More Than Meets The Eye: The Latent Argumentative Function of Michelangelo's Drawings for Vittoria...

7/30/2019 More Than Meets The Eye: The Latent Argumentative Function of Michelangelo's Drawings for Vittoria Colonna

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Nagode Research Paper - Page 1

Elyzabeth NagodeItalian Renaissance Art History

Research Paper03/04/12

More Than Meets the EyeThe Latent Argumentative Function of the Colonna Presentation Drawings

Much has been written about the presentation drawings produced

by Michelangelo for Vittoria Colonna between 1538 and 1546. They

share, with the drawings produced for Tomasso de Cavalieri that

preceded them, a style unique in the artist's catalog. Unlike the Cavalieri

drawings, however, the meaning and function ofPieta and Christ on the

Cross is well-established in numerous documents that survive from the

period, including, most significantly correspondence on the subject

between Michelangelo and Colonna herself. What these documents make

clear is that the drawings had a profoundly personal meaning for the

artist as well as the recipient, that they functioned for the former as an

expression of religious devotion, and that they functioned for the latter as

an object of similar devotion. But what these documents also suggest is

that these drawings latently served at least one other function for the

artist as well: to offer a definitive argument against the increasingly

popular public opinion expressed by Colonna about the inherent inability

ofdisegno to affect the same kind of direct emotional response from the

viewer as colore.

Evidence of Michelangelo's intent to defend this approach in the


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drawings made for Colonna can be found in the style of their execution.

According to Vasari, the artist could draw and compose in a wide range of

styles, making simple designs that conformed to the tastes of craftsmen

like Il Menighella and even drawing badly to win a simple bet.1 The

majority of Michelangelo's drawings were made for his own use,

fragmentary, and unfinished. The style he adopted for their execution

ranged from the clear, dramatic, precise, and detailed rendering of the

figure studies completed for the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel (fig. 1), to

the very loose and largely referential line work through which he worked

out the majority of his initial compositions (fig. 2). The drawings he made

as gifts, on the other hand, were organized narrative compositions done

in a distinct soft sfumato style with a carefully crafted colorito or finish.2

The two extant drawings done for Colonna, Pieta (fig. 3) and Christ on the

Cross (fig. 4), like the Tityus, The Fall of Phaeton, Ganymede, and Il

Sogno (figs. 5, 6, 7, and 8 respectively) created earlier for Tomasso de

Cavalieri, are clearly executed in this style. The figure work in all of these

drawings, while varying in their degree of muscular emphasis, also

displays that highly descriptive language of gesture characteristic of

Michelangelo's handling of the human form:3 the inspirational twisting

upward impulse of Colonna's Christ figure on the cross finding its

1 Giorgio Vassari, Lives of the Most Eminent Painters, Sculptors and Architects.Translated by Gaston Du C. de Vere. 1912-1915.http://www.fordham.edu/halsall/basis/vasari/vasari26.htm.

2 Una Roman D'Elia, Drawing Christ's Blood: Michelangelo, Vittoria Colonna, and theAesthetics of Reform, 91.

3 Noel Annesley and Michael Hirst, 'Christ and the Woman of Samaria' byMichelangelo, 613.


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synergistic counterpart in the upstretched arm of Cavalieri's Jupiter, for

example, or the seated Virgin's implacably ambiguous gesture of mixed

mourning and jubilation mirroring Ganymede's similarly mixed

expression of pleasure and fear.4

What sets the Colonna drawings stylistically apart from the

drawings produced

4 Angela Brundin, Vittoria Colonna and the Spiritual Poetics of the Italian Reformation,78.


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Study for the Sistine Ceiling (Fig. 1)

Study for The Deposition of Christ (Fig. 2)


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Above: Pieta for Vittoria Colonna & Christ on the Cross for VittoriaColonna (Fig. 3 & 4)

Below: Tityus for Tomasso de Cavalieri (Fig. 5)


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Above: Fall of Phaeton for Tomasso de Cavalieri & Ganymede forTomasso de Cavalieri (Figs. 6 & 7). Below: Il Sogno for Tomasso de

Cavalieri (Fig 8).


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for Cavalieri, however, is their subject matter and manner of

composition. Despite the mythical and/or fantastical scenes depicted in

the Cavalieri drawings, all represent a concrete, human situation

artistically-translated into a plastic group.5 Their compositions are fluid

and dynamic, with each element engaged in advancing the clearly-

defined linear of the visual narrative as a whole.6 They are, in this way, as

much an expression of that High Renaissance aesthetic ideal embodied

by the work of Michelangelo as everything else he produced.

The Colonna drawings are not. While they deal with iconographic

religious subjects that were repeatedly addressed by the artist over the

course of his career, they do so in ways that make them two of the most

decidedly unique pieces in his catalog. The scenes in both are supra-

historical to accepted canon, and conceived as symbolic events

revolving around the relationship that exists between the surrounding

figures, and/orsimply the viewer, to the central figure of Christ.7 Their

composition is uncharacteristically severe, stiff, and symmetrical.8 The

Virgin and cherubim of the Pieta serve, not to forward a linear narrative of

action, but to hold a moment in time through their absorption in worship,

as well as the efforts each is making to hold the dead Christ in the almost

5 Charles de Tolnay, Michelangelo's Pieta Composition for Vittoria Colonna, 62.6 Alexander Nagel, Observations on Michelangelo's Late Pieta Drawings and

Sculptures, 562.7 Charles de Tolnay, Michelangelo's Pieta Composition for Vittoria Colonna, 58, 62;

and Alexander Nagel, Observations on Michelangelo's Late Pieta Drawings andSculptures, 548.

8 Charles de Tolnay, Michelangelo's Pieta Composition for Vittoria Colonna, 62.


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supernatural and clearly cruciform position he's been given by the

artist.9 This same sense of static suspension is heightened when

everything but that cruciform position is abandoned in Christ on the

Cross, rendering singular visual focus on the suffering endured by the

living Christ in the moments before his death that have been made

uncomfortably visceral by the artist's unprecedented mastery of gestural

physical expression.10 The result, in both drawings, is an intentional

artistic elevation of essentially human situations beyond plastic narrative.

They become what Charles de Tolnay describes as hyper-idealized

religious symbols,11 and represent what Alexander Nagel calls a more

overtly archaizing return to the original conception of cult statuary. As

such, both drawings stand in sharp contrast, not only to those produced

for Cavalieri and Michelangelo himself, but to aesthetic ideals the artist

had helped redefine, realize, promote, and would continue to promote for

many years to come through his work with the offices of the Catholic

Church.12

The stylistic and aesthetic differences that make the Colonna

drawings so unique are clearly intentional. As the sheer volume of

correspondence on the design and development of his major public

commissions makes evident, every iconographical detail [of

9 Alexander Nagel, Observations on Michelangelo's Late Pieta Drawings andSculptures, 562.

10Una Roman D'Elia, Drawing Christ's Blood: Michelangelo, Vittoria Colonna, and theAesthetics of Reform, 103.

11Charles de Tolnay, Michelangelo's Pieta Composition for Vittoria Colonna, 62.12Alexander Nagel, Observations on Michelangelo's Late Pieta Drawings and

Sculptures, 563.


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Michelangelo's work] is precisely thought out ... very carefully

elaborated13 The choices of subject matter, composition, medium, finish,

aesthetic, and effect for the Pieta and Christ on the Cross reflect the

same rational disegno approach to their creation as that undertaken for

any other purpose by the artist. The difference lay only in the patron, the

intended audience, and the relationship shared by the two. Michelangelo,

in this case, was his own patron. His intended audience was a woman

with whom he shared an extraordinarily complex relationship, to whom

he looked for spiritual guidance, and for whom he was alleged to have

great affection, admiration, and respect.14 The drawings were intended to

serve as both the embodiment of their shared belief in salvation through

faith alone, as well as an expression of that faith itself.15 Choice of subject

matter, figural and symbolic elements, composition, gesture, medium,

atmosphere, finish, aesthetic, and affect were made by the artist

specifically to please and move the recipient. The repeated references

made in Colonna's poetry and prose to the Virgin with whose mourning

she seems to have personally identified would have made the Pieta an

obvious iconographic choice of subject for the artist's purposes.16 The

positioning of the dead Christ as both central and preeminent is a direct

13Secrets of the Dead, Michelangelo Revealed,PBS video, 11:48-11:5414Alessandro Nova, Vittoria Colonna. Vienna., 424, from Michelangelo, Pontormo and

the Noli me tangere, by Michael Hirst and Gudula Mayr, published in VictoriaColonna, Dichterin und Muse Michelangelos, Vienna (1997).

15Alexander Nagel, Gifts for Michelangelo and Vittoria Colonna, 328-331.16Una Roman d'Elia, Drawing Christ's Blood: Michelangelo, Vittoria Colonna, and the

Aesthetics of Reform, 119.


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reference to tenets of the faith Colonna shared with the artist.17 The

relationship of the Virgin acting as spatial mediator in direct line between

the body and the cross behind her, on the other hand, acknowledges

Colonna's personal belief that Mary had effectively been elevated by her

suffering to the role of coredemptrix.18 This position further allows Mary

to visually serve in the drawing as the cross upon which Michelangelo

more literally hangs the living Christ in the second of his drawings. This

iconographic image, like that of the Pieta, had deep personal significance

for Colonna whose belief that salvation necessitated contemplating

Christ struggling alive on the Cross was not shared by Michelangelo nor

supported by the il Spirituali as a whole.19

What these drawings intentionally fail to fulfill for Colonna,

however, is the desire expressed in her prose prayer on theAve Maria to

be given a Christ all full of blood, with a thousand wounds lacerated on

the Cross.20 Despite their settings within the inherently violent crucifixion

narrative, Michelangelo makes no attempt in either drawing to depict the

blood of Christ's wounds or the tears of the Virgin so graphically

described in the gospels. In both, as Una Roman d'Elia notes in an essay

on the subject, pain is not dramatized as a bloody horror, but meditated

17Alexander Nagel, Observations on Michelangelo's Late Pieta Drawings andSculptures, 560.

18Una Roman d'Elia, Drawing Christ's Blood: Michelangelo, Vittoria Colonna, and theAesthetics of Reform, 121.

19Una Roman d'Elia, Drawing Christ's Blood: Michelangelo, Vittoria Colonna, and theAesthetics of Reform, 108-111.

20Ibid, 122, quoting Paolo Simoncelli, Evangelismo italiano del Cinquecento: questionereligiosa e nicodemismo politico, Rome (1979), 430431.


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upon as a disembodied notion.21 The artist thus rendered these

moments with a carefully colored but colorless simplicity and softness

that communicates a vulnerable sense of deep personal empathy for the

suffering being endured by his figures through a sublime but visually

precise juxtaposition of their positioning, gesture, and spatial intimacy.22

By doing so, Michelangelo realized, not only the manifest purpose

for which he'd originally made the drawings, but the latent purpose of

demonstrating to Colonna the innate superiority of the disegno approach

over that of the colore in its power to elicit emotion. Colonna uses both

words to comment metaphorically on the religious salvation in her poetry,

associating disegno with the words of Christ and colore with the blood

through which salvation could more directly be obtained.23Disegno is an

abstract and ideal appreciated through sustained intellectual

contemplation; colore a direct experience whose apprehension was

immediate and profoundly moving.24 Most revealing as to Colonna's

opinion on the relative superiority of the two approaches are those

suggestions made repeatedly in her poetry that colore is the ultimate

end and perfect culmination of the incomplete disegno.25

The Pieta and Christ on the Cross, with their subtle but highly-

effective emotional interplay of black on white, assertively defied what

21Ibid, 124.22Ibid, 124.23Ibid, 96.24Una Roman d'Elia, Drawing Christ's Blood: Michelangelo, Vittoria Colonna, and the

Aesthetics of Reform, 97.25Ibid, 98.


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must have seemed to Michelangelo like such a naive understanding of his

skill to woman possessed of Colonna's intellect. Her response to both

drawings was immediate, direct, and deeply personal. In a letter to

Michelangelo she describes one of the drawings as so marvelous that it

surpassed in all ways all my expectations it is most perfect from all

sides and one could not wish more, nor come to wish so much.26 In the

same letter she states her belief that the works Michelangelo produced

for her were realized by virtue of Divine Grace and that she considered

them invested with divine forces of a miraculous nature that brought

comfort to her private devotions.27

That Michelangelo was able to realize both the manifest and latent

intent with the Colonna drawings reveals more, perhaps, about the power

disegno had to offer as an approach to making art that engaged

powerfully, directly, and deeply with viewers both known and anticipated,

as well as those generations removed from its creation. The major

commissions of those who embraced its application with such

breathtaking emotional effect during the High Renaissance continue to

seminally define western ideas of what art is, means, and is supposed to

do. It is little wonder, under the circumstances, that those same principles

when applied to the creation of something as private and heavily-

endowed with personal meaning as the Colonna drawings should have a

26Vittoria Colonna, quoted by Charles de Tolnay, Michelangelo and Vittoria Colonna,in Sixteenth Century Italian Art, 318.

27Charles de Tolnay, Michelangelo and Vittoria Colonna, in Sixteenth Century ItalianArt, 318.


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similar but even greater effect on the single viewer by whom they were

inspired, and for whom they were specifically, if not exclusively intended

to be seen.


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Works Cited

Annesley, Noel and Michael Hirst. 'Christ and the Woman of Samaria' byMichelangelo. The Burlington Magazine, 123 (1981):580+608+610+614

Brundin, Abigail. Vittoria Colonna and the Spiritual Poetics of the ItalianReformation. Burlington: Ashgate Publishing Company, 2008.

D'Elia, Una Roman. Drawing Christ's Blood: Michelangelo, VittoriaColonna, and the Aesthetics of Reform. Renaissance Quarterly, 59(2006): 90-129.

de Tolnay, Charles, Michelangelo and Vittoria Colonna. In SixteenthCentury Italian Art, edited by Michael W. Cole, 306-323. Oxford:Blackwell Publishing, 2006.

de Tolnay, Charles. Michelangelo's Pieta Composition for VittoriaColonna. Record of the Art Museum, Princeton University, 12(1953): 44-62.

Nagel, Alexander. Gifts for Michelangelo and Vittoria Colonna. InSixteenth Century Italian Art, edited by Michael W. Cole, 324-367.Oxford: Blackwell Publishing, 2006.

Nagel, Alexander. Observations on Michelangelo's Late Pieta Drawingsand Sculptures.Zeitschrift fur Kunstgeschichte, 59 (1996): 548-572.

Nova, Alessandro. Vittoria Colonna. Vienna. The Burlington Magazine,139 (1997): 423-425.

Secrets of the Dead. Michelangelo Revealed. PBS video, 52:32. May 13,2009. http://www.pbs.org/wnet/secrets/episodes/michelangelo-revealed/watch-the-full-episode/226/

Vasari, Giorgio. Lives of the Most Eminent Painters, Sculptors andArchitects.Translated by Gaston Du C. de Vere. 1912-1915.Accessed February 26, 2012.http://www.fordham.edu/halsall/basis/vasari/vasari26.htm

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