with two
marble reliefs: the Madonna of the Stairs (cat.
168) and the Battle of the Centaurs and
Lapiths. His Madonna was an analytic and
methodical, almost philological study of the
projection of perspective in the rilievo schiac- fig. i. Michelangelo, Battle of the Centaurs and Lapiths. c. 1492, marble. Casa Buonarroti, Florence
ciato of Donatello. The Battle, done slightly
earlier, can be dated precisely: Condivi said that
it had just been finished when Lorenzo il Mag-
nifico died in April 1492. From that moment was the sublimation of human drama. His language of the fourteenth and early fifteenth
Michelangelo did no more reliefs. unfinished modeling thus presupposed the his- century, which restored its life and vigor.
Immediately after his De pictura (1436) toria of the relief: the moment of passage from Brunelleschi, Manetti recounted, thought that
Alberti had written a brief treatise called De the relief on a plane to the statue and statuary in the Middle Ages the great culture of Rome
statua. He did not discuss relief there: relief group is clearly evident in his Pieta in Saint was providentially transposed to Tuscany: in
represented actions (historiae) by projection Peter's of 1498. Rome the ancient had been handed down
onto a plane, and for him its only difference Vasari and Condivi agreed on the subject of through time. Florence had deliberately chosen
with painting lay in technique. This nature of the 1492 relief, and their source was Michel- it as a model and was thus its legitimate heir.
relief as historia concisely narrated on a per- angelo himself. Almost certainly it was sug- Not the inert liturgical and curial Latin, but that
spectival plane is demonstrated paradigmatically gested by Poliziano. No figure, however, shows of the great ancient writers, was fused by Dante
by Donatello's Banquet of Herod of 1437. the features of a centaur, half man and half and Petrarch with the lively Tuscan vulgate,
However, a statue in the round was not historia horse: the relief is a tangle of nudes clinging to giving it literary dignity. What had happened in
but elogium, the superposition of an ideal each other in tight muscular knots. The subject the field of spoken language had also happened
eternal figure onto an earthly mortal one. After is ancient, but the energetic plastic idiom comes in the field of art: shortly after theorizing about
1492 Michelangelo did only statues, ideal fig- directly from Giovanni Pisano: the ancient was the art of the masters of the early fifteenth cen-
ures, but they were imbued with a pathos that transmitted to the modern through the Tuscan tury, Alberti became the sponsor of the Cer-

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