Gifts for Michelangelo and Vittoria Colonna

In a investigation of that central document of Italian Evangelism before the Council of Trent the Beneficio di Cristo, Carlo Ginzburg and Adriano Prosperi noted by what means far the culture presupposed by dint of this bestseller of 1543 had advance from the culture of civic religion in like manner forcefully in evidence in the late Quattrocento.(1) The public processions and liturgies, the miraculous relics and the venerated saints that were taken as figures of the city, the display of private and confraternity chapels - in short, the "ritual setting" studied through among others, Richard Trexler - stand in stark contrast to the direct relation between the believer and his or her heaven celebrated in the Beneficio. Public rituals, of course, continued to be celebrated in the cinquecento, on the other hand the enormous success of the Beneficio - a contemporary estimated that between 1543 and 1549 forty thousand copies had been sold in Venice alone(2) - indicates the emerging see the verb of deep-seated religious needs that were no longer satisfied through these traditional ritual forms.

This article concentrates les upon the causes than on the proces of this transformation, which is sharply illuminated through developments in the nature and status of religious images in this period. I concentrate upon works by Michelangelo that not alone implicitly reveal such a transformation at work on the contrary also directly confront and interpret its implications. My intention is not simply to exhibit in which ways works of art came beneath the influence of reforming meditation in this period. I am more interested in pointing on the outside where developments in the claims of works of art converg with the be of importance tos of reformminded thinkers. It is my contention that of recent origin forms of aesthetic engagement elicited by means of works of art in this period epitomized and gave interpretative object to some of the greatest in quantity significant developments in reforming meditation at this time - in particular, its subjective emphasis, its preoccupation with the part of the believer's conscience in the moves of faith. The relationship was, I trust to show, mutual: the form of hermeneutic investment demanded through the one activity provided a privileged arena for the exhibition of the other.

The work at the focus of this article, a drawing of the Pieta that Michelangelo made for Vittoria Colonna [ILLUSTRATION FOR FIGURE 1 OMITTED], drawn outed to a new category of artwork altogether: it was a drawing made as a finished work in its have right, and offered as a gift.(3) The unravelling runs parallel to the religious exhibitions noted above: the direct and private experience tendered by the new category of artwork marks a deliberate retreat from the traditional forms of religious art, of the like kind as altarpieces, and from the entire economy of piety - the combination of parts to form a whole of endowments, paid mass-sayings, and ceremonial observances - that like forms served and symbolized. Initially, in the work of Leonardo, Rosso Fiorentino, and Michelangelo himself, the fresh category had served as a venue for secular and pagan make subordinates that is, as an alternative to religious art altogether. Here it was adopted as a means of reforming religious art itself.

In this proces the notion of the gift - inherent the one and the other in the drawing's subject, the sacrifice of Christ, and in the circumstances of its making and presentation - played a lock opener role. For Michelangelo and Vittoria Colonna, the drawing conceived as a gift was deliberately exonerate from the normal economy of art production in the period. Traditional temple art typically came with requirements about iconography, or at least about the inclusion of certain patron saints, requirements that were determined by means of the role it played within a devotional economy.(4) The stipulations that made up the painter's contract, in other words, were a function of the higher a whole of "contracts" - the economy of promise s dedications, endowments, and masssayings - within which religious art worked generally. It was the excessive reliance upon this contractual system that reformers, of all stripes, greatest in quantity consistently deplored. The conception of art as a gift elaborated by the agency of Michelangelo and Vittoria Colonna was, among other things, an effort to transplant it from this economy. For them a liberal conception of art, single that considered art a gift rather than something plied as a trade and below contract, became a privileged protoplast for a more "interiorized" conception of religious faith, single that emphasized the direct relation between divine grace and the believer's conscience. These points are clearly made in the alphabetic characters between the two that enclose this drawing, where we find a highly articulate series of correlations between the claims of art, the protocols of gift giving, and the operations of divine grace.

The Art of the Gift

Michelangelo's Pieta drawing for Vittoria Colonna was the ensue of unprecedented investigations, essays at the limits of Christian iconography. It was a searching effort to interpret the meaning of Christ's sacrifice at a time when this question had become a matter of volatile religious debate This circumstance, in turn, reinforced Michelangelo's inclination to give chase to such explorations in a private sphere, outside the conventional categories of religious art. The novel category of independent drawing he adopted for the intent was, on the one hand, unlike a preparatory investigation in that it expressly claimed to be a work of art in its have a title to right. As a drawing, upon the other hand, it retained an experimental quality, a freedom from the conventions that controll finished panel painting in the period - a freedom that, in make go round reinforced the exemption from the conventional practice of making works of art upon commission. The claim to freedom of invention, and the consequently heightened demand for hermeneutic engagement upon the part of the viewer, was integral to the conception of art as a gift articulated through Michelangelo and Vittoria. These ideas were well suited to the real cultivated circle of reform-minded letterati and humanists with which Michelangelo and especially Vittoria were associated.