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Archaism and reform in Michelangelo’s early religious sculpture
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Date
2023
Authors
Whyte, Matthew Anthony
Journal Title
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Publisher
University College Cork
Published Version
Abstract
This thesis explores instances of formal archaism in Michelangelo’s early sculpture during the 1490s, arguing that his conscious assimilation of medieval visual sources constitutes a defining aspect of his stylistic development and his response to the spiritual pressures of the period. Across three chapters, it examines three of Michelangelo’s religious sculptures spanning this period – the Madonna of the Stairs in Florence (c. 1490), the statuettes for the Arca di San Domenico in Bologna (1494-95), and the Pietà in Rome (1497-99). Each chapter analyses the sculptures’ respective relationships with specific medieval sources and visual traditions, ultimately arguing that Michelangelo fashioned their fundamental spiritual function through their formal and conceptual archaisms.
Two overarching claims form the basis of these analyses. Firstly, an examination of Michelangelo’s early archaism can yield a richer understanding of the characteristic features of his early style. Francesco Caglioti has recently highlighted this period of the artist’s career as requiring significant reappraisal given resilient issues of interpretation and even attribution which prevail in the scholarship. These problems, Caglioti argues, are symptomatic of a deficient understanding of Michelangelo’s youthful style that is driven in part by the greater emphasis afforded to his mature production after 1500. This study locates the shifting character of Michelangelo’s early production in his interaction with a diverse range of medieval sources, demonstrating that his recourse to earlier visual forms manifests through a selective process of assimilation to produce varied types or degrees of archaism.
Secondly, translated meaning can be sought through the artist’s conscious selection of older visual sources to shed new light on his aesthetic response to his spiritual environment. The development of religious reform particularly through Girolamo Savonarola’s sermons often clashed with modern conceptions of artistic innovation. In reaction, artists frequently made recourse to medieval styles and iconographies, understanding earlier art forms as immune to the disintegration associated with what Hans Belting called the ‘era of art.’ While the question of Michelangelo’s archaism as a spiritually motivated feature of his art has been explored before, such studies have been the exclusive domain of his mature, sixteenth-century production. These questions have yet to be explored in any systematic way in the context of his youth. In addition, Michelangelo’s sympathies for Savonarola’s religious conservatism has been widely recognised since his own lifetime, but more remains to be said regarding the nature of the friar’s impact on the sculptor’s art. Finally, with several recent studies emphasising the artist’s engagement with reform theology in his later life, this thesis seeks to offer a way in which we can identify the conception of these sympathies from the earliest stages of his career.
This project demonstrates that, throughout the 1490s, Michelangelo consistently turned to the Middle Ages as a source of art whose formal appearance was bound up with its assumed authentic religiosity. Through their incorporation of archaic motifs, effects, and meanings, his early religious sculptures fashioned their devotional appeal to their prototypical viewers by aligning their aesthetic form with contemporary values surrounding the relationship between spirituality, art, and reform espoused in Savonarola’s Dominican circles. Through such an analysis of Michelangelo’s early archaism, this thesis seeks to contribute a more thorough image of the forms and meanings associated with the artist’s youthful style. It also contributes to discussions on the artistic response to religious reform around the turn of the sixteenth century, providing greater depth to our understanding of how the retrieval of an ‘old age’ style functioned both formally and conceptually to address these spiritual pressures.
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Keywords
Sculpture , Renaissance , Michelangelo , Reform , Archaism , Dominican
Citation
Whyte, M. A. 2023. Archaism and reform in Michelangelo’s early religious sculpture. PhD Thesis, University College Cork.