We live in a world that is slowly emasculating words power, most of all the fluid possibility for words to express things that we cannot see. On the contrary a tangle of images is taking our independent imagination by siege, and in order to establish a balance between spirit and senses we can only evaluate what looks real and human, scientific, historical and social.
Thus it is particularly difficult for modern women and men to imagine physical beauty as an elevating subject for any artist to contemplate and to portray beyond the distractions and the trammels of sexuality.
Accordingly, many mighty statues carved by Michelangelo are resistant to common sense since they surprise us for a mysterious quality. A mystery beyond mere semblance.
Those celebrated images were once to be poetic and philosophical expressions of the artist himself: a man who, during a time of social and political turmoil, was often torn between envisioning a new artistic grammar and the need to establish his otherness from past generations of artisans or the coeval legions of imitative artists concentrated on nature, reality, history.
In many of his sonnets, Michelangelo asserted that Beauty in nature is only an imperfect copy of ideal Forms. Following a vernacular, Christianized version of Plotinus’s Platonism, he believed that enlighten artists could learn about Ideals by reflecting on the beauty of sensory objects and then-through creative imagination-discover in their own minds the Ideals from which all sensory objects are imperfectly derived. Once artists have apprehended those Ideals, they can use knowledge to create a beauty more perfect than any seen in nature.
Being also a poet, Michelangelo wanted to transmit something more philosophical and lyrical about his inventions in spotless marble. He thus took the most sensual and immediately interesting object, the human body, and tried to put that notion out of reach of time and desire.
Thus Buonarroti carved a new type of statues, imagining those figures were as spoken images: not characters and names but as nouns, not images of humans but as actions and verbs.
Nowadays the pleasant bodies Michelangelo imagined for the David, the Bacchus or the Vatican Pieta arouse interest and aesthetic satisfaction almost to the detriment of those meanings he and his patrons wanted to show through.
However, we might assume that the full range of Buonarroti’s imaginative skills was well understood only by the most educated contemporaries, that is to say that portion of late-Humanist culture that has passed on to us a novel aesthetic of the body: a classical quality poised between Holiness and Sensuality, Nature and Ideals, Christian values and ancient like forms.
Many go to the Accademia merely to be recounted of an old tale and to admire the evident beauty of the David, assuming that quality depended on the emulation of nature and not on ‘philosophical’ imagination. Most visitors are concerned to understand if that very icon of male beauty was born on the basis of a peculiar human being, a model beloved by Michelangelo for his semi-divine appearance. This certainly could reassure us in a time of pubertal approach toward pseudo-independent representations of our bodies, a pseudo-freedom from the boundaries of history, religion and taboos underlined even by advertising and fashion.
This awkwardness, this rather confusing overview remind us of few words by Coleridge “The intelligible powers of ancient poets, the fair humanities of old religion, the Power, the Beauty and the Majesty, that had their haunts in dale or piney mountain…all these have vanished. They live no longer in the faith of reason” .
Thus it is particularly difficult for modern women and men to imagine physical beauty as an elevating subject for any artist to contemplate and to portray beyond the distractions and the trammels of sexuality.
Accordingly, many mighty statues carved by Michelangelo are resistant to common sense since they surprise us for a mysterious quality. A mystery beyond mere semblance.
Those celebrated images were once to be poetic and philosophical expressions of the artist himself: a man who, during a time of social and political turmoil, was often torn between envisioning a new artistic grammar and the need to establish his otherness from past generations of artisans or the coeval legions of imitative artists concentrated on nature, reality, history.
In many of his sonnets, Michelangelo asserted that Beauty in nature is only an imperfect copy of ideal Forms. Following a vernacular, Christianized version of Plotinus’s Platonism, he believed that enlighten artists could learn about Ideals by reflecting on the beauty of sensory objects and then-through creative imagination-discover in their own minds the Ideals from which all sensory objects are imperfectly derived. Once artists have apprehended those Ideals, they can use knowledge to create a beauty more perfect than any seen in nature.
Being also a poet, Michelangelo wanted to transmit something more philosophical and lyrical about his inventions in spotless marble. He thus took the most sensual and immediately interesting object, the human body, and tried to put that notion out of reach of time and desire.
Thus Buonarroti carved a new type of statues, imagining those figures were as spoken images: not characters and names but as nouns, not images of humans but as actions and verbs.
Nowadays the pleasant bodies Michelangelo imagined for the David, the Bacchus or the Vatican Pieta arouse interest and aesthetic satisfaction almost to the detriment of those meanings he and his patrons wanted to show through.
However, we might assume that the full range of Buonarroti’s imaginative skills was well understood only by the most educated contemporaries, that is to say that portion of late-Humanist culture that has passed on to us a novel aesthetic of the body: a classical quality poised between Holiness and Sensuality, Nature and Ideals, Christian values and ancient like forms.
Many go to the Accademia merely to be recounted of an old tale and to admire the evident beauty of the David, assuming that quality depended on the emulation of nature and not on ‘philosophical’ imagination. Most visitors are concerned to understand if that very icon of male beauty was born on the basis of a peculiar human being, a model beloved by Michelangelo for his semi-divine appearance. This certainly could reassure us in a time of pubertal approach toward pseudo-independent representations of our bodies, a pseudo-freedom from the boundaries of history, religion and taboos underlined even by advertising and fashion.
This awkwardness, this rather confusing overview remind us of few words by Coleridge “The intelligible powers of ancient poets, the fair humanities of old religion, the Power, the Beauty and the Majesty, that had their haunts in dale or piney mountain…all these have vanished. They live no longer in the faith of reason” .
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