Motivi di ecfrasi dantesca in Michelangelo secondo Benedetto Varchi: ancora sulle Due lezzioni all'Accademia fiorentina

Il saggio si propone di individuare la peculiare prospettiva dell'umanista Benedetto Varchi in relazione all'uso che della Commedia dantesca fa Michelangelo Buonarroti. Nelle due prolusioni dal titolo Due lezzioni, recitate presso l'Accademia fiorentina nel 1547, egli infatti delinea il profilo di un artista, Michelangelo appunto, che si è nutrito delle pagine dantesche, ma ha pure fatto suo il profilo etico e civile del grande poeta medievale. E proprio in virtù di questo costante modello ha realizzato i suoi capolavori (poetici e artistici) trasfigurando secondo tecniche ecfrastiche l'opera dantesca.

Artemisia Gentileschi

During the last four decades the painter Artemisia Gentileschi (b. Rome 1593—d. Naples 1654?) has become an increasingly popular subject for both scholars and the general public. Against considerable odds, she was trained by her painter father, Orazio Gentileschi, and demonstrated a precocious talent from an early age. Her first known signed and dated painting is a Susanna and the Elders of 1610 (Schönborn Collection, Pommersfelden); she returned to this subject many times during her career, including her last known signed and dated painting of 1652 (Pinacoteca Nazionale, Bologna). In the intervening years she devised innovative compositions for both traditional and not-so-traditional iconographies, with a focus on heroic women from sacred and secular sources—in addition to Susannas, she painted Judiths, Mary Magdalenes, and Lucretias, among others—as well as multiple self-portraits, indicating demand for her abilities and interpretation as well as her image. Her rape by the painter Agostino Tassi in 1611, and the trial that followed in 1612, has been seen by many as a pivotal moment in Artemisia’s life, which it certainly was. But her artistic accomplishments must be understood in the much wider contexts of nascent feminist ideologies and painting in Baroque Europe. During her long career, spent in Rome, Florence, Venice, Naples, and London, Artemisia acquired numerous patrons and correspondents. These included Grand Duke Cosimo II of Florence and his wife, Christina of Lorraine; Michelangelo Buonarroti the Younger; Galileo Galilei; the Duke of Alcalá Fernando Enríquez d’Afán de Ribera y Enríquez; Philip IV and his sister Infanta María of Spain; Cassiano dal Pozzo; and Charles I of England. She was named the first female member of Florence’s Accademia delle Arti del Disegno in 1616, and she deftly managed her own thriving business and extensive studio, largely on her own. The last known documented reference is a Neapolitan tax document of 1654; she may have died during the plague outbreak in the city that year. Her burial site, allegedly in the church of San Giovanni dei Fiorentini, has not been identified, but a later text states that it was marked with a now lost stone simply inscribed “HEIC ARTEMISIA,” or “Here Lies Artemisia.” The lack of more detailed information provides an indication of the fame she had achieved during her life. The literature on Artemisia Gentileschi has expanded significantly in recent years, as has her body of work, but not without considerable scholarly disagreement.

GIORGIO VASARI: (N)O ALVORECER DA ERA DA ARTE

“Le Vite” (As Vidas), de Giorgio Vasari, é reconhecidamente um dos textos mais relevantes da história da arte. Sob a perspectiva de biografar os mais renomados pintores, escultores e arquitetos de sua época, o texto vasariano se tornou célebre tanto como uma primeira história da arte, como o registro basilar para o estudo da arte italiana renascentista e, por fim, também para a compreensão do desenvolvimento e entendimento da arte em um de seus períodos históricos mais proeminentes, qual seja, a arte italiana de Cimabue a Michelangelo Buonarroti. Esses fatos podem nos conduzir a uma interpretação equivocada: a de que o texto de Vasari seja uma obra delimitada ao mero estudo histórico e artefatual, de modo que expandir a compreensão dos fenômenos que aquela obra abarca para os problemas filosóficos da arte de nosso tempo ou da arte em geral constituiria uma tarefa fadada ao anacronismo. No presente artigo, demonstraremos como “Le Vite”, pelo contrário, alicerça o conceito de era da arte para uma das principais filosofias da arte contemporânea, qual seja, o essencialismo histórico de Arthur Danto, e em seguida defenderemos em que medida naquela obra do Cinquecento já se fazem presentes e em germinação alguns dos principais aspectos da nossa compreensão atual do termo arte.

Generation and Ruination in the Display of Michelangelo’s Non-finito

Michelangelo Buonarroti left nearly half of the many sculptures he carved in his lifetime unfinished, their rough surfaces transgressing early modern norms of finish and decorum. Nonetheless these objects (called non-finito/i) were preserved, collected, and displayed in their incomplete states. This paper examines the sites in which Florentine and Roman collectors exhibited Michelangelo’s unfinished statues and demonstrates how the display strategies implemented within these sites sought to offset the expectation of finish that the non-finito failed to meet. By situating roughed sculptures within frameworks that evoked natural forces of accretion and generation or conjured archaeologies of ruination and restoration, collectors strategically blurred artistic, natural, and, temporal agency and fundamentally shaped how the viewer perceived and evaluated Michelangelo’s most anomalous works.

(Not an) ambivalence toward Michelangelo in Federico Borromeo’s De pictura sacra and Musaeum

This article discusses the role of Michelangelo Buonarroti in the Seventeenth-century art theory treatises of Cardinal Federico Borromeo De pictura sacra and Musaeum. In the referred text we can notice an ambivalent approach to the artistic genius of Buonarroti. In several cases Borromeo mentions Michelangelo as an artistic example who equalled or even exceled the great artists of Antiquity, albeit in other paragraphs the author criticises the artist for his aesthetic fallacy. A close reading of De pictura sacra and Musaeum, as well as an analysis of Borromeo’s didactic programme in the newly established Accademia del disegno in Milan allows to heed that Cardinal was rather an admirer of Michelangelo’s personality and talent. In De pictura sacra Buonarroti and other Renaissance Masters serve a rhetoric function and allow to conceptualise the theological and aesthetic framework for a post-Tridentine Catholic religious art.

Sztuka starości. Dwa późne wiersze Pära Lagerkvista w kontekście liryku ***I’ sto rinchiuso come la midolla… Michała Anioła Buonarrotiego

The subject of this article is an analysis of two poems by Pär Lagerkvist from his late book Aftonland (1953) in a context which has not been considered in previous research, i.e. a poem I’ sto rinchiuso come la midolla… by Michelangelo Buonarroti. In his poems about old age and the aging artist, Lagerkvist is close to some of the crucial poetic images drawn by Michelangelo – an artist whom the Swede highly esteemed. Additionally, a Polish translation of the two poems (Gammal genius. Vid färdens sista rast…) is proposed.