Michelangelo S Art Of Devotion In The Age Of Reform

In this volume, Emily A. Fenichel offers an in-depth investigation of the religious motivations behind Michelangelo's sculpture and graphic works in his late period. Taking the criticism of the Last Judgment as its point of departure, she argues that much of Michelangelo's late oeuvre was engaged in solving the religious and artistic problems presented by the Counter-Reformation. Buffeted by critiques of the Last Judgment, which claimed that he valued art over religion, Michelangelo searched for new religious iconographies and techniques both publicly and privately. Fenichel here suggests a new and different understanding of the artist in his late career. In contrast to the received view of Michelangelo as solitary, intractable, and temperamental, she brings a more nuanced characterization of the artist. The late Michelangelo, Fenichel demonstrates, was a man interested in collaboration, penance, meditation, and experimentation, which enabled his transformation into a new type of religious artist for a new era.

"This offers an in-depth investigation of the religious motivations behind Michelangelo's sculpture and graphic works in his late period. Emily Fenichel argues that much of Michelangelo's late oeuvre was engaged in solving the religious and artistic problems presented by the Counter-Reformation"--

Michelangelo was acutely conscious of living in an age of religious crisis and artistic change, and for him the two issues were related. Michelangelo and the Reform of Art explores Michelangelo's awareness of artistic tradition as a means of understanding his relation to the profound religious uncertainty of the sixteenth century. Concentrating on Michelangelo's lifelong preoccupation with the image of the dead Christ, Alexander Nagel studies the artist's associations with reform-minded circles in early sixteenth-century Italy, and reveals his sustained concern over the fate of religious art.

This study explores the phenomenon of the cults of Raphael and Michelangelo in relation to their death, burial, and posthumous fame—or second life—from their own times through the nineteenth century. These two artists inspired fervent followings like no other artists before them. The affective response of those touched by the potency of the physical presence of their art- works, personal effects, and remains—or even touched by the power of their creative legacy—opened up new avenues for artistic fame, divination, and commemoration. Within this cultural framework, this study charts the elevation of the status of dozens of other artists in Italy through funerals and tomb memorialization, many of which were held and made in response to those of Raphael and Michelangelo. By bringing together disparate sources and engaging material as well as a variety of types of artworks and objects, this book will be of great interest to anyone who studies early modern Italy, art history, cultural history, and Italian studies.

On account of the artists' collaborative practice, Sebastiano del Piombo's oeuvre is often misconstrued as a coloristic supplement to Michelangelo's disegno or as a mere extension of the older master's drawings and ideas. Marsha Libina's book complicates this narrative by offering a critical reevaluation of the devotional art of Sebastiano del Piombo (1485-1547), an important Venetian artist whose Roman work stands at the nexus of questions regarding art, religious reform and the largely unexplored history of artistic collaboration. Investigating new ways of understanding Sebastiano's interest in soliciting Michelangelo's drawings as catalysts of invention, Libina tells the story of a collaboration driven neither by a compliant imitation of Michelangelo nor the reconciliation of opposing regional styles but, rather, by an interest in hermeneutically productive difference - generating complementary yet divergent approaches to art as a vehicle of reform. This volume presents an in-depth exploration of how Sebastiano's experiments with the sacred image - like Michelangelo's - were formulated in response to the early years of Catholic reform. The years preceding the Council of Trent saw the rise of divisive investigations into the repercussions of an increasingly mediated knowledge of the divine. Libina reveals how these concerns converge in Sebastiano's new language of devotional painting, which embraces an aesthetic of figural stillness, isolation and psychological detachment. At a moment when religious debates and questions about the role of image-based devotion took center stage, Sebastiano's work offered a reflection on what it meant to view and meditate on the body of Christ in the Renaissance altarpiece.

In this book, Sarah Rolfe Prodan examines the spiritual poetry of Michelangelo in light of three contexts: the Catholic Reformation movement, Renaissance Augustinianism, and the tradition of Italian religious devotion. Prodan combines a literary, historical, and biographical approach to analyze the mystical constructs and conceits in Michelangelo's poems, thereby deepening our understanding of the artist's spiritual life in the context of Catholic Reform in the mid-sixteenth century. Prodan also demonstrates how Michelangelo's poetry is part of an Augustinian tradition that emphasizes mystical and moral evolution of the self. Examining such elements of early modern devotion as prayer, lauda singing, and the contemplation of religious images, Prodan provides a unique perspective on the subtleties of Michelangelo's approach to life and to art. Throughout, Prodan argues that Michelangelo's art can be more deeply understood when considered together with his poetry, which points to a spirituality that deeply informed all of his production.

This book examines the promotion of the sensuous as part of religious experience in the Roman Catholic Church of the early modern period. During the Counter-Reformation, every aspect of religious and devotional practice was reviewed, including the role of art and architecture, and the invocation of the five senses to incite devotion became a hotly contested topic. The Protestants condemned the material cult of veneration of relics and images, rejecting the importance of emotion and the senses and instead promoting the power of reason in receiving the Word of God. After much debate, the Church concluded that the senses are necessary to appreciate the sublime, and that they derive from the Holy Spirit. As part of its attempt to win back the faithful, the Church embraced the sensuous and promoted the use of images, relics, liturgy, processions, music, and theater as important parts of religious experience.

Michelangelo in the New Millennium addresses the mobility and flexibility of Michelangelo’s art regarding placement and intention, considers the artist’s late papal painting commissions, and probes deeper into his early religious works.