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Eye, Mind, and Hand in Michelangelo's Poetry

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  02 December 2020

Robert J. Clements
Robert J. Clements*
Affiliation:
The Pennsylvania State University
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Extract

Although Michelangelo was so self-conscious about his poems as to dismiss them as “silly things” and “heavy pastries,” the neo-Platonic pieces provide us with avenues to his most intimate thoughts on art. In his canzoniere one learns that two little-known guideposts alongside his theoretical approach to painting and sculpture are the special interrelations existing between the eye and the hand and between the intellect and the hand. It is with these relationships which he recognized between, first, vision and manual execution and between, second, poetic conceptualizing and manual execution, that these pages will be concerned.

Type
Research Article
Information
PMLA , Volume 69 , Issue 1 , March 1954 , pp. 324 - 336
Copyright
Copyright © Modern Language Association of America, 1954

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References

1 Sappho, Oxyrhynchus Papyri, xv, 1922, No. 1787.

2 Carl Frey, Dichtungen des Michelagniolo Buonarroti (Berlin, 1897), p. 196.

3 Commentarium in Convivium v.xiii.

4 Commentarium in Convivium vi.vi.

5 Xenophon, Memorabilia, Loeb ed., p. 237.

6 Note also the notion of grace in the verses of our second paragraph.

7 Anthologia. Palatina, 5.94.

8 Ascanio Condivi, Vita di Michelangelo, lii.

9 Trattato della Pittura (Rome, 1844), i, 34-35; ii, 97.

10 Vasari, Le Vite de' piu eccellenti pittori, scultori, ed architettori (Florence, 1878-85), vii, 156.

11 G. K. Loukomski, Les Sangallo (Paris, 1934), p. 88.

12 Idea del tempio della. Pittura (Milan, 1590), p. 44.

13 De Tolnay, The Medici Chapel (Princeton, 1948), plate 77.

14 Lodovico Castelvetro, Poetica (Basilea, 1576), pp. 214 f.

15 Aesthetic Experience and its Presuppositions (New York, 1946), p. 155.

16 “What Sculptors have learned from Michelangelo,” London Studio, Jan. 1940, pp. 2-5.

17 Reproduced in E. Panofsky, Idea (Leipzig, 1924), p. 131.

18 Primo libro del trattato delle perfette proporzioni (Perugia, 1830), pp. 44, 52.

19 De Hollanda, Da Pintura antigua (Porto, 1930), p. 189.

20 E. Panofsky, Studies in Iconology (New York, 1939), p. 140.

21 Dichtungen, p. 83.

22 Philosophical Review, xxxiv (May 1925), 288.

23 Here the admirer becomes the artist speaking, as noted by Valerio Mariani, La Poesia di Michelangelo (Rome, 1941), p. 3.

24 Plotinus, Enneads v.ix.6.

25 Vasari, vii, 270.

26 Gaetano Milanesi, Le Lettere di Michelangelo (Florence, 1875), p. 489.

27 Dichtungen, p. 235.

28 Milanesi, Lettere, p. 450.

29 In James Hutton, The Greek Anthology in Italy (Ithaca, 1935), p. 213.

30 Dialogo di Pittura (Venice, 1946), p. 92.

31 In Giovanni Papini, Vita di Michelangiolo (Milan, 1949), p. 583.

32 De Hollanda, Da Pintura antigua, p. 232.

33 Ars poetica, vv. 38-39.

34 De Hollanda, p. 240.

35 Condivi, Vita (Pisa, 1823), p. 83.

36 Il primo libro del trattato, p. 87.

37 De Hollanda, p. 234.