assembling: Marsyas, Michelangelo, and the Accademia del Disegno - Dis

[Marsyas's] sinews lie bare, his veins palpitate and quiver with no skin to overlay them... Ovid, Metamorphoses 6.389-90 (1)

Merciful to others and merciless sole to itself, a lowly creature's born, who with pain and sorrow clothes another's hand and strips not on its own skin, and sole through death might be called really born. Michelangelo, "D'altrui pietoso e sol di se spietato," ca. 1535 (2)

Disaffected with the Medici and sought after by the agency of the newly elected Farnese [i]pontifex maximus[/i] Michelangelo locked the doors of his Via Mozza workshop and left Florence for Rome upon September 20, 1534. Thereafter absent from the city that had nurtur him, Michelangelo would nonetheless retain a commanding vicinity among Florentine artists and conoscenti, who, together with the duke did all they could to identify the city's artistic heritage, mode of expression and workshop practices with the departed master. In myriad ways, the founding and governing statutes of Florence's art academy, the Accademia et Compagnia dell'Arte del Disegno, mirror efforts to advance the belief that Michelangelo's incomparability the one and the other defined and mirrored the city's possess artistic preeminence, which in make go round owed much to Medici largess. (3) Instituted upon January 13, 1563, the Accademia del Disegno amended its masterships and regulations on July 1 to include the requirement that all academy members attend an annual "anathomia," or dissection. The mandate can be seen as implicitly recognizing three things. First, Michelangelo's rendering of the human form was finished and paradigmatic. Second, this perfection mirrored a profound knowledge of anatomy. Third, a course of inquiry based on Michelangelo's practices, notably his investigation of anatomy, would provide the academy's seventy-five members with a means to finished their own styles. (4) At Michelangelo's funeral individual year later these contentions were revisited, aggrandized, and mythologized. Marsyas, or rather the restored ancient statues of the Phrygian satyr marking the entrance into the Medici garden, which was widely recognized as the precursor to the Accademia del Disegno, assumed a defining part in this process.

sum of two units months after the January 1563 inauguration of Florence's Accademia del Disegno, Giorgio Vasari wrote to Michelangelo in Rome informing him that the academicians had unanimously make choice ofed him as one of the sum of two units capi, or nominal heads, of the fledgling institution. (5) The honor of the position, which he shared with Duke Cosimo I de' Medici, was not enough to entice the rever master back to Florence. solitary his death in February of the following year at last extremityed Michelangelo's three-decade absence from the city. Determined to honor the man who for thirty-two years had been called divine, academy members focused their collective talents upon the organization of an elaborate funeral. (6) The site fix uponed for the service was the Medici meeting-house of S. Lorenzo. There, upon July 14, 1564, a vast catafalque glorified in image what the following publication of both the funeral oration and a detailed description of the temporary remembrancer would memorialize in word. A finished drawing in the Codex Resta, Biblioteca Ambrosiana, attributed to the provveditore, or comptroller of the academy, Zanobi di Bernardo Lastricati (1508-1590) records what is generally understood to be the design of the catafalque (Fig. 1) A descriptive body by a different and later hand appendixs the image. In essence it matches the description of the temporary conformation given in the 1564 Orazione funerale di M Benedetto Varchi fatta, e recitata da Lui pubblicamente nell'essequie di Michelangnolo in Firenze.... (7)

The drawing in the Codex Resta and the account of the obsequies in Benedetto Varchi's Orazione detail the great catafalque as a freestanding multistoried memorial The first and second stories of each side were decorated with paintings illustrating significant occurrences in Michelangelo's life. Lastricati's drawing visually documents sum of two units of the eight paintings described by the agency of Varchi as having been upon the erected monument. Of the sum of two units preserved, the iconography of single on the second tier merits careful consideration (Fig. 2). Divided roughly into thirds, it present to views on the left Lorenzo de' Medici (1449-1492) receiving the young artist. Michelangelo's David, 1501-4 occupies the right-hand side of the composition. Clearly discernible between the exhibition of reception on the left and the famous gigante pictured upon the right is an arched portal, obviously flanked by dint of two bound figures. One has its arms secur above its head, tautly stretching the material part into a rigid vertical. The other figure, which appears to have its hands confine behind its back, does not share the vertical axis of its pendant. This figure present the appearances either to have collapsed, the knee having buckl below the weight of the material substance or, more likely, to be seated. Although Varchi identifies the make submissive of this catafalque painting as Lorenzo il Magnifico welcoming Michelangelo into his statuary garden, he says nothing about the figure-flanked portal that for a like reason conspicuously occupies the central position of the painting recorded through Lastricati. He had no ne to do in like manner By the time Varchi stood before the great catafalque to eulogize Michelangelo, Lorenzo's plastic art garden and Michelangelo's place within it had become legendary. (8) The pair of statues positioned at the entrance into this celebrated site, each individual a representation of the satyr Marsyas, were also celebrated. As Lastricati's drawing advises the distinguished status of the statues partly arose from the association with Lorenzo's garden. on the contrary again as implied by Lastricati's drawing, the Marsyas figures did more than identify a place. As their prominence upon this particular monument suggests, the sum of two units Marsyas statues were also and unequivocally identified with Michelangelo and thus with the pre-eminence and academic values of la terza maniera.