THE SEVEN LETTERS
exchanged by
MICHELANGELO AND VITTORIA COLONNA,
the only AUTHENTIC DOCUMENTS of
THEIR RELATIONSHIP
DISCARDED BY NEIL MAC GREGOR,
who also gave Vittoria Colonna the Quietus in
MICHELANGELO’S INDIVIDUALIZED DRAWINGS
of His BELOVED MARCHESA
in the London Exhibition of Michelangelo’s Drawings (2005)
as a consequence
of her loss of identity
as the FEMALE GENIUS of RENAISSANCE-HUMANISM
in a shadowy afterlife
Paolo Giovio:
By what excellent tools
Can the true image of Vittoria Colonna be sculptured?
Which exquisite nuances of eloquence
express her mind?
Although the empathetic drawings of Vittoria Colonna, perhaps his most sensitive drawings, he had created in the two decades from 1525 to 1543, are breathtaking novelty and not at all Michelangelo-esque regarding the artist’s habitual muscled males, Vittoria Colonna WAS NOT IDENTIFIED in these unique drawings, which were attributed to UNKNOWN WOMEN in the SECULAR EXHIBITION of Michelangelo’s Drawings in the British Museum in 2005– entitled NEARER TO THE MASTER (??).
In the captions beneath Michelangelo’s Drawings of his BELOVED MARCHESA in the London Exhibition in 2005, Vittoria became an anonymous woman or an ideal head or the half-length figure of a woman. Michelangelo’s empathetic drawing, showing Vittoria in half-profile, was presented as HEAD of a YOUNG MAN, even though a question mark was added, although Paolo Giovio, who befriended Vittoria Colonna, had left behind a precise description of her physiognomy in his Dialogues, focusing her ears and her nose:
Although wonderful gems and pearls are dangling from them (her ears), the onlooker’s eyes are only fascinated by her pretty ears. And what a lovely nose, resembling the noses of the Arsacid Dynasty! A tiny hill has been more suggested by Nature than accomplished and does not affect her female charm.
Giovio’s description is proved by Michelangelo’s drawings of Vittoria Colonna. To distinguish her profile from classic Greek profiles, he let her forehead and her conspicuous nose slightly deviate from a straight line. And he even added the tiny hill at her nasal root. Effortlessly, easily, the author of this text discovered Michelangelo’s drawings of Vittoria Colonna in spite of their attribution to unknown women, among the multitude of drawings in the London Exhibition (2005).
NEIL MAC GREGOR, THE INITIATOR of the EXHIBITION
Immersing himself
in Michelangelo’s drawing of
the Living Crucified
and in
VITTORIA COLONNA’S ENTHUSING LETTERS
about
his drawing of
THE LIVING CRUCIFIED
Astonishingly, in the Catalogue of the Exhibition, Neil Mac Gregor, the initiator of the Exhibition NEARER TO THE MASTER, which gave Vittoria Colonna her quietus in Michelangelo’s drawings, becomes engrossed with Vittoria Colonna’s enthusing letters she wrote to Michelangelo about the drawing of the LIVING CRUCIFIED. Mac Gregor even translated her “most poetical” letter into English. However, all of a sudden, the magician among Today’s Art Historians, relying on his intuition, discarded her letters, blaming Vittoria´s personal shortcomings for his failure to find an adequate approach to her female genius, a failure, which, certainly, was due to her loss of identity Vittoria Colonna, this Greatest Female Genius of Italian Renaissance-Humanism has suffered in her shadowy afterlife until today. But it was also a failure, due to Mac Gregor’s refusal to take on necessary empirical research about the poetess he did not, neither of her sonnets published by Alan Bullock nor of her mesmerizing Carteggio published by Ermanno Ferrero and Giuseppe Müller already in 1892 (!) Neither did Neil Mac Gregor immerse himself in Michelangelo’s self-revealing sonnets to his Beloved Marchesa, which also enlighten the inner dynamics of their relationship.
Nevertheless, it is mesmerizing for an empirically researching historian, so to speak a hardworking ant, anxiously relying on primary texts to bring to light the historic truth about this female genius of Italian Renaissance, to observe Neil Mac Gregor, the magician among today’s renowned art historians, relying on his intuition instead of referring to primary texts, when immersing himself into Vittoria Colonna’s original letters on Michelangelo’s Crucified, handy to him as Director of the British Museum, offering another thrilling example for Neil Mac Gregor’s immediate approach to original historic objects, this time to Vittoria’s letters to Michelangelo, on a common human basis the intuitive magician prides himself of sharing with the Renaissance Woman.
Neil Mac Gregor, the glorified creator of a History of the World in one hundred objects left from previous civilizations and collected in the British Museum, was frenetically celebrated in 1336 reviews by his bourgeois readership, usually well-heeled and short of time, not really erudite but keen on self-improvement.
For them Mac Gregor presented HISTORY as a kaleidoscope, shifting, inter-connected, constantly surprising, and presenting our world by novel, undogmatic, unscholarly, empathetic, intuitive ways. “Brilliant deeply researched”, enthused Mary Beard, Guardian. “One of the most effective and intellectually ambitious initiatives in the making of public history!” Sunday Telegraph
Gregor’s immersion into Vittoria’s enthusing letters to Michelangelo, about his LIVING CRUCIFIED parallels his idiosyncratic procedures with his hundred objects:
Maybe the magician dreamed of also using Vittoria’s letters as material to distil a new woman from them in order to make her come out from these occasional letters as the female genius of Italian Renaissance, rising like Phoenix from the ashes, - by the way a figure Vittoria loved - and also resembling Apollinaire’s New Woman, “for whom no concept has been found so far, who rises from humanity, who will have wings and renew the world.”
Let’s see!
Neil Mac Gregor stays true to his idiosyncratic procedure, but more so to his personal appeal to his bourgeois readership, he never loses sight of, when dealing with the Italian Reformation in a kind of introductory essay, he integrated in the exhibition catalogue, entitled Michelangelo and Catholic Reform, a vague title, he completely loses sight of, instead erratically roaming through the High Time of Italian Reformation in the first half of the sixteenth 16th century, emphatically pushing the “intellectually vigorous ecclesiastics Gasparo Contarini and Reginald Pole into the foreground, who adhered to Lutheran Sola Fide (faith alone). Reginald Pole is also named as the founder of the so-called Ecclesia of Viterbo, a highly illustrious clerical circle with Vittoria Colonna, singled out as the only female among outstanding male members being called Spirituali,because they believed in the subjective revelation of God’s Grace through the workings of the Holy Spirit in individual souls.”
In his biographical notes about Vittoria Colonna, Neil Mac Gregor puts emphasis on her “impeccable” highly aristocratic lineage and points out that the poetess was “extraordinarily well-connected”, her correspondents ranking from Emperor Charles V and later Paul III to leading literary figures including Aretino, Bembo, Castiglione, Giovio and Varchi”, whereby Neil Mac Gregor irritatingly ranks ill-famed Aretino, the Rabelais of Italian Renaissance first and Pietro Bembo second, the Venetian Grande and literary pundit of Renaissance Italy. Nobody’s praise did Vittoria Colonna desire more fervently than his, calling him: Bembo, mio chiaro.
Vittoria Colonna, the spirited Femina Ludens and Pietro Bembo, in their mesmerizing correspondence, feature the courtly manners of the Renaissance on a high literary level, disguising flattery by sparkling wit, with Vittoria at times playing a daring game with the literary pundit. Bembo, though disposing of a humorous vein, did not always appreciate her superior esprit. Nor does Neil Mac Gregor, who found her “changes in tone dizzying”, her spirited capriciousness offending his earthbound sense of Scottish humor?
MICHELANGELO’S LIVING CRUCIFIED
according to
VITTORIA COLONNA’S IDEATION?
Trustee: British Museum London. AN 18429001. By courtesy of the British Museum
CHRIST IS STILL ALIVE
IN CONTRAST TO THE DYING CRUCIFIED in late-medieval paintings, reconciling Godfather by suffering the cruel death on the cross as atoning sacrifice for the sins of mankind, the muscular body of Michelangelo’s LIVING CRUCIFIED is virtually offensive, remindful of a Greek God, banishing the humiliating creatureliness of the ECCE HOMO paintings from the beholder ‘s field of vision.
With his daring alteration of the Iconography of the Crucified, Michelangelo corresponded to Vittoria Colonna’s personal image of Christ,
Vittoria Colonna, the female exponent of Italian Renaissance-Humanism, confronted the creaturely suffering Son of God with the bright image of painless God Apollo.
The Humanist Vittoria Colonna prayed to Jesus Christ:
I ask you, be my Apollo, and bathe
my eyes and my breast
in your heavenly fountain.
Previously, Michelangelo had already created Risen Jesus (Santa Maria sopra Minerva) with a similar ideal body, described by Stendhal as an athlete if remarkable strength. For certain, encouraged by Vittoria Colonna, the artist now transferred the ideal body onto the Crucified.
Neil Mac Gregor, as art- historian, arrives at the same conclusion. “The attractive hypothesis that the finished form of the design was arrived after consultation with Colonna, finds some support from the drawing itself, as it shows signs of having had additions by Michelangelo.”
MICHELANGELO and VITTORIA COLONNA INSTILLED in the CRUCIFIED THE DIGNITY OF THE SELF-AWARE INDIVIDUAL OF THE RENAISSANCE
The artist makes the Godson on the cross scrutinize the sense of his crucifixion. Separated from his Godfather, deserted by HIM, he remains self-reliant at the moment of dying. Though lonely, nailed on the cross, Michelangelo’s Crucified remains a SELF-ASSURED HUMAN INDIVIDUAL affronting his Remote Godfather, demanding from him justification, because he imposed on him this sacrificial, death on the cross, making him, his innocent son, atone for the sins of others.
Perrig:” Michelangelo measured the suffering of Christ by the depth of consciousness and not by the horror of the applied torture, there, where the Godson advances the threshold of nothingness and godliness……
Silvia Ferino-Pagden: “Whatever our interpretation of the living Christ on the cross may be like, it should be emphasized that the presentation of the ideal muscular body in an ancient Greek fashion without visible wounds, except for the nails in hands and feet, and without the crown of thorns, contravenes tradition.
MICHELANGELO AND VITTORIA COLONNA
THEIR LIVING CRUCIFIED
as
DIVINIZATION
OF THE
SELF-DEFINED INDIVIDUAL OF RENAISSANCE HUMANISM
In REBELLION
against
THE OLD TESTAMENT GOD FATHER
MAKING HIS INNOCENT SON ATONE FOR THE SINS OF MANKIND
Michelangelo encouraged by Vittoria Colonna instilled the Self-Defined Individualism of Renaissance -Humanism in the Living Crucified, pushing aside the Old Testament Interpretation
of the Crucifixion as an act of atonement for the Sins of Mankind imposed on his Divine Son by the
Old Testament God Father
Photographic rendition by courtesy of Kunst Historisches Museum in Vienna
VITTORIA COLONNA and MICHELANGELO
A STRANGE HOLY FAMILY
Not at all Madonna-like are outward appearance and posture of the Godmother, a mature woman, to whom Michelangelo gave the features of his beloved Vittoria. The Holy Virgin alias Vittoria Colonna is the dominating figure in the foreground, who, for certain, contributed the narrative substrate of the drawing to the artist.
The godmother, dressed in a negligent gown, with her habitual turban on her head has crossed her legs in defiance of Sweet Renaissance Madonnas. On her one leg, the head of Boy Jesus is resting, who, with angled legs, half hanging, half lying on the narrow bench, cannot stretch himself for wholesome sleep.
Michelangelo, in his habitual hood, has placed himself as Joseph beside Vittoria as Godmother. Leaning on the back of the bench, he is helplessly scrutinizing the child. The boy’s lifelessness, his cramped posture, instead of suggesting sound sleep, anticipate his death on the cross, which will be the boy’s destiny. The sands, running through the hour-glass, are also remindful of the boy’s short life.
Vittoria Colonna, a critical Godmother of the New Age of Renaissance-Humanism is holding an empty sheet of paper in her right hand extended backwards towards Heaven, in direction of the inexorably reticent Godfather, demanding from him justification for the violent death on the cross, he has imposed on His and Her Son.
The drawing of MADONNA DEL SILENZIO confirms Vittoria as driving force behind Michelangelo’s representation of the LIVING CRUCIFIED, demanding justification from Godfather for his shameful death on the cross.
MICHELANGELO’S and VITTORIA COLONNA’S
REBELLIOUS GODMOTHER under the CROSS
Her utter lack of understanding of the HEAVENLY FATHER, who imposed on Her and His SON the shameful death on the cross is drastically expressed by the body language of this self-assertive mother of Jesus under the Cross with Michelangelo not shrinking back from rendering the mother’s wrath against Godfather in her rebellious posture.
MICHELANGELO
(DRAWING)
VITTORIA COLONNA
(NARRATIVE SUBSTRATE)
Trustee:Louvre,Paris,
CABINET DES DESSINS. INV.-NR.720 F.
By courtesy of the Museum and of Dr. Alexandre Tessier
NEIL MAC GREGOR’S
IDIOSYNCRATIC INTERPRETATION of
MICHELANGELO’S LIVING CRUCIFIED
To turn on the interest of his secularized bourgeois fans for Michelangelo’s Living Crucified in Today’s Brave New World, Neil Mac Gregor comes up with his sensational parallel of the Living Crucified to Laokoön, which was ingeniously selected by the magician:
Firstly, it brings the Crucified down onto a secular level, because, unlike the passion of Jesus, this icon of human agony remains without redemptive reward from Heaven.
Secondly the parallel is not far-fetched, because this most famous ancient sculpture was excavated in Rome in 1506 and was put on public display in the Vatican Museums. Pope Julius II had Michelangelo survey the transport of the Laokoön group into the Vatican. The artist immediately praised the sculpture as a portento dell’ arte, his dying slave (Louvre) really being reminiscent of Laookön:
But Neil Mac Gregor DID DISCOVER Laokoön as the model for Michelangelo’s Living Crucified:
As Condivi rightly noted, Michelangelo ‘s drawing did not show Christ dead but alive, the twist of his upper body and upturned face distantly echoing the death throes of Laocoön in the ancient marble.
Should Michelangelo’s transfiguration of the Crucified into a self-aware Renaissance Individual, questioning his shameful death on the cross, imposed on him by His Heavenly Father, which puts an insurmountable barrier between the Crucified and ancient Laokoön, really escape Mac Gregor’s attentiveness?
Anyway, Michelangelo’s and Vittoria Colonna’s intellectual self-definition of the Godson did certainly not fit into Neill Mac Gregor’s singular idea, Michelangelo might have used the drastic representation of Laokoön’s death struggle as model for the Crucified in his gift drawing for Vittoria Colonna.
Mac Gregor implied far-fetched circumstantial evidence:
The stark simplicity of Michelangelo’s drawing is reminiscent of Catholic spiritual writers’ and preachers’ injunctions for the faithful to focus their devotions on the image of Christ’sCrucifixion. To help them do so, writers like Ochino encouraged their readers to visualize the scene by descriptions as that in the fourth of his Seven Dialogues, which recounts how the Good Thief had been converted because he witnessed Christ’s burning tears falling on the ground and Christ’s fervent sighs going up to Heaven.
In the following passage, Neill Mac Gregor, the self-willed magician among art historians of Today, dares to impute to Michelangelo a similar emotionalizing intention in his drawing of the Living Crucified:
In Michelangelo’s drawing, the skull, the blood dripping down from his nailed feet (?), and the lamenting angels in the background are intended to act in a similar way as visual clues prompting similar contemplation of Christ’s sacrifice.
It is hardly imaginable that Mac Gregor as art historian should not be familiar with the symbolical meaning of the skull at the foot the cross, indicating Golgotha as the place of Christ’s Crucifixion, which took place at Calvary, also called Golgotha, the Hebrew word for “the place of a skull.” (Mark.15:22),
However, it is true, the conventional addition of weeping angels and skull is interfering with his revolutionizing representation of the Living Crucified in the Age of Renaissance-Humanism.
As is proved by Vittoria’s humorous comment in her letter, Michelangelo DID add the conventional skull and the weeping angels. May be, he wanted to calm down outraged onlookers and the indignant inquisition because of his otherwise scandalizing representation of the Crucified with the flawless muscular body of a Greek God?
NEIL MAC GREGOR’S INTERPRETATION of
MICHELANGELO´S LIVING CRUCIFIED
for
VITTORIA COLONNA
IMPUTING TO THE ARTIST RECENTLY DUG-UP LAOKOÖN
as HIS MODEL for
THE LIVING CRUDCIFIED
Neil Mac Gregor:
The human aspect of Christ’s incarnation is expressed in his heavenward cry of anguish, while at the same time his divine nature, that part of him that accepted the suffering and sacrifice as the fulfillment of his mission to relieve mankind’s sins, is shown by the majestic repose of his body.
CONTROVERSE INTERPRETATIONS to
NEIL MAC GREGOR’S FAR-FETCHED INTERPRETATION of
MICHELANGELO’S LIVING CRUCIFIED
Alexander Perrig.
Michelangelo measured the suffering of Christ by the depths of consciousness and not by the applied torture.
Sylvia Ferino-Pagden:
Whatever our interpretation of the living Christ on the Cross in the represented moment may be like, it should be emphasized that the ideal body without visible wounds in spite of the nails in his hands and feet and without the crown of thorns contravenes tradition.
VITTORIA COLONNA
UNITING CHRIST AND APOLLO
IN HER PERSONAL IMAGE OF GOD
and
MICHELANGELO
CREATING
THE LIVING CRUCIFIED with
THE PERFECT MUSCULAR BODY
of a GREEK GOD
Proud of her Humanist education, granted to Female Aristocrats in Renaissance Italy as the first women, Vittoria Colonna, a female zealot, did not only enhance her intelligence to ultimate peaks. She was not only keen on unfolding her intellectual, spiritual, poetical but also creative capabilities in theological matters.
Audaciously, the Humanist Lady, united Christ and Apollo in her PERSONAL IDEA of GOD by attributing to Jesus Christ the brightness of the Greek God, realized by Michelangelo in the perfect body of the LIVING CRUCIFIED.
Beholding Apollo,
Whose radiance, by passing by illuminated every star,
the poetess “crucified” medieval presentations of her GOD of LIGHT as ECCE HOMO.
What does Vittoria Colonna expect from her CHRIST-APOLLO?
Spiritual Vitality to overcome her mundane imperfection! Her personal God is to breathe another image of God into her soul, a more serene idea of God than the sinister image of ECCE HOMO she had been indoctrinated by Theologia Crucis of Reformed Theologians she befriended in the Clerical Circle at Viterbo:
Light of foot, she wants to flee from this false world:
Con leggier salto sapro in tutto fuggir dal falso mondo.
VITTORIA COLONNA
THEOLOGIA CRUCIS IN SUBLIMATION
and
POETICAL PERFECTION
In
HER GRAT SONNET
LE BRACCIA APRENDO IN CROCE
While Neil Mac Gregor got stuck in sinister medieval dogmatism, even imputed to Michelangelo (!) by him in order to verify his idiosyncratic idea, the artist could have used Laokoön’s death struggle as model for the Living Crucified, Vittoria Colonna pushes aside the interpretation of Christ’s Crucifixion as self-sacrifice imposed on the Godson by his Godfather as Atonement for the sins of mankind in order to interpret theCrucifixion as Jesus Christ’s voluntary divine act of love for the world and for mankind, whose lot Jesus Christ shared by his incarnation.
With her authentic interpretation of Christ’s death on the cross, Vittoria Colonna dissociated herself from the Reformed Theologians of Viterbo she befriended to hurry ahead of her time by centuries to side with the leading theologians of the Protestant Church of Germany, whose interpretation of Christ’s Death on the Cross is identical with hers.
Bischof Wolfgang Huber: “Jeusu Christ’s Death on the cross is an act of self-abandonment, performed in personal freedom and in love.”
Vittoria Colonna, as poetess of Renaissance-Humanism visualizes the Crucified as a self-determined individual of Renaissance, acting on his own initiative, when she, in the great concetto at the beginning of her sonnet makes the Crucified free his arms from the bars of the Cross for an affectionate embrace of this world and these people now living in it. Heaven is only mentioned once (!) and in one breath together with Limbo, both inaccessible areas, unexperienced by the poetess and her fellow-beings.
Vittoria’s Crucified embraces rocks, historic monuments, the curtain of the ancient temple, which ripped in two after Christ’s passing away, as well as shadows and figures. The poetess placed the focus on materialized this-worldliness.
In the second quatrain of her sonnet, the embrace of Christ is spiritualized into illumination of the human minds for his new scriptures, which are not engraved in stone tablets and are not enforced on these new Christians, nor are they indoctrinated in Renaissance individuals.
The new scriptures of the Crucified are interpreted by these new Christians themselves, while the poetess restricts the Crucified to instilling “ardent zeal” into the hearts of men, after melting the ice in their souls by showing them his sweet realm and his kindness, these graces hitherto hidden by a multitude of precepts of the Old Testament Religion of harsh intimidating laws, also representative of the dogmatism of the Official Church in the 16th century.
The poetess dreams of the Embrace of the Crucified taking effect in beatifying liberation of religiousness, profusely hailed in the second tercet:
O, DESIATA PACE, O, BENEDETTI GIORNI FELICI,
O, LIBERAL PIETADE,
Che ne scopre GRAZIE, LUME, AMORE.
VITTORIA COLONNA
SONNET
SPREADING THE ARMS WIDE ON THE CROSS
Lord, by spreading the arms wide on the cross
and showing the pure wounds,
You have opened Heaven, Limbo, Rocks, Monuments,
the Curtain of the Ancient Temple, Shadows, and Figures.
You have enlightened the Human Minds,
going astray in darkness.
and melting the ice,
you have imbued them with glowing fervor,
which makes accessible Your Holy Scriptures.
You have revealed your sweet realm and your kindness,
which seems hidden
by so many precepts of rough, even tough, just law of fear.
O, DESIRED PEACE, O BLESSED, HAPPY DAYS!
O FREED PIETY, WHICH DISCOVERS MERCY, LIGHT, LOVE.
VITTORIA COLONNA
SONETTO
LE BRACCIA APRENDO IN CROCE
Le braccia aprendo in croce e pure
piaghe largo, Signor, apristi il Cielo
il limbo, I sassi, I monumenti, e ‘l velo
del tempio antico, e l’ombre e le figure.
Le menti umane infin alora oscure
Illuminasti, dileguando il gielo,
le riempiesti d’un ardente zelo,
ch ‘aperse poi le sacre tue scritture.
Mostrassi il dolce imperio e la bontade,
che parve ascosa in quei tanti precetti
de l’aspra e giusta legge del timore:
O, Desiata Pace, o Benedetti
Giorni Felici! O,Liberal Pietade
Che ne scopre Grazie, Lume, Amore.
SEVEN OCCASIONAL LETTERS
exchanged by
VITTORIA and MICHELANGELO
in the years 1538 (?) to November 1543
as
THE ONLY WRITTEN DOCUMENTS of
THEIR PERSONAL RELATIONSHIP
DISCARDED as NEGLIGIBLE by
NEIL MAC GREGOR
NEIL MAC GREGOR about
VITTORIA COLONNA’S LETTERS
to MICHELANGELO
The meaning of these letters associated with the gift of the Crucified is often difficult to follow: the problematic task of
unpicking Colonna’s syntax is exacerbated by her dizzying changes in tone from high-flown theological abstraction to discussion of practicabilities.
Neil Mac Gregor’s overall rating of Vittoria Colonna’s letters to Michelangelo. about the gift drawing of the living Crucified offers another excellent example of his idiosyncratic proceedings, which, however, at least in the case of Vittoria Colonna, are altogether reaching into the void, because he does not take the slightest effort at objectifying verification by offering concrete proofs from her letters for his insinuations, revealing his disparagement of Vittoria Colonna, which is a sad consequence of her general loss of identity.
But the author of this text cannot fight off her impression that the “dizzyingly” capricious spirit of this superior female Genius of Renaissance-Humanism had a disconcerting impact on Neil Mac Gregor’s earthbound Scottish identity.