Michelangelo's Relics: Some Aspects of Artistic Devotion in Cinquecento Italy

CHAPTER 7 Michelangelo’s Relics: Some Aspects of Artistic Devotion in Cinquecento Italy JÉRÉMIE KOERING H ere we evaluate the reception of Michelangelo’s genius as a matter of sacred behavior on the part of numerous contemporaries, who treated Michelangelo’s drawings as relics belonging to the entirety of his work. Just as a relic confirmed its sacred origin within the reliquary, so too did Michelangelo’s adepts borrow from his art with the tacit understanding that the final, resulting work would resemble Michelangelo’s art and relay creativity in the sacred ways of relic dissemination. In April 1544, Pietro Aretino addressed an exhortation to Michelangelo with a pressing prayer. Aretino had been trying for several years to obtain a drawing from the master, yet despite repeated requests, he never received any. His desperate plea: “But why, O Lord, do you not reward my constant devotion, who reveres your celestial qualities, with a relic of those papers that are less dear to you?”1 The fervent desire to possess a drawing from the great Florentine artist, even if only a piece of paper with “two marks of carbon” (due segni di carbone),2 drives the author of the notorious Dialogo nel quale la Nanna insegna a la Pippa sua figliola a esser putana (1536) to accomplish an act of devotion by talking to Michelangelo as one would to Christ or one of his saints. Formulated as a pious attitude towards the divine artist, Aretinos’s plea strikes a puzzling comparison of sheets of paper to sacred remains: to relics. How should we understand this shift from sacred to secular language to describe a work of art? In Creating the “Divine” Artist, Patricia Emison has attempted to explain the aberrant use of the word reliquia as merely a metaphor highlighting the artist’s ingegno.3 Indeed, the word 1 “Ma perché, o signore, non remunerate voi la cotanta divozion di me, che inchino la celeste qualità di voi, con una reliquia di quelle carte che vi sono meno care?”; Aretino, Lettere, no. 173, II, 15–16; English translation quoted from Goffen, Renaissance, 334. On Aretino’s letter, see also Emison, Creating, 146; Nagel, “The Afterlife,” 214; and Bambach, “Art and Personal Spirituality”, 212. 2 Aretino, Lettere, no. 173, II, 15–16; Goffen, Renaissance, 334. 3 Emison, Creating, 4–5: “But that Vasari termed some of his works divine did not imply that they were like relics, so much as that compliment had exceeded well beyond the bounds of the literal. One could believe that 131