Michelangelo's Dream

Michelangelo's Dream Author(s): Maria Ruvoldt Source: The Art Bulletin, Vol. 85, No. 1 (Mar., 2003), pp. 86-113 Published by: College Art Association Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/3177328 Accessed: 13/10/2010 13:11 Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of JSTOR's Terms and Conditions of Use, available at http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp. JSTOR's Terms and Conditions of Use provides, in part, that unless you have obtained prior permission, you may not download an entire issue of a journal or multiple copies of articles, and you may use content in the JSTOR archive only for your personal, non-commercial use. Please contact the publisher regarding any further use of this work. Publisher contact information may be obtained at http://www.jstor.org/action/showPublisher?publisherCode=caa. Each copy of any part of a JSTOR transmission must contain the same copyright notice that appears on the screen or printed page of such transmission. JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact support@jstor.org. College Art Association is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to The Art Bulletin. http://www.jstor.org Michelangelo's Dream Maria Ruvoldt When Tommaso de' Cavalieri and Vittoria Colonna received one of Michelangelo's gift drawings, they were getting something novel. The highly finished drawing conceived as an end in itself and presented as a token of affection or esteem had no real precedent in artistic practice, belonging instead to other modes of social exchange and communication, such as gift giving and letter writing.' As Alexander Nagel has observed, the ostensible privacy and intimacy of this new form allowed for a unique degree of freedom of invention and interpretation.2 The drawings that Michelangelo produced in the mid-1530s in particular represent an exercise of artistic license that encourages an equally flexible interpretative response. They tend to be allegorical in nature, treating familiar myths or evoking a classicizing fantasy world whose outlines seem familiar from the work of an earlier generation of artists such as Andrea Mantegna, even if their precise meaning has eluded art historians. II Sogno (or The Dream, Fig. 1), generally dated to about 1533, traditionally has been viewed as an allegory of virtue and vice, an interpretation that seems somewhat limiting in light of the complex imagery of the work and the circumstances of its production and reception. Letters from both Cavalieri and Colonna to the artist testify to their intense engagement with Michelangelo's drawings, reporting hours spent gazing at the works and the use of mirrors and magnifying glasses for their closer examination." Taking such evidence as my guide, I want to look at the Sogno not as an instantly apprehensible allegory of virtue and vice but as an image to be meditated upon, a work whose pleasure derives from its endless unfolding of meaning, affording the viewer delight in returning to it again and again. While it is impossible to recover the intimate, subjective experience of the drawing's original recipient, the Sogno's iconography makes its meaning accessible to the less initiated viewer. The traditional interpretation of the work responds to that iconography, but I believe it falls short of the multifaceted nature of the image. In the pages that follow, I will argue that the Virtues and Vices are certainly at play in the Sogno, but as part of a more complex program that alludes to melancholia, dreams, love, desire, and creation. In blending these themes together, Michelangelo provides pictorial form for contemporary ideas about artistic inspiration and creation by inventing a visual language that complements and enhances a textual discourse on divine inspiration. The image challenges its viewer to untangle multiple threads of meaning and reweave them into a coherent whole, joining the artist in the making of meaning. At the center of Michelangelo's Sogno, a male nude perches precariously on an open box filled with masks. His upper torso twists to his left as he leans on a sphere for support. He turns his head in the opposite direction, looking upward and over his right shoulder to watch a winged creature descend from above. Considerably smaller in scale, the body of this heavenly visitor is silhouetted against the empty upper zone of the sheet as he floats down, head first, toward the nude. He extends his right arm to direct a trumpet at the nude's forehead, inflating his cheeks to sound the instrument. The trumpet pierces through an arc of smaller figures, many of them fragmentary, that encircle the nude. This arc of forms is rendered with a lighter touch, producing a sketchy effect that contrasts with the heavily worked body of the nude, yet the figures remain legible. Among assorted disembodied heads, we find figures that embrace and kiss while others do battle, drink, or sleep. Despite its relatively complex imagery, the Sogno seems to have presented few challenges to its readers. Since the seventeenth century, the drawing has been understood as an allegory of the human soul awakened to virtue from vice.4 This reading originates with Hieronymus Tetius, a seventeenth-century visitor to the Palazzo Barberini. Viewing a painted copy of the Sogno, Tetius identified its central seated youth as the human mind, his winged counterpart as an angel, and the cloud of figures surrounding the pair as representations of the Vices.5 His interpretation was endorsed, expanded, and applied to the original by Erwin Panofsky in the twentieth century." Subsequent readings have amplified and refined Panofsky's analysis, and few, if any, have challenged it.' At least eleven copies of the Sogno exist-in paintings, drawings, prints, and ceramics-yet none is entirely faithful to the original.8 The copyists' adjustments concentrate on the figures and heads arranged in an arc around the central nude, reducing their number and altering their appearance (Figs. 18, 20). Though faintly drawn and clearly subordinate in the original, in the copies they are as fully realized as the main figure and appear to be of equal significance. The copies thus shift the balance between the nude and the figures that surround him, a crucial change that invites misreadings of the original, as the secondary figures emerge from the mists of Michelangelo's drawing to become the apparent focus of the work and the key to its interpretation. But the copies also clarify the drawing, their interventions providing evidence of contemporary response to the Sogno and its imagery. The central pair of figures, carefully described and finished, is clearly the focus of the original drawing.9 Situated at the center of the sheet, the fully articulated nude youth and his winged companion are highlighted through contrast with the sketchy and incomplete forms arrayed about them. The otherwise empty upper zone concentrates attention on the body of the descending visitor, pulling the viewer's eye along his headlong plunge to reach the youth. The box beneath the nude thrusts him forward, creating a foreground space behind which the misty arc of figures appears. MICHELANGELO'S 1 Michelangelo, II sogno, ca. 1533. London, Courtauld Institute Gallery, Somerset House DREAM 87 88 ART BULLETIN MARCH 2003 VOLUME LXXXV NUMBER 1 'Al' totrll 3 SaintJohn, French, 1275. New York, The Pierpont Morgan Library, ms 524, fol. 6 (photo: The Pierpont Morgan Library/ Art Resource, NY) 2 Jacques de Gheyn, Melancholy.New York, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, The Elisha Whittelsey Collection, The Elisha Whittelsey Fund, 1949 (inv. no. 49.95.1232) Because of his idealized form and contact with the heavenly creature above him, the seated youth generally is believed to represent the human soul.10 But the presence of a recognizable attribute and the pose of the figure imply a more precise identity. The youth leans on a large sphere bisected by a line, a detail that suggests it represents the Earth. Some copies of the Sogno, in fact, depict the sphere as a globe, complete with continents. This prominent prop, originally an attribute of the geometer, is familiar from the iconography of melancholy (Figs. 2, 6).11 Traditionally signifying the melancholic's aptitude for geometry, in the Sogno the globe has other potential meanings. Simultaneously representing Earth and instability, it may signal both the melancholic's elemental affiliation and the emotional volatility that characterizes the temperament. The dependence of the Sogno's central nude on the globe strongly suggests that the figure is a melancholic. The figure's pose further develops the theme of melancholy. It indicates that the nude is in motion, prompting the viewer to reconstruct its prior position. Turning to meet his visitor, the youth has abandoned a closed pose, yet traces of his earlier posture remain. The nude shifts and turns to the right, lifting his head and body. Firmly planted on the ground, the left leg stabilizes the figure, defining the axis on which it turns. The right arm, cast across the chest, signals the "original" pose: the body turned to the left, the head and arms resting on the sphere. The "original" attitude suggests sleep, the habitual activity of the melancholic. With the advent of his visitor, the nude stirs, looking up and over his shoulder. The activation of the figure removes him from the company of melancholic sleepers and announces his condition as one of melancholic rapture, for his turning head and upward glance belong to the pictorial vocabulary of divine inspiration. The pose may have its genesis in illuminated manuscripts depicting the Evangelists (often accompanied by inspiring angels) turning their heads to hearken to the dictated Word (Fig. 3).12 It serves as an outward sign of a wholly interior moment, a physical manifestation of divine possession. Michelangelo employs the pose elsewhere, most notably in the figures of the Prophets and Sibyls in the Sistine Chapel, whose responses to their accompanying genii enact the effects of divine revelation.13 The type appears in contemporary portraits as well, such as Raphael's TommasoInghirami, whose pen hovers above the page as he turns his head to listen to his unseen Muse. The turning youth of the Sogno echoes such figures, and his encounter with an angelic creature suggests that he, too, experiences divine inspiration. The downward rush of the winged figure, awakening the nude from his slumber, contrasts with more static, decorous images of patiently dictating angels and Muses. The Sogno's exchange images the moment of inspiration as dramatic and perturbing. It embodies a particular model of divine inspiration, derived from Plato and elaborated by Marsilio Ficino, that attributed the insights of philosophers, prophets, and poets not to study and rational practice but to furor, a state of ecstasy akin to madness.14 Deeply indebted to Platonic philosophy, Ficino's formulation of divine furor famously granted a new status to the melancholic personality, asserting that its predisposition to madness signified a propensity to receive divine inspiration. The Renaissance discourse on melancholy and its relation to divine inspiration is well known, and need not be further rehearsed here.15 But as I bring it to bear on the Sogno, I want to emphasize an important aspect of melancholy as defined in early modern discourse: its doubleness, the peculiar mix of benefits and afflictions that made the humor both desirable and suspect. Since antiquity, melancholy's link to exceptional MICHELANGELO'S achievement had been seen as small consolation for its considerable drawbacks, including crippling depression. A text then commonly ascribed to Aristotle established the tone for subsequent assessments of melancholy.16 Although his premise, that all great men are melancholics, seems to elevate the stature of the humor, Aristotle's investigation focused on its negative effects on both mind and body. Ficino's own critical evaluation of the personality type in De vita triplici (1489), while celebrating the exceptional gifts reserved for melancholics, nevertheless acknowledged and offered therapies for the physiological and psychological ills associated with the humor, cataloguing medicinal and dietary prescriptions to alleviate its more troubling symptoms. Michelangelo, perhaps more than any other artist of the Renaissance, embodied the role of the melancholic genius, plagued by emotional instability yet blessed by divine inspiration.17 His image, both public and private, is intimately bound up with the vocabulary of melancholy. Raphael's Heraclitus may well be a tribute both to Michelangelo's figural style and to his melancholic personality, a pictorial homage that seems to encapsulate the myth of Michelangelo's melancholia (Fig. 4).s8 Gian Paolo Lomazzo further contributed to this image of the artist, granting Michelangelo the honor of representing the contemplative side of Saturn in the pantheon established in his treatise Idea del tempio della pittura.'9 This perception of the artist stemmed in part from his own adoption of the persona through the self-conscious publication of his melancholic tendencies, as evidenced in his correspondence and poetry. The Sogno participates in that selfconstruction of the artist as genius, exploiting both the Platonic notion of divine furor and the Aristotelian definition of melancholia and its attendant vices to describe melancholic inspiration as a blend of positive gifts and dangerous temptations. In the Sogno, Michelangelo depicts the mechanisms of inspiration with a certain precision. Approaching the youth from the heavens, the winged creature blows through a trumpet. This sacred exhalation recalls the afflatus of the inspiring god, echoing ancient descriptions of divine inspiration. Virgil's account of the Cumaean Sibyl's prophecy in the Aeneid, for example, is rich in the imagery of breath and wind. The doors of the Sibyl's cave swing open with the power of Apollo's presence, and her prophecies are carried on the wind. As she reaches the state of prophetic frenzy, she "feels the nearer breath of deity."20 Longinus likewise describes the Pythian priestess as "inspired to utter oracles" by virtue of "divine vapour."21 Michelangelo adopted this imagery for his Delphic Sibyl, her hair fluttering behind her to manifest the presence of the god. The concept also has a biblical pedigree, as Matthias Winner has observed in his reading of the Sogno, citing both the "breath of life" that animates Adam and pictorial sources for the trumpeter in illustrations of God creating the universe by breathing through a similar instrument.22 The angelic trumpeter has other connotations as well, both ominous and auspicious. The Revelation of Saint John the Divine describes angels sounding trumpets to waken the dead and call them to judgment, and a host of Last Judgments, Michelangelo's among them, depict the action. But the trumpet is also one of the attributes of Fame, an appropriate DREAM 89 4 Raphael, Schoolof Athens, detail: Heraclitus,1509-11. Vatican, Stanza della Segnatura (photo: Alinari/Art Resource, NY) allusion for an agent of inspiration, for the fruits of inspired thought promise fame and immortality to their creator. Although his winged form and his flight securely establish his divine origin, the precise identity of this figure remains ambiguous. He can be read as an angel, whose message from God represents either divine inspiration or the final call to account, as the personification of Fame, or as a generic "genius," allowing the viewer to assign a specific identity or to remain open to the figure's various implications.23 The unusual placement of the trumpet further advances the Sogno's affiliation with melancholy and the theme of divine inspiration. As he descends, the angel/genius blows his trumpet not at the youth's ear, as we might expect, but instead at the center of his forehead. This is the very spot indicated for the cauterization of melancholics in a medieval medical text (Fig. 5).24 According to Renaissance medical tradition, this spot corresponds to the location of the imaginatio or, in Leonardo's unique formulation, the imprensiva, the part of the brain that receives and processes visual impressions.25 Demonstrating the delivery of inspiration to the imaginatio, rather than to the ear, the drawing transforms the imagery of inspiration from that of the poet or evangelist, who translates his experience into words, to that of the artist, who receives visual images directly from a heavenly figure. This emphasis on visual experience, heightened by the nude's intense upward gaze, suggests a further refinement of the youth's identity, placing the Sogno within the same dis- 90 ART BULLETIN MARCH 2003 VOLUME -i!•( i~~~ii .......................?iil:i~i;i:: ..........: •,: •.•.•• .,•...• .. LXXXV NUMBER 1 :: : :: - - .:-:--:ii i-i:_ --:::ii: '?.:i.?-i i. :: •? ii;i:? j~,i • •,•il_.!•:;i •;: .`::,•.':8i~i:i'liii'•.. •..::. ii:: . ........... : . ....~:i-::.•....:. .;•, -i.iii•,-i-: ---ii.;: 1i:-:: • • :a.•!•/,5 :-::•!i]Xi':: iii::-:_... ... .i? :i' :-i• }• ._~ ....:: : i i! :• •!•:•!.•••:,•i i!• i` -.i .i.i ~ _....?. ;..i::•:! i.•i:• ::-i•-i~i -: ..... .• .. •i.,••:'.•••,:i . i:•i• •..•i-~; . .?;-ii :,i•,• •-,• ::::.• .•,•..... •• ;••,. i.:...... ;.i•;i i ,S•~i!•~ii a-B.?: .......... : i i!:I-iiii! ii-_;:i: •..,. .•,,.:......... i iii;--i:: i!•::• :i',l-i• :::: .i• .:;ii •;.-•,• ,::,•:; •.•.,•.,• .•. .... ,• ••..•-........... 5 Diagram of melancholic cauterization, 13th century. UB Erfurt, Dep. Erf. CA 40 185, fol. 248v course as Albrecht Dfirer's Melancholia I (Fig. 6) as a pictorial treatise on the relationship between melancholy and the artistic genius. The identification of the central nude as an inspired melancholic might seem to be at odds with the traditional reception of the Sogno as an image of virtue overcoming vice. Indeed, a near-contemporary copy of the Sogno on a majolica plate bears an inscription identifying the scene as "Daniel dreaming of all the mortal sins ... ," and it is easy to read the arc as a pictorial catalogue of wicked behavior.26 The battling figures at the right-hand side of the sheet, for example, seem to personify Anger, a drinking figure invokes Gluttony, a figure tugging at another's cloak connotes Envy, and kissing couples suggest Lust. As a result, the figures in the arc are generally interpreted as personifications of the seven deadly sins, a reading that is perhaps a shade too imprecise. There are at least ten groups of figures in the arc, not the canonical seven. The sin of Lust seems to receive especially concentrated attention, while Pride is conspicuously absent.27 Disembodied heads of no clear iconographic function cloud the background. While these iconographic discrepancies remove the drawing from the conventional canon of the seven deadly related sins, the arc nevertheless enumerates vices-those specifically to the melancholic personality. As noted above, Renaissance constructions of the melancholic personality defined the ability to receive divine inspiration as the gift that tempered the humor's terrible disadvantages. The melancholic's alternating periods of creative energy and paralysis were mirrored by competing tendencies toward great achievement or toward vice. This connection between vice and melancholia, rooted in literary tradition, found expression in the visual arts as well.2s Michelangelo's Sogno belongs to this tradition, for it portrays a melancholic figure simultaneously blessed by divine inspiration and tempted by sinful inclinations. The bag held above the youth's left shoulder is the most readily legible sign of melancholic vice. Its prominent location on the sheet underscores the nude's identification with melancholy. From Aristotle forward, greed was considered characteristic of melancholia, and the purse was adopted as a visual sign of melancholic parsimony.29 Dfirer employed a purse and keys in his figure of Melancholia, and Cesare Ripa's personification of the melancholic likewise prominently displays a moneybag (Fig. 7). Michelangelo himself used the device in his most famous evocation of the melancholic humor, the figure of Lorenzo de' Medici, duke of Urbino, in the Medici Chapel, who clutches a pouch in his left hand and leans on a cash box.30 The Sogno depicts other melancholic vices as well. At the lower left of the drawing, a crouching figure cooks while another waits impatiently at table, a scene said to signify Gluttony. Melancholics, Aristotle notes, "are inclined to eat much."31 The waiting figure holds his finger across his mouth in the conventional gesture of melancholic silence.32 Just above this pair, a figure draining a vessel's last drops expresses the Glutton's insatiability. He also recalls the analogy likening the effects of melancholy to those of wine, which structures Aristotle's consideration of the melancholic character in his Problemsand offers an explanation for the variety of symptoms melancholics experience: "For wine in large quantities seems to produce the characteristics which we ascribe to the melancholic, and when it is drunk produces a variety of qualities, making men ill-tempered, kindly, merciful or reckless ...."" Just as different amounts of wine produce different effects in the drinker, so the quality and quantity of black bile determine the nature of the melancholic's symptoms. On the right side of the drawing, battling figures make reference to melancholic irascibility, recalling Aristotle's remark that melancholics are "mad... and easily moved to anger."34 The sleeper at the lower right of the sheet, on the other hand, may refer to the paralysis and torpor associated with the humor.35 A kissing couple above the youth's right shoulder may relate to the observation that "the melancholic are usually lustful."3" To the left of this pair, a nude male MICHELANGELO'S DREAM 91 6 Albrecht Dfirer, MelancholiaI, 1514 (photo: Bildarchiv Foto Marburg/Art Resource, NY) embraces a reclining female nude and kisses her averted face. This pair may indeed signify lust, yet the woman seems to reject her partner's amorous advances. Her response refers to yet another problem associated with melancholy: disdain for the opposite sex.'7 The significant omission in this catalogue of vice is, of course, the sin of Pride. Superbiais not one of the characteristic vices of melancholy, which would account for its absence. Paradoxically, some traits typical of melancholiamost notably, habitual solitude-were particularly susceptible to accusations of pridefulness. Michelangelo confronted this problem more than once, defending himself through interlocutors against charges of superbia by suggesting that his antisocial tendencies were the result of his virtuous devotion to his art, not the vice of pride.38 This strategy was possible because audacia, a close relative of superbia,had a long history as a virtue reserved for poets and painters alike, those creative individuals most likely to embrace the melancholic perso- na.39 Michelangelo could thus excuse his "prideful" behavior while calling attention to it as evidence of his own audacia. This would suggest that the Sogno's central figure, surrounded by the vices of the melancholic temperament, embodies their opposite, the virtue of audacia, the characteristic trait of the creative mind rapt by "intense and lofty imaginings." Elsewhere in his correspondence and poetry, Michelangelo asserts his melancholic nature in terms that often reflect its more sinister aspects as presented in the Sogno. In letters to Pietro Gondi and Sebastiano del Piombo, Michelangelo acknowledges his reputation for melancholic madness, reassuring his friends about his mental health while reinforcing his association with the temperament.40 He reports having taken great pleasure in a dinner party that allowed him to "escape a little from my melancholy, or from my madness."41 A letter from Sebastiano to Michelangelo reveals that the artist's friends considered his melancholic tendencies a cause for 92 ART BULLETIN MARCH 2003 VOLUME LXXXV NUMBER 1 7 The Melancholic,from Cesare Ripa, Nova Iconologiadi Cesare Ripa....., Padua, 1618. The New York Public Library, Astor, Lenox and Tilden Foundations, Print Collection, Miriam and Ira D. Wallach Division of Art, Prints and Photographs (photo: The New York Public Library/Art Resource, NY) Alarmed that Michelangelo might abandon the for the Julius Tomb, Sebastiano urged him to bring project the work to completion, blaming melancholia for Michelangelo's errors of judgment: "For the love of God, guard yourself against whatever your melancholy humor counsels you, for it has always been your ruination."42 Although Michelangelo's assertion that "my happiness is melancholy" may be ironic, and his remarks on melancholy tend to emphasize the negative aspects of the temperament, the humor's reported link to greatness and genius could not have been lost on him.43 By aligning himself with melancholy, even through identification with melancholic ills, Michelangelo implicitly claimed the mantle of genius for himself, a claim given visual form in the Sogno. If the Sogno is seen as a meditation on melancholic inspiration, those disembodied heads that hover at the edges of the arc of figures can be readily incorporated. Generally ignored by interpreters, these shadowy countenances nevertheless occupy a significant position on the sheet, filling the upper portion of the arc to the left and right of the central pair. Through their form, they articulate the first step in the process of creation: the generation of images in the mind, swiftly translated to paper in the sketch. Faintly drawn, yet legible, the heads seem to be taking shape as they emerge from the cloudy mass encircling the central pair. These insubstantial forms, barely described, recall Leonardo's exhortation to the painter to sketch, to record rough approximaconcern. tions of figural motifs, later to be translated into finished work.44 Leonardo's method of drawing represents an important shift in artistic practice, a move away from the repetitive forms of the pattern book and toward imaginative experimentation.45 It is in the sketch, in half-finished forms such as the heads in the Sogno, that the process of pictorial generation is enacted. The artist quickly records figures, gestures, forms, exercising his inventive skill as he moves his hand across the sheet. The sketch is the tangible evidence of the process of invention, a record of the experience of creative fury. Francisco de Hollanda insisted that in drawing, "the idea or concept must be placed most quickly in execution before it is lost or diminished by some perturbation.., .not losing that divine furor and image that it bears in the fantasia."46 Giorgio Vasari likewise linked the sketch to creative furor: "And because from the furor of the artist these things are expressed quickly with pen or with another drawing instrument, only to rough out what comes to him, for this reason they are called sketches."'47Speed, rather than finish, is valued as proof of the frenzied nature of creation. As Lomazzo observed, this could be taken to extremes, preventing the artist from moving forward from the unfettered freedom of invention to the discipline of completion: "as soon as [artists] have delineated a body and formed a gesture, infinite others of different kinds are born in the fantasia, so that they are unable, because of the extreme delight they feel in invention, to have the patience to finish any work begun."48 Michelangelo enacts this process in the Sogno, filling the arc of figures with half-formed faces that emerge from the clouds as if from the recesses of the artist's mind. Even the choice of the cloudy mass to encompass the figures recalls contemporary discussions of artistic invention: Leonardo suggested that the painter seek out new forms in clouds.49 Michelangelo's graphic production contains many such examples of unfinished figures, testifying to his use of the sketch as an exercise in invention. But the Sogno is not a half-finished work; the contrast in finish between the figure of the nude and the images in the arc seems a deliberate choice.50 Thus, the very form of the Sogno articulates the trajectory of artistic invention. The figures in the arc, ranging from quickly sketched heads to more fully rendered bodies, represent the progression from furious invention to diligent completion. The youth and his companion, highly finished, the most complete and substantial figures in the drawing, represent the final products of the artist's hand. The different states of finish in the drawing also influence the viewer's experience of the image. Those figures that seem to personify the melancholic vices are the most clearly articulated; the fragmentary heads are sketchy and incomplete. This encourages different methods of reading, suggesting a more fixed significance for the figures that are more finished in comparison with the others, which invite a more speculative response. The viewer experiences the process of creation along with the artist, witnessing the evolution of forms. The most vivid example of this (admittedly subjective) experience is the figure at the lower right of the drawing. When seen from a slight distance, it appears to be a seated figure holding a ball or sphere in his lap. On closer inspection, what seemed to be his head dissolves into the knee of the figure MICHELANGELO'S DREAM 93 8 Michelangelo, Ganymede,ca. 1533. Cambridge, Mass., Fogg Art Museum, Harvard University Art Museums, Gifts for Special Uses Fund (photo: Alan Macintyre, @ President and Fellows of Harvard College) above, but the overlap and the lack of finish make it impossible to define the boundaries between the two. Instead, the image seems to shift and change shape before the viewer's eyes.51 This type of engagement with the viewer is particularly important in light of the drawing's status as a gift. Alexander Nagel has argued that the gift drawing "places a special burden on the viewer as interpreter," requiring a sensitive response that recognizes the image's "claim to a kind of infinity or inexhaustibility."52 Nagel refers to the religious drawings Michelangelo produced for Vittoria Colonna, but his observations on the intimacy of the interpretative act are relevant here as well. The gift drawings presuppose a particular kind of looking that the Sogno's allusive and elusive imagery seems calculated to reward. Vasari records that four gift drawings (Ganymede, The Punishment of Tityus, TheFall ofPhaeton, and Bacchanal of Children) were made for Tommaso de' Cavalieri, the young Roman who was the focus of Michelangelo's affections in the mid1530s.53 Although no definitive documentary evidence supports the assumption that Cavalieri was the recipient of the Sogno as well, circumstantial evidence suggests it. The work is mentioned by Vasari in connection with the others and is stylistically related to the Cavalieri group.54 Judith Testa has observed that the Sogno's central nude appears in variation in the Ganymede, Tityus, and Phaeton drawings (Figs. 8-10), creating a compelling visual link among the works that suggests they were conceived as a group.55 Finally, Battista Franco's Battle of Montemurlo (Fig. 11) further supports a link between the Sogno and the Cavalieri drawings, for it incorporates quotations of the Ganymede,securely tied to Cavalieri, Archers Shooting at a Herm (another gift drawing, now at the Royal Library, Windsor), implicitly linked to the group by Vasari, and the Sogno.56 94 ART BULLETIN MARCH 2003 VOLUME LXXXV NUMBER 1 9 Michelangelo, ThePunishmentof Tityus,ca. 1533. Windsor, Royal Library (photo: The Royal Collection @ 2002, H.M. Queen Elizabeth II) Gift drawings such as those for Cavalieri enjoy a unique status in Michelangelo's production; they functioned as private messages from the artist to the drawing's recipient, expressions of personal devotion. Yet, as Michelangelo certainly knew, they were also circulated among connoisseurs who may or may not have had access to the drawing's original context and intention."5 The many copies of the Sogno testify to this dual life of the gift drawing and demonstrate how such images could be transformed to suit other, less personally charged functions. Franco's Battle of Montemurlo offers perhaps the most dramatic example, in which borrowings from three different compositions are stripped of their original significance to become a display of variet&'. While copies and borrowings reflect the popular currency of Michelangelo's work, they may not have met with the artist's approval. Cavalieri himself lamented his failure to keep the drawings private in a letter to Michelangelo: Cardinal de' Medici wanted to see all of your drawings, and they were so pleasing to him that he wanted to have the Tityus and the Ganymede made in crystal; and I did not know how to speak well enough to convince him not to do the Tityus, and now Maestro Giovanni is doing it. At least I was able to save the Ganymede.58 10 Michelangelo, TheFall of Phaeton, ca. 1533. Windsor, Royal Library (photo: The Royal Collection @ 2002, H.M. Queen Elizabeth II) Cavalieri's reluctance to turn over the works and his final declaration that he managed to "save the Ganymede" suggest that he knew that Michelangelo would be displeased by the drawings' fate. The mythological scenes executed for Cavalieri, particularly the vivid depiction of Ganymede's rape, seem to articulate Michelangelo's reflections on his feelings for the young man, which may further explain why Cavalieri attempted to protect them from more public dispersal.59 In addition to the undoubtedly intimate messages of the imagery, however, the Cavalieri group was allegedly meant to perform a practical function. Vasari professes that Michelangelo sent such works to Cavalieri "because he was learning to draw."60 Although this assertion may seem an effort to conceal the more private motive for the drawings, I propose to take it seriously. Michel- MICHELANGELO'S DREAM 95 11 Battista Franco, Battle of Montemurlo, 1537. Florence, Palazzo Pitti (photo: Alinari/Art Resource, NY) angelo's own practice of providing cartoons and models to artists in his circle demonstrates that his drawings circulated among his acquaintances for a variety of purposes, from the personal to the pedagogic.61 It has been suggested that Cavalieri copied the Phaeton as an exercise, and several drawings have recently been attributed to him.62 In these circumstances, the repetition of the figure of the nude youth throughout the Cavalieri series might have had a didactic function, allowing the artist to demonstrate the hermeneutic possibilities inherent in a single figure. The verso of the Tityus seems to confirm this possibility; the figure of Tityus has been traced and transformed into a Risen Christ. But by whose hand? Michael Hirst proposes that Michelangelo did the tracing before giving the drawing to Cavalieri, while Alexander Perrig speculates that it is in Cavalieri's hand.63 No matter who the author, the fact of the traced pose would suggest that one of the functions of the gift drawings for Cavalieri may have been to demonstrate the art of drawing. Viewing the Sogno through the lens of Vasari's text yields a practical purpose for the drawing, but Vasari's meaning is not exactly clear. Were the drawings intended as models for Cavalieri to copy? Or were they gifts signifying Michelangelo's approval of Cavalieri's new "hobby"? The latter scenario seems more likely. Despite the evidence for Cavalieri's efforts as a draftsman, he was an amateur, a nobleman with a passion for the arts, not an artist in training. The Sogno, like the other drawings more securely associated with him, was not a cartoon to be developed into a painting, but rather an independent work of art, a representing piece. Although it is not a drawing lesson in the strictest sense, it does treat the theme of artistic creation, representing both the practical process of developing forms from sketch to completion and the ineffable experience of inspiration itself, here imaged as a gift of the melancholic personality. Michelangelo makes this reflection on artistic inspiration explicitly personal in the Sogno's arc of figures through a series of self-quotations. Hovering just above the central nude's right shoulder is a female figure, a half-length body that engages in no identifiable action. Though prominently located, this mysterious figure (Fig. 12) does not seem to participate in the iconography of vice. She casts her glance backward, her eyes directed over her right shoulder. Her 96 ART BULLETIN MARCH 2003 VOLUME 12 Michelangelo, II sogno, detail LXXXV NUMBER 1 13 Michelangelo, Creationof Adam, 1508-12. Vatican, Sistine Chapel (photo: Alinari/Art Resource, NY) 14 Aristotile da Sangallo, after Michelangelo, Battle of Cascina,detail, mid-16th century. Norfolk, Collection Leicester, Holkham Hall (photo: Foto Marburg/Art Resource, NY) MICHELANGELO'S sidelong glance and horizontal posture recall a member of another cloud of figures: those encircling God the Father in Michelangelo's CreationofAdam (Fig. 13). In the Sogno, she is free of the divine arm yoked about her shoulders, but the figure recalls the pose and disposition of her Sistine sister.64 Scattered throughout the drawing are what seem to be similar references to Michelangelo's figural inventions. They range from direct quotation to allusive evocation, invoking works that span the artist's career. To the left of the female figure, for example, a nude seen from behind, its legs truncated, bends at the waist, recalling the figure of a climber at the far left of the Battle of Cascina (Fig. 14). Like the female figure, the nude does not perform any action linked to vice. This is the most direct and easily legible self-quotation, but at least four additional figures are quite suggestive. At the lower right of the sheet, a figure raises his right hand and wraps his left arm across his body. Versions of this pose can be traced in studies contemporaneous with the Sogno for the figure of Christ in the Last Judgment (Fig. 15).65 There are differences, to be sure, notably, the position of the head, but the central figure in the Casa Buonarroti study bears a strong resemblance to the Sogno's figure. In another instance, the figure at the top right of the Sogno who grabs his companion by the throat echoes a similarly aggressive figure near the bottom of the same Casa Buonarroti study, although the Sogno's figure uses two hands to throttle his foe, grasping the fabric around his neck. The act of tugging itself brings to mind a much earlier pair of struggling figures, the youths in the background of the Doni Tondo. To the left of the Sogno's struggling pair, a figure raises his right arm to strike a cowering companion. In addition to invoking Anger, their actions recall Michelangelo's depiction of David and Goliath on the Sistine Chapel ceiling and, as Henry Thode noted, bear a strong resemblance to several sketches of the same (or a similar) subject (Fig. 16).66 The problem of dating is more intractable, however, in another possible self-quotation, the crouching figure at the bottom right-hand side of the sheet. This figure resembles a study for an Apostle at Gesthemene, his body tightly curled in sleep (Fig. 17), an image generally dated 1558-60, but the compact pose may have been invented years earlier, perhaps to serve in the crowd of souls depicted in the Last Judgment, and become part of Michelangelo's figural repertoire, like the David and Goliath type, revived in the late 1550s. This raises the question of whether the acts of quotation in the Sogno represent the "remembering hand" of the artist, an unthinking display of his standard pictorial vocabulary. The variations from the originals quoted in the arc suggest that, in some instances, Michelangelo may be returning to and reworking stock poses. While some of the self-quotations seem indirect, I would argue that they are deliberate, making reference to other works in Michelangelo's career. Michelangelo's use of the same central figure throughout the Cavalieri series (to which the Sogno may belong) encourages the viewer to seek correspondences among images, and the Sogno's adoption of the iconography of melancholy and inspiration further suggests such a reading of the self-quotations. But there is more concrete evidence in the copies of the Sogno that Michelangelo's reuse of his own images was an intentional act. DREAM 97 15 Michelangelo, study for the LastJudgment,ca. 1534. Florence, Casa Buonarroti, no. 65Fr (photo: Alinari/Art Resource, NY) A copy of the Sogno by Marcello Venusti, an artist with close ties (both personal and professional) to Michelangelo, seems to confirm that these acts of self-quotation were recognized and acknowledged by Michelangelo's intimates (Fig. 18).67 Venusti made a significant adjustment to the figures in the arc, replacing the amorous couple located just above the youth's right knee with an unmistakable image of Michelangelo's Aurora (Fig. 19). This revision and replacement suggest that Venusti was aware of the arc's self-referentiality. His use of Aurora highlights this aspect of the original drawing and functions as the visual equivalent of the label Michelangelo invenit, crediting Michelangelo's authorship of the Sogno. The same pair is subject to alteration in all three of Alessandro Allori's versions of the Sogno (Fig. 20), and the change again invokes one of Michelangelo's works. Although Allori's quotation is not as direct as Venusti's, the figure of a young child embracing a reclining female nude nevertheless summons Michelangelo's Venus and Cupid to mind (Fig. 21).68 The presence of references to Michelangelo's artistic production in the Sogno, apparently recognizable to his contemporaries, seems to contradict his biographer's claim for the artist's "tenacissima memoria" (extremely tenacious memory) .69Ascanio Condivi, whose biography of the artist is often viewed as a self-constructed response to Vasari's Vite,informs 98 ART BULLETIN MARCH 2003 VOLUME LXXXV NUMBER 1 16 Michelangelo, sketches of David and Goliath, 1555. Oxford, Ashmolean Museum, Parker no. 328r 17 Michelangelo, sketches for the Apostles at Gesthemene, 1558-60. Oxford, Ashmolean Museum, Parker no. 340 us that "having painted so many thousands of figures ... he never made one that resembled another, or that had the same pose."70 Not only did Michelangelo never replicate a figure, we are told, he even guarded against repeating a line. Condivi reports Michelangelo's declaration "that he never draws a line without remembering if he has ever drawn it before.""71The concept of the artist's memory apparently had such appeal that Vasari repeated Condivi's assertions in his revised edition of the Vite (1568): "Michelangelo had a tenacious and profound memory... he never made any of his own works that resembles another, because he remembered everything that he had done."72 Condivi's and Vasari's claims for Michelangelo's memory are, of course, claims for his infinite variety of creation: he never repeated a figure because of his ability to generate new forms constantly. Rather than statements of fact, they function as part of the construction of Michelangelo as genius, an enterprise that the Sogno participates in by giving visual form to this facility of invention. The self-quotations recall Michel- angelo's most ambitious projects, the Battle of Cascina, the Sistine Chapel ceiling, and the Last Judgment, and the shadowy heads promise wonders yet to come. The reuse and repetition of forms, such as the metamorphosis of Tityus into the Risen Christ, or Night into Leda, or even Ganymede (as Sebastiano del Piombo proposed, perhaps only half in jest) into Saint John, demonstrate mastery of another kind of variety, the ability to engage a viewer's imagination with a single image that calls forth multiple interpretative possibilities.73 Such transformations, clearly part of Michelangelo's artistic practice, suggest that his recycling of forms was potentially charged with meaning. By turning Night into Leda, for example, Michelangelo allows the significance of one figure to bleed into that of the other, enhancing and complicating the meaning of each.74 In a departure from the conventional narrative, Leda sleeps, her encounter with the swan rendered as a sexual dream, reminiscent of the perverse nightmares said to afflict unhappy lovers.75 Night's body, which bears the MICHELANGELO'S DREAM 99 19 Michelangelo, Aurora, 1524-26. Florence, S. Lorenzo, New Sacristy (photo: Alinari/Art Resource, NY) 18 Marcello Venusti, II sogno, ca. 1540. Florence, Galleria degli Uffizi (from Galleria degli Uffizi, Catalogogenerale[Florence: Centro Di, 1979], 584, no. P1866) signs of recent childbirth, proleptically signifies Leda's divinely wrought pregnancy. Viewed with Leda in mind, Night's sleep becomes even more suggestive, her dreaming implicitly sexual. Her fantastic attributes (the owl, poppies, and mask), read in tandem with the Leda myth, seem to be born, quite literally, of her dream experience. Michelangelo's self-quotations in the Sogno are likewise expressive. The drawing was probably produced during the initial stages of the Last Judgment's development, and there are important thematic and formal parallels between the two works.76 Both depict a drama of Virtue and Vice, in which trumpeting angels rouse more passive humans. Significant conversions occur in the figural transpositions between the drawing and the fresco. A variation on the Sogno's battling "David and Goliath" group, for example, appears in triplicate at the lower right of the LastJudgment (Fig. 22), the striking figures no longer embodying melancholic wrath but rather angelic combat. Similarly, kissing figures that suggest lust in the drawing recur in a crowd of the blessed at the upper right of the fresco (Fig. 23), their embraces signifying spiritual, not carnal, ecstasy. The line between virtue and vice blurs, as the very same pose signifies first one, then the other. Such mutations are especially provocative when linked to Michelangelo's poetic query about desire: "if every feeling of ours displeased heaven, / to what end would God have made the world?""77The question is daring, and in the original Italian, Michelangelo's words seem to invoke the Sogno itself, for "s'ogni nostro affetto" suggests a Petrarchan wordplay, allowing the reader to read sogni, or dreams.Michelangelo's figural transpositions, it would seem, demonstrate not only that the significance of his figures is mutable but also that the boundaries between virtue and vice may not be so clearly drawn. The interpretative flexibility that the gift drawing encourages and the self-citations invite is enhanced by the Sogno's status as a dream image. In Renaissance culture, the dream was an important field for the practice of interpretation, as the proliferation of dream-interpretation handbooks for diverse audiences indicates.7' Readers of these texts were instructed to determine the veracity of their dreams through a series of tests and guided to interpret their dream symbols.79 The Sogno provides especially fertile ground for that kind of work, its multiple allusions encouraging the interpretative interventions of its viewers. Dreaming also carried enormous weight as both metaphor and mechanism for divine inspiration and permitted an unprecedented degree of artistic license, allowing for the free play of fantasy without any need to conform to the expectations of narrative. In dreaming (and images of dreams), it is the very opposite of coherence that is valued, as openness to multiple readings offers the viewer his or her own imaginative outlet. The pictorial rhetoric of the dream allows the image to function both as the record (whether fictive or real) of the artist's visionary experience and as a virtual dream for the viewer. The title conferred on Michelangelo's drawing defines its subject as a dream, and the associations that dreaming generates further develop the Sogno's meaning. The Sogno's youth is shown not reclining or asleep but semiupright, with wide-open eyes. This alert pose has led some of the drawing's interpreters to view the youth as awakening from the vice-ridden "dream of human life" to a higher 100 ART BULLETIN MARCH 2003 VOLUME LXXXV NUMBER 1 20 Alessandro Allori, II sogno, ca. 1579-80. Florence, Galleria degli Uffizi (photo: Alinari/Art Resource, NY) calling.80 But the Sogno's youth participates in a pictorial tradition that depicted dreamers with open eyes, looking toward the source of their dreams, a device that both asserts awareness of the dream and emphasizes the visual quality of dream experience.81 The Sogno employs other common pictorial conventions for the representation of dreams, firmly establishing its melancholic youth as a dreamer. The contrasting states of finish in the drawing create a distinction between the "reality" of the central pair and the insubstantial nature of the images in the arc. The misty quality of the cloud of figures asserts their status as "dream visions," apparitions in the mind of the central figure.82 Scale and finish further define levels of reality, distinguishing between the dreamer and the images he sees in his dream. This contrast also enhances the figures' status as inventions; before they are given material form, they exist only in the artist's imagination.83 By invoking the imagery of dreaming in a drawing laced with references to melancholy and to his own inventions, Michelangelo participates in an ancient tradition linking dreams to divine inspiration. Since antiquity, dreams had been credited as a source of poetic inspiration and a sign of divine favor.84 In the Timaeus, Plato had argued that "no man achieves true and inspired divination when in his rational mind, but only when the power of his intelligence is fettered in sleep or when it is distraught by some divine inspiration."85 Pausanias likewise hinted at a link between dreams and inspiration, identifying Sleep as "the god dearest to the MICHELANGELO'S DREAM 101 21 Jacopo Pontormo, after Michelangelo, Venusand Cupid, 1532-33. Florence, Galleria degli Uffizi (photo: Alinari/Art Resource, NY) 22 Michelangelo, LastJudgment,detail, 1536-41. Vatican, Sistine Chapel (photo: Alinari/Art Resource, NY) 23 Michelangelo, LastJudgment,detail (photo: Alinari/Art Resource, NY) Muses."86 The implication that the Muses might visit in dreams is confirmed by the fourth-century bishop Synesius of Cyrene, whose text on dreams credits them with his inventive process, describing an interaction that recalls the collaboration between poet and Muse, albeit more practical than romantic: and conceptions thinker: Often [a dream] has collaborated on the drafting of my works. It has clarified an idea, has made my style more appropriate, has eliminated one thing, and introduced another.... it has given me suggestions, explained the significance of things to me, indicated awkward expressions that were then modified....87 Synesius echoes the words of the second-century philosopher Aristedes, who cited dream visitations from the healing god Asclepius, rather than the Muses, as the source of expressions that surpassed his own capabilities as a Indeed, the greatest and most valuable part of my training was my access to and communion with these dreams. For I heard many things which excelled in purity of style and were gloriously beyond my models, and I dreamed that I myself said many things better than my wont, and things of which I had never thought.88 Developing this idea, Synesius proposes that dreams can transform even the most unlikely men into poets. He arguesthat it is possible that a person "falling asleep devoid of poetic learning, after having met the Muses in a dream," might awake to find himself "an able poet."89 Renaissance dream theory drew on these precedents, identifying dreams as mechanisms of divine inspiration for poets and philosophers. Petrarch alluded to the poet's penchant 102 ART BULLETIN MARCH 2003 VOLUME LXXXV NUMBER I for inspired dreaming in his coronation oration, specifically linking laurel, the poet's garland, to dreams: "[W]hen a person who is asleep is touched with laurel his dreams come true. Which makes it singularly appropriate for poets, who are said to sleep on Parnassus."90In 1499, the humanist Giovanni Pontano dedicated a portion of his dialogue Actius to a consideration of the relationship between dreams and poetic invention.9' Dreams, Pontano's interlocutors argue, are the medium for inspiring sibyls, prophets, and poets. Poetic furor, the frenzied moment of divine inspiration, comes through the mechanism of the dream.92 The evidence of Michelangelo's letters and sonnets demonstrates that his conception of dreams was consistent with the contemporary view of their privileged nature and association with inspiration. The fusion of sleep and the Ficinian definition of genius is the subtext of a famous sonnet in which the artist celebrates his status as a dreamer: O night, O time so sweet, even though black, who infuses all labor with peace at the day's end, whoever exalts you shows good judgment and vision and whoever honors you has a sound mind. You cut short and break off every tiring thought, enfolding them in your moist shade and quiet, and often in a dream you bear my soul from the lowest to the highest sphere, to which I hope to journey. O shadow of death, by whom is stilled every misery hostile to the heart and soul, last and effective remedy for the afflicted: You restore our ailing flesh to health, wipe dry our tears and put to rest all toil, and take from him who lives rightly all wrath and weariness.93 The poem reflects many of the conventions of the lyric tradition invoking Sleep, but the poet speaks in general terms, disclosing no personal motive to desire sleep.94 Only when he speaks of dreams does Michelangelo employ the first-person singular, marking a division between those (all) who benefit from the restorativepower of sleep ("ogni stanco pensiero"; "ogni quiet'appalta")and those lucky few who slip the bonds of the body in dreams ("dall'infimaparte alla pii5 alta/in sogno spesso porti, ov'ire spero"). Night is praised and honored by those who "showgood judgment and vision," people of "sound mind." As the author of the panegyric, Michelangelo implicitly claims these distinctions for himself, adducing his appreciation of Night and his experience of dreams as emblems of his judgment and vision. Michelangelo's poetic reflections on his affiliation with night are provocative,for they temper this positive evaluation of dreams. Night is identified as fragile and unstable, a witty reference to its easy defeat by light, but also a metaphorical link to the volatility of melancholia."9 In a sonnet perhaps intended for Cavalieri, Michelangelo laments his alliance with night: He who created, out of nothingness, time, which did not exist before anybody, made two from its one, and gave the high sun to one, and gave to the other the moon, which is much nearer. From these in one moment there were born the chance, destiny and fortune of each of us; and to me they allotted the dark time, which I resembled at birth and in the cradle. And now, just as one who imitates himself grows darker as the night is well advanced, so I'm troubled and grieved at doing so much wrong. Yet I'm comforted that the power to make my night into day has been granted to the sun that was given to you at birth as a companion.96 Night and melancholy are implicitly linked and acknowledged as the source of the poet's wrongdoing and affliction. This awareness of the sinister aspects of night finds expression in the melancholic sins in the Sogno. In less formal, though not necessarily less self-conscious, expressions of his statusas a dreamer, Michelangelo reported his dreams and his ability to interpret the dreams of others. In doing so, he participatedin the Renaissancediscourse that defined prophetic dreams and dream divination as signs of intellectual and spiritual superiority. In a letter to Luigi del Riccio, the artist relates a dream in which a mutual friend responded strangely to a greeting.97Michelangelo begs del Riccio to determine if the friend is indeed angry, implying the likelihood that his own dreams are prophetic. Condivi's biography records the dream vision of Cardiere, a friend of Michelangelo, who was warned of the imminent expulsion of the Medici by the ghost of Lorenzo il Magnifico.98Cardiere failed to understand the significance of the dream, but Michelangelo did not, and he fled to Bologna. Michelangelo's acumen is contrasted with Cardiere's obtuseness as the tale takes a comic turn: Lorenzo il Magnifico returns in a second dream and slaps Cardiere for his stupidity.99Michelangelo's abilityto understand what his friend could not--his abilityto interpret a dream-indicates that he belongs to that exceptional class of people who are prone to divinatoryexperience. While such records of Michelangelo's dream experience might seem to call for (and even reward) a psychoanalytic approach, my aim is to place them in a pre-Freudiancontext, to address them as a rhetorical tool, part of a tradition in which poets and artists alike linked dreams to the creative process and reported them as signs of communion with the divine. As artists sought to claim equality with poets and philosophers as the recipients of divine inspiration, the dream offered an especially potent metaphor for their activity. In addition to signifying divine favor, dreaming is, after all, a visual experience. Those concerned with inner vision would naturallysee the dream, with its potential for fantastic imagery,as an appropriateanalogy for their own work.When Diirer defined the artist's imagination as inwardly "full of figures,"self-generatedforms equated with the Platonic Idea, his language was resonant with the concept of the dream.'00 But he was more direct as well, lamenting "how often in my sleep do I behold great works of art and beautiful things, the like whereof never appear to me awake, but so soon as I awake even the remembrance of them leaves me."lo'1Leonardo also compared the waking imagination unfavorably with the perception of the dreamer, asking, "Whydoes the eye see a surer thing in dreams than with the waking imagination?"102His suggestion that vision in dreams is more MICHELANGELO'S reliable than sense experience reveals the power of the dream as metaphor. It articulates the distinction between the mental, interior activity of creation and the physical labor of execution. The persistent subtext in the use of dreams to describe image making was Horace's comparison between dreams and the hybrid monsters that poets and painters make.'03 Though his comparison is a negative one, meant to demonstrate the absurdity of invention ungoverned by concerns of decorum, the concept of ut pictura poesis was eagerly embraced by painters wishing to assert the status of their art and claim the privilege of inventive license, signified by the dream. This function of the dream is made clearer in instances when artists relate dreams directly to their creative product. Like the poets who found inspiration in dreams, artists, too, attributed new inventions to dreaming. In doing so, they, too, followed ancient precedent. Pliny reports that Parrhasias "boasted that he was the prince of painting.., .and had painted the Herakles at Lindos precisely as he had often seen him in sleep," making a direct link between artistic invention and dream experience.'04 Repeating this intertwining of dreaming and artistic creation, Diirer responded to a disturbing dream of a deluge by painting a watercolor of the cataclysmic scene that functions simultaneously as a visual record of the dream and as an independent work of art, and then recorded the dream itself in words.105 The account of the dream is written below the image, as if to assert the primacy and immediacy of visual experience. In keeping with this tradition, Michelangelo used the metaphor of the dream to describe one of his inventions, the staircase for the Laurentian Library. Writing to Vasari, he referred to his recollection of the design: "A certain staircase appears in my mind, like a dream."106 Likening the staircase to an image seen in a dream, the artist dodges Vasari's request for an explicit description but reveals the visionary quality of invention. The appearance of the same metaphor in Hollanda's Da pintura antiga suggests that the dream indeed formed an important part of Michelangelo's vocabulary, as descriptive of the inventive process. Hollanda quotes Michelangelo using the dream to invoke the distinction between the sensory experience of vision and the inner workings of invention: In painting, the idea is an image that the intellect of the painter has to see with interior eyes in the greatest silence and secrecy. This he must imagine and select from the most excellent and rare things that his imagination and prudence may attain, as an exemplar dreamt or seen in the sky or elsewhere.'07 The dream functions as a sign of the "interior eyes," a perception resulting from spiritual rather than sensory experience, an apt description of divine inspiration. The need for selection recalls Renaissance dream classification, in which the dreamer is charged with determining whether his dream is true or false and interpreting its meaning. Binding the experience of the dream, the process of invention, and the necessity of selection together, Michelangelo's language evokes the imagery of the Sognoitself, in which the youth must choose his inventions from the cloud of DREAM 103 figures he dreams, selecting in favor of creativity rather than melancholic vice. Perhaps as a result of the Horatian comparison, and arguably influenced by the relation between dreaming and creative production, by the late sixteenth century the word sogno came to stand for fantastic pictorial inventions. Connoting improbable or unexpected imagery, sogno supplied a descriptive term that embraced a wide range of artistic production, from the grotesques uncovered by excavations in Rome to the work of Hieronymus Bosch.108 Eventually, this resonant word was deployed by artists and critics alike to mean inventive facility.'09 In Anton Francesco Doni's dialogue Disegno,for example, an artist reflects on the "fantastic animals and infinite and diverse figures" he conjures "in my fantasy, in my imagination, in the chaos of my mind." Asked what name to give such images, another speaker answers: "Dreams."11o This is the context in which Michelangelo's Sogno was produced and received, one in which dreams were signs of exceptional status and in which the metaphor and imagery of dreaming described the experience of divine inspiration. The melancholic youth of the Sogno is a dreamer, receiving inspiring visions from a heavenly source. By virtue of his divine election, he is endowed with inventive ability, signified by the self-quotations. But the Sogno also has a darker side, as its many interpreters acknowledge, which is expressed in the numerous melancholic vices that appear as part of the dream vision. The drawing presents a distinct duality in the content of the youth's dream, a mixture of invention and vice, positive and negative. In this, the Sogno departs from more conventional representations of dreams. Rather than experiencing a vision equivalent to the "true" dreams of saints and emperors, in which the dream is unambiguously trustworthy, the melancholic youth of the Sogno experiences an inner vision that mixes the gift of invention with temptations to vice. This requires that a moralizing tone be established. Michelangelo found a solution in the iconography of deceit, using masks to signify the nature of some of the dream's content.111 The masks that fill the box beneath the dreamer point to the potentially dangerous nature of the dream, and their seemingly infinite number, as Matthias Winner has argued, seems to give visual form to Saint Jerome's observation that there is "a counterfeit mask for every sin to which we are inclined."112 They also recall Angelo Poliziano's description of"dreams hidden behind their deceiving masks," a turn of phrase that exploits the richness of larva, a word that signifies both "mask" and "phantasm."'13 Masks are not, however, unambiguously negative symbols. Just as superbia finds a more positive face in audacia, the concept of deceit is tempered when transformed into artifice. Illusion is the artist's stock-in-trade, artifice his primary skill. The mask may signify this aspect of artistic production; Ripa's personification of Painting carries a mask that bears the inscription "Imitatio," and subsequent self-portraits and allegories of painting employ masks as attributes.114 A letter by Annibale Caro, a close friend of Michelangelo, provides a provocative link between masks, dreams, and the iconography of the artist. Charged with devising a program for the decoration of Cardinal Alessandro Farnese's new villa at Caprarola, Caro sent a detailed letter to the artist Taddeo Zuccaro.15 For the Camera dell'Aurora, the cardinal's bed- 104 ART BULLETIN MARCH 2003 VOLUME LXXXV NUMBER 1 24 Taddeo Zuccaro, study for the House of Sleep,1562. Paris, Mus&edu Louvre (photo: R6union des Mus6es Nationaux/Art Resource, NY) room, Caro appropriately chose themes relating to sleep, including an Endymion and assorted gods of silence and secrecy. For the space over the bed, Caro chose the subject of the House of Sleep from Ovid's Metamorphoses,which describes Sleep and his thousand children, the Dreams.116 He instructed Zuccaro to depict Morpheus, the bringer of dreams, as a maker of masks: "Morpheus is called by Ovid the artificer and maker of figures: and therefore you will show him in the act of making masks of various appearances, placing some of them at his feet.""'117 Characterized by Ovid as surpassing all others in the representation of the human form, Morpheus may be seen as an analogue for the artist. In Ovid's text, Morpheus appears to the widow Alcyone in the guise of her recently deceased husband, Ceyx. Morpheus is a palpable portrait: "he seemed also to weep real tears, and his hands performed the gestures of Ceyx.""118 Ovid's language recalls the oft-repeated aims of Renaissance portraiture: making the absent present, the dead come alive to the living. Caro, hewing closely to the text, invented an appropriate attribute for this "imitator and artificer of the human form": masks. In Zuccaro's original drawing for the composition (Fig. 24), Morpheus is shown as an artist, a sculptor; though he uses his hands to shape a mask, his tools, a hammer and chisel, are placed within easy reach.119 Just as masks simultaneously evoke Morpheus's role as an "artificer and maker of figures" and the deceptive dream he brings to Alcyone, the presence of masks at the foot of the Sogno's central figure may signify both the nature of his dream and his status as an artist, and may well point directly to his identification with Michelangelo. The central mask in the box features a forked beard and a flattened nose, physiognomic traits associated with Michelangelo. Both James Saslow and John Paoletti have linked the mask to Michelangelo's self-portrait as the flayed skin of Saint Bartholomew in the LastJudgment.'20 Since Michelangelo's self-portraits rarely adhere to convention, such identifications are necessarily subjective. But the prominent location of the mask at the center of the box suggests its significance, and the resemblance is provocative. The Sogno's central nude, long understood to represent the human soul, would seem to represent the soul of Michelangelo himself, as Judith Testa has speculated.121 In juxtaposing the idealized nude and the caricature of the mask, the drawing splits the self-representation in two, dividing soul from corporeal being. Such a division not only follows the conventions of tomb imagery, it also invokes Renaissance perceptions of dreaming as ajourney of the soul, freed from the body in sleep to commune with the divine.122 The play between body and soul, deceit and artifice, invention and temptation that occurs in the Sogno is particularly charged because of the drawing's initial function as a gift. It was commonly understood that Michelangelo's gift drawings were expressions of love, as Pietro Aretino intimated, referring to the rumor that "no one but certain Gherardos and Tommasos may have them."'123With its mix of inspiration and temptation, the MICHELANGELO'S drawing speaks the Renaissance language of love, in which the lover is either exalted or debased, motivated toward spiritual ascendance or tormented by physical desire. The Sogno was most likely given to Tommaso de' Cavalieri, the young man whom Michelangelo "loved infinitely more than all others."'24 Cavalieri's relationship to Michelangelo is perhaps best characterized as that of beloved to lover, in the Petrarchan sense. But the Petrarchan dynamic applies to any of the potential recipients of Michelangelo's gifts.'25 Whether the Sognowas intended for Cavalieri or for someone else, it certainly functioned as a tangible sign of love and its potential outcomes. In a letter drafted to accompany the Ganymede and the Tityus, Michelangelo addressed the issue obliquely, informing Cavalieri, "It would be permissible to give a name to the things that a man gives, to him who receives them: but out of respect it will not be done here."126 The function of the Cavalieri drawings as visual expressions of love, however allusive and indirect, has provided the focus for most of the modern scholarship on these works. Michelangelo's tortured love for Cavalieri forms the interpretative frame for the group; the drawings are read as representations of the artist's desire to overcome his physical passions and rise to the spiritual effects of love. When this interpretation is extended to the Sogno, it reinforces the traditional reading of the image as an allegory of Virtue and Vice. There is, however, another way to think about the meaning of love and its significance for the drawing. Renaissance conceptions of inspiration and creativity were deeply indebted to the discourse on love. Love functions as a complementary language in the Sogno, amplifying the theme of inspiration invoked by melancholy and dreams. In both Petrarchan and Neoplatonic thought, love was identified as the highest form of divine possession. Ficino credited love as the prime motivator of all action, human and divine, and specifically linked love to intellectual and artistic production. It is love that induces the teacher to teach, the student to learn, the artist to strive for perfection. Calling love the "master and governor" of all the arts, Ficino insisted that "artists in all the arts seek and care for nothing else but love."'27 Equating "amatory feeling" with divine madness, he argued that love was the "most excellent" of the forms of divine possession, for it was the source of all the others.12s In both Neoplatonic and Petrarchan contexts, love was understood as a journey of ascension from physical desire to spiritual contemplation, initiated by the sight of beauty.129 Mirroring the doubleness of melancholy and of dreams, the trajectory of love had two potential outcomes: a torturous experience of frustrated desire on earth or an ecstatic connection to heaven. Sexual desire, the recognition of the attractions of the physical, is the necessary first step on the ladder of love, but it must be suppressed; the lover must overcome physical desire, direct his attention toward the higher forms of love and beauty present in his beloved, and respond with a creative act. While the Petrarchan poet was moved to re-create his beloved in poetry, in Neoplatonic thought the forms of creativity are as various as the forms of love, ascending in order from physical reproduction to the highest modes of procreation: the products of intellect. The nature of the reproduction is dictated by the form of love. DREAM 105 "[S]ome, either by nature or education, are better fitted for progeny of the soul than of the body, and others, certainly the majority, the opposite."'30 Those who fail to transcend the pull of sexual desire produce natural children, the chosen few who achieve divine union create ideas. In his poetry, Michelangelo endorsed the doctrine of ascent through love and emphasized the incompatibility of spiritual elevation and the fulfillment of physical desirethemes that seem to inform the Cavalieri group. He also famously argued that heterosexual love, the paradigm of Petrarchan lyric, was inferior to love between men. His preference for a truly Platonic model of love is expressed in a sonnet that contrasts the "base and vile" impulses of love for women with the elevating effects of love for another man. A violent burning for prodigious beauty is not always the source of harsh and deadly sin, if then the heart is left so melted by it that a divine dart can penetrate it quickly. Far from hindering empty passion from flying higher, love stirs and wakes us, and feathers our wings; and from that first step, with which it's not satisified, the soul can mount up and rise to its creator. The love I speak of aspires to the heights; woman is too different from that, and it's not worthy of a wise and manly heart to burn for her. One love draws toward heaven, the other draws down to earth; one dwells in the soul, the other in the senses, and draws its bow at base and vile things.'1' The sonnet and its imagery complement the drawing, as Judith Testa has already observed.132 The assertion that love need not always be the source of sin echoes the duality of melancholic vice and creativity in the arc of figures, and the reference to love that "stirsand wakes" the soul recalls the encounter between the youth and the angel. The love Michelangelo speaks of is love for a man, but one that is not, as he is at pains to point out, based in the senses. He claims the elevating experience of love exclusively for the "wise and manly heart" and judges woman as the unworthy object of such affections. Elsewhere, Michelangelo again spoke of the tension between carnal and spiritual love: The soul, the intellect complete and sound, more free and unfettered, can rise through the eyes up to your lofty beauty; but great ardor gives no such privilege to the human body, which, weighed down and mortal, and still lacking wings, can hardly follow the flight of a little angel; so sight alone can take pride and pleasure in doing SO .... 133 Celebrating sight as the pathway to the soul and lamenting the limitations of the body, the sonnet is a conventional reflection on the effects of love, but its imagery also echoes 106 ART BULLETIN MARCH 2003 VOLUME LXXXV NUMBER ,- ?~~ ~ iJr. 1 e ~li '~ ~ !:ii~?: ~' : il=- ?- *! l tLSW UIiE-N ..NNQ? ?jow Np ............. .. 25 Nicolas Beatrizet, Il sogno, 1545. London, The British Museum (photo: @ Trustees of the British Museum) that of the Sogno,especially the intense gaze of the nude, his eyes locked on the flight of a little angel. The concept that the physical expression of love drags the soul to earth finds visual form in the Sogno. The kissing couple located above the nude's right knee expresses heterosexual desire. The clumsy approach of the male figure, his knee digging into his partner's groin, incarnates Michelangelo's critique; his face, disfigured by his efforts to kiss, and his erect penis, now mostly effaced, stressthe fact that hislove dwells in the senses. His partner turns away, perhaps in disgust. The possibility that the couple serves as a commentary on the dangers of physical desire is further suggested by the placement of the figures. At least two disembodied phalluses are located near the heterosexual couple. Directlynext to the pair, a muscular, if not definitively masculine (given Michelangelo's figural style) hand, apparently belonging to another figure, grasps the larger phallus.134Again, the dual theme of lust and disdain for the opposite sex seems pertinent. Though now barely visible in the original, having apparently been rubbed out by a later hand (but legibly reproduced in two near-contemporarycopies of the Sogno,a print, Fig. 25, and a majolica plate in the Detroit Institute of Arts), this element of the drawing amplifies the subtext of homosexuality suggested by the unappealing rendering of the heterosexual couple. In the context of the gift drawing,this vivid MICHELANGELO'S depiction of a homosexual act takes on added personal significance, specifying one dimension of Michelangelo's melancholic inclinations. The juxtaposition of two forms of lust, heterosexual and homosexual, in the cloud of figures implies an equation of the two; it is physical expression that is "base and vile," no matter who the object of desire might be.135 Located above the masturbatory image is a single erect penis, devoid of any specific reference to homosexual or heterosexual activity. Aristotle's explanation of the melancholic nature may again be invoked, for he credits both wine and the melancholic nature as the source of male erections.136 Disembodied and isolated from any obvious stimulus, the phallus seems emblematic of desire. The grouping of sexually explicit images in such a prominent position on the sheet seems to acknowledge the role that desire plays in the process of inspiration and creation. Indeed, the analogous relation between sexual reproduction and intellectual productivity established in the discourse on love frequently found expression in metaphors of pregnancy and childbirth, such as Ficino's assertion that "Venus fertilizes the body and stimulates fertility. Saturn presses the mind, pregnant by his seed, to give birth."'37 Echoing this formulation, Pietro Aretino begged Michelangelo for a drawing, an example of "one of the marvels continually being born from the divinity that impregnates the intellect."'38 Michelangelo's own vocabulary of invention suggestively employs the term concetto,with its connotations of sexual generation."39 Condivi likewise repeatedly uses concetto,sometimes with nascere (to be born) and partorire(to give birth), as in his description of Michelangelo "filled with concetti,and forced every day to give birth to one of them."'140 But the sexual activity in Michelangelo's drawing, depicted in the cloud of "vice," is described in a negative light. Rather than eliding sexual and intellectual generation, the imagery of the Sogno articulates a hierarchy of creation, ascending from physical procreation to intellectual invention, each inspired by love, echoing the trajectory of invention from sketch to completed work expressed in the form of the drawing. The nude averts his gaze from the sexually explicit forms in the arc, directing his attention to his heavenly visitor. The direction of his gaze suggests that he belongs to the fortunate elite who reject the physical act of reproduction and physical expressions of desire in favor of a higher form of creation. Michelangelo extends this choice to the viewer, whose own desire and its consequences are initiated by the drawing. As the nude turns, he reveals his body to the viewer. The beauty of his form seems designed to appeal to the viewer's gaze, and the careful description of his body encourages the eye to linger, making the male nude the object of desire that initiates the chain of sublimation and inspiration, so that the processes of viewing and interpreting mirror the processes of inspiration and creation themselves. But the outcome of the viewer's journey is not predetermined; the Sogno allows for multiple modes of response, from the Neoplatonic model of ascent to more ambivalent experiences in which physical pleasure and vice are not so easily dispensed with. Weaving together references to melancholy, self-quotations, and dreams, Michelangelo's Sogno offers the viewer a rich experience of layered meaning, a reward for the "special M Se de primo / DREAM 107 MXXXI /D r cara/ee do a'a airtu D' Gridadn i/ enore frend. Amor.. 26 Giuseppe Maria Mitelli, frontispiece to Mitelli, Alfabeto in sogno, Bologna, 1683. The New York Public Library, Humanities/Prints Collection (photo: The New York Public Library/Art Resource, NY) interpretive efforts" that the gift demands.141 The cloud of figures functions as a sign of the melancholic personality (through reference to its characteristic vices), of the creative products of the melancholic mind (represented by the quotations of Michelangelo's own work), and of the landscape of dreams, which mixes true and false visions. Reading the arc of images, the viewer moves from images of vice to the quotations and back again. At times, as in the sleeper at the lower right, or the figures reminiscent of the Last Judgment drawings, vice and invention fuse. The elision of these concepts that Michelangelo achieves in the arc of figures speaks of the mixed blessing of melancholia, which commingles madness and genius, of the double nature of dreams, potentially true or false, and of the alternative paths of love, physical and spiritual. It encapsulates, in one complex yet apprehensible image, the multifaceted discourse on the nature of divine inspiration. The Sogno also may be seen as the inaugural image in a new tradition, translating the vocabulary of inventive, artistic dreaming into visual form. The image of the artist as dreamer functions as the frontispiece to Giuseppe Maria Mitelli's Alfabeto in sogno, a pattern book for artists published in the late seicento (Fig. 26). Mitelli's prefatory remarks to his collection of fantastic images seem to be the culmination of the dis- 108 ART BULLETIN MARCH 2003 VOLUME LXXXV NUMBER 1 Goya speak of the dream of the artist, free to invent according to the dictates of his own fancy, recalling the Horatian formula of fantasy, dreams, and monsters? Or do the monsters produced by the sleep of reason represent the folly of the social order, the superstitions and prejudices that Goya satirizes in the Caprichos?The ambiguity of the word suefio leaves the image open to interpretation, and the displacement of the etching from the frontispiece further problematizes its significance. In an advertisement for the Caprichos published in the Diario de Madrid, Goya emphasized the fantastic nature of his work. Invoking the ancient paragone of poetry versus painting to assert his artistic license, he boasts of having "put before the eyes of the public forms and poses which have existed previously in the darkness and confusion of an irrational mind, or one which is beset by uncontrolled passion."'45 His claims are given visual form in Capricho43, as the images spill forth from the artist's mind. In the advertisement, Goya suggests that the Caprichosare the products of his furor; in Capricho 43, he fuses furor, dream, and invention. The true afterlife of Michelangelo's Sogno, it seems, is not to be found in the many copies of the drawing, but rather in Goya's self-image as a dreamer surrounded by the monsters of his own making. The Sogno is a pictorial meditation on the multiple aspects of artistic inspiration; the Sleep of Reason ushers in a new conception of the artist and his project, one that moves beyond poetic license and divine inspiration into more sinister territory, in which dream edges ever closer to nightmare. 27 Francisco Goya, Capricho43: The Sleepof ReasonProduces Monsters,1799 (photo: Victoria & Albert Museum, London/Art Resource, NY) course linking sleep, dreams, and artistic inspiration. Mitelli claims that his inventions came to him in a dream, brought by Morpheus: "Completely given over to the power of Sleep, I was encircled, thanks to his gentle minister, Morpheus, by forms and visions pertinent to the most noble art of Drawing."142 Borrowing the poet's rhetoric of the dream as a vehicle for inspiration and the related conceit of the dream narrative, Mitelli describes his dream not in words, but in the figures that populate his text. The frontispiece gives visual form to the dream experience. The artist is depicted asleep at a table, a palette and brushes abandoned at his feet, a sculpted bust nearby. Disembodied eyes, mouth, ear, and nose float above him. Artistic creativity, Mitelli's image suggests, comes in the form of the dream. Mitelli's frontispiece clearly points the way to, and may have provided the source for, Francisco Goya's celebrated Capricho 43, the Sleep (or Dream) of Reason Produces Monsters (Fig. 27).143 Initially intended as the frontispiece to the Caprichos, Goya's image of the artist as a dreamer mingles the sinister nature of dreams with their fantastic, inventive aspect.144 Both image and text balance precariously on the line that divides fantastic invention and irrational excess. Does A specialistin Renaissance and Baroqueart, Maria Ruvoldt received her Ph.D. from Columbia University in 1999. Her first book, The Imagery of Inspiration in the Italian Renaissance, isforthcoming from Cambridge University Press [115 West 86th Street, New York,N.Y.10024]. Frequently Cited Sources II Carteggio di Michelangelo, 5 vols., ed. Paola Barocchi, Giovanni Poggi, and Renzo Ristori (Florence: S.P.E.S., 1965-83). Condivi, Ascanio, Vita di Michelagnolo Buonarroti, ed. Giovanni Nencioni (Florence: S.P.E.S., Studio per Edizioni Scelte, 1998). Klibansky, Raymond, Erwin Panofsky, and Fritz Saxl, Saturn and Melancholy: Studies in the History of Natural Philosophy,Religion, and Art (London: Thomas Nelson and Sons, 1964). Panofsky, Erwin, "The Neoplatonic Movement and Michelangelo," in Studies in Iconology: Humanistic Themes in the Art of the Renaissance (1939; reprint, New York: Harper and Row, Icon Editions, 1962). The Poetry of Michelangelo: An Annotated Translation, ed. and trans. James M. Saslow (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1991). Saslow, James M., Ganymedein the Renaissance: Homosexuality in Art and Society (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1986). Summers, David, Michelangelo and the Language of Art (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1981). Testa, Judith Anne, "The Iconography of the Archers:A Study in Self-Concealment and Self-Revelation in Michelangelo's Presentation Drawings," Studies in Iconography5 (1979): 45-72. Vasari, Giorgio, Le vite de' piit eccellentipittori, scultori, ed architettori (1568), 9 vols., ed. Gaetano Milanesi (Florence: 1878-85). Winner, Matthias, "Michelangelo's II Sogno as an Example of an Artist's Visual Reflection in His Drawings," in Michelangelo Drawings, ed. Craig Hugh Smyth, Studies in the History of Art, vol. 33 (Washington, D.C.: National Gallery of Art, 1992), 227-42. MICHELANGELO'S Notes This article derives from my doctoral dissertation, written under the direction of David Rosand. I am indebted to him for his unstinting support and encouragement. I am grateful to all those who read this manuscript at various stages of its development, including the members of my dissertation committee and those who heard versions of this paper at Columbia University and Ohio State University. I especially wish to thank Pamela M. Fletcher, Senta German, Perry Chapman, and The Art Bulletin's anonymous readers for their contributions. For assistance in obtaining photographs and permissions, I thank Claudia Goldstein. Unless otherwise indicated, translations are mine. 1. William Wallace, "Studies in Michelangelo's Finished Drawings," Ph.D. diss., Columbia University, 1983, offers the term "gift drawing" as an alternative to the conventional "presentation drawing," coined by Johannes Wilde. See A. E. Popham and Johannes Wilde, The Italian Drawings of the XV and XVI Centuries in the Collection of His Majesty the King at Windsor Castle (London: Phaidon Press, 1949), nos. 423, 424, 428-31. See also Michael Hirst, "The Making of Presents," chap. 10 of Michelangelo and His Drawings (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1988), 105-18; and Alexander Nagel, "Gifts for Michelangelo and Vittoria Colonna," Art Bulletin 79 (1997): 647- 68. The dynamics of gift giving, long a subject for anthropologists, are beginning to be explored by art historians. For the anthropological perspective, see in particular the highly influential Marcel Mauss, The Gift: The Form and Reason for Exchange in Archaic Societies (1925), trans. W. D. Halls (New York: W. W. Norton, 1990). Recent contributions in art history, in addition to Nagel, include Genevieve Warwick, "Gift Exchange and Art Collecting: Padre Sebastiano Resta's Drawing Albums," Art Bulletin 79 (1997): 630-46; Natalie Zemon Davis, The Gift in Sixteenth-CenturyFrance (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2000); and Brigitte Buettner, "Past Presents: New Year's Gifts at the Valois Courts, ca. 1400," Art Bulletin 83 (2001): 598-625. 2. Nagel (as in n. 1). 3. Tommaso de' Cavalieri to Michelangelo, Carteggio, vol. 3, no. 898: "In questo mezo mi pigliar6 almanco doi hore del giorno piacere in contemplare doi vostri desegni ... quali quanto pii li miro, tanto piP mi piacciono.... " Vittoria Colonna, to Michelangelo, Carteggio,vol. 4, no. 968: "lo l'ho ben visto al lume et col vetro et col specchio, et non viddi mai la pii finita cosa." 4. As part of Michelangelo's oeuvre, the Sogno has accumulated an extensive bibliography, ranging from inclusion in catalogues to more iconographic investigations. The interpretation of the drawing as an allegory of virtue and vice remains unchallenged, with the single exception of Andrew Pigler, who argues that the scene represents the House of Sleep as described in Ovid's Metamorphoses, identifying the youth as Hypnos, the god of Sleep, and his winged companion as Iris. The following is a comprehensive list of the drawing's bibliography to date. Henry Thode, Michelangelo: Kritische Untersuchungen flber seine Werke,3 vols. (Berlin: G. Grot'esche Verlagsbuchhandlung, 1908-13), vol. 2, 375-82, vol. 3, no. 520; Carl Justi, Michelangelo: Neue 1909), 347; A. E. Beitriage (Berlin: G. Grot'esche Verlagsbuchhandlung, Brinckmann, Michelangelo Zeichnungen (Munich: R. Piper, 1925), no. 59; Karl Frey, Die Handzeichnungen Michelagniolos Buonarroti, Nachtrag (Berlin: J. Bard, 1925), no. 157; Bernard Berenson, The Drawings of theFlorentinePainters, 2d ed. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1938), no. 1748b; Panofsky, 171-230, esp. 223-25; Andrew Pigler, "The Importance of Iconographical Exactitude," Art Bulletin 21 (1939): 228-37; Sherman Lee, "Daniel's Dream: A Significant Misnomer," Art Quarterly9 (1946): 257-60; Ludwig Goldscheider, Michelangelo's Drawings (London: Phaidon Press, 1951), no. 93; Alessandro Marabottini, "I Sogno di Michelangelo in una copia sconosciuta," in Scritti di storia dell'arte in onore di Lionello Venturi,ed. Mario Salmi, 2 vols. (Rome: De Luca, 1956), vol. 1, 349-58; Luitpold Dussler, Die Zeichnungen des Michelangelo (Berlin: Gebrfiider Mann, 1959), no. 589; Charles de Tolnay, Michelangelo, 5 vols. (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1943-71), vol. 5, no. 169; Eugenio Battisti, "Michelangelo o dell'ambiguitA iconografica," in FestschriftLuitpold Dussler, ed. J. A. Schmoll gen. Eisenwerth, Marcell Restle, and Herbert Weiermann (Munich: Deutscher Kunstverlag, 1972), 209-22; Frederick Hartt, Michelangelo Drawings (New York: Harry N. Abrams, 1975), no. 359; Charles de Tolnay, Corpus dei disegni di Michelangelo, 4 vols. (Novara: Istituto Geografico De Agostini, 1975-76), vol. 2, no. 333; Francesco Gandolfo, II "Dolce Tempo": Mistica, ermetismoe sogno nel cinquecento (Rome: Bulzoni, 1978), 138-52; Christoph Frommel, Michelangelo und Tommaso de' Cavalieri (Amsterdam: Castrum Peregrini, 1979), 66-67; Testa; Summers, 215-16; Robert S. Liebert, Michelangelo: A Psychoanalytic Study of His Life and Images (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1983), 307-10; Saslow, 17-62; Alexander Perrig, Michelangelo's Drawings: The Scienceof Attribution, trans. MichaelJoyce (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1991), 33;John Paoletti, "Michelangelo's Masks," Art Bulletin 74 (1992): 423-40; Winner, 227-42; Carol Morganti, "Il Sogno di Michelangelo: Una ricognizione iconografica," Grafica d'Arte 8 (1997): 2-6; and Ernst H. Gombrich, "Sleeper Awake! A Literary Parallel to Michelangelo's Drawing of The Dream of Human Life," in Festschriftfitr Konrad Oberhuber,ed. Achim Gnann and Heinz Widauer (Milan: Electa, 2000), 130-32. 5. "Mundi globo Juvenis innixus, nudo corpore, eodemque singulis membris affabre compaginato, primo se intuentibus offert; quem angelus, tuba ad aures admota, dormientem excitat: hunc non aliud referre crediderim, quam ipsam Hominis mentem a vitiis ad virtutes, longo veluti postliminio, revocatam; ac proinde, remota ab eius oculis longius, vitia circumspicies." Hierony- DREAM 109 mus Tetius, Aedes Barberiniae ad Quirinalem (Rome, 1642), 158, quoted in Panofsky, 224 n. 178. 6. Panofsky, 223-25. 7. At the College Art Association annual conference in New York, February 2000, Carlo Ginzburg delivered a paper that proposed Dante's Divina Commedia as a literary source for the Sogno, but his reading maintains Panofsky's analysis of the theme of virtue and vice. Gombrich (as in n. 5) identified a poem by Giovanni Francesco Pico della Mirandola as a possible source for the drawing. The poem's imagery resonates with the drawing, but it, too, focuses on virtue and vice exclusively. 8. For the copies, see Dussler (as in n. 4), no. 589; Lee (as in n. 4), 257; and Marabottini (as in n. 4). The painted copies are Battista Franco, ca. 1540 (National Gallery, London); Marcello Venusti, ca. 1540 (Galleria degli Uffizi, Florence); Alessandro Allori, ca. 1579-80 (Galleria degli Uffizi); idem, ca. 1579-80 (private collection, Rome), published by Marabottini; and idem (private collection), published in Robert B. Simon, Visions and Vistas: Old Master Paintings and Drawings (New York: Berry-Hill Galleries, 1999), 58. Copies as drawings are Marcello Venusti, ca. 1540 (Pierpont Morgan Library, New York); artist unknown, 16th-century (Casa Buonarroti, Florence); and three drawings in private collections, artists unknown, cited by Dussler. Prints were made by Nicolas Beatrizet, ca. 1545, listed in J. D. Passavant, Le peintregraveur, 6 pts. in 3 vols. (Leipzig, 1860-64), vol. 3, pt. 6, 119, no. 112; and Michele Lucchesi, ca. 1545, ibid., 168, no. 15. A majolica plate was made in Deruta, 1545 (Detroit Institute of Arts). See also an etching by Jan de Bisschop (after a drawing by Sebastiano del Piombo) showing only the Sogno's central nude and the box of masks, in The Genius of the Sculptor in Michelangelo's Work (Montreal: Montreal Museum of Fine Arts, 1992), no. 115. 9. Although the authenticity of the Courtauld sheet has been questioned, even those scholars (Berenson, Dussler, Frey, and Panofsky) who have doubted its status as autograph have accepted that the composition reflects an original by Michelangelo. Current scholarly consensus favors attribution to Michelangelo himself. The notable exception is Michael Hirst (as in n. 1), who omits any consideration of the Sogno from his selective study of Michelangelo's drawings. No such work, copy or original, is mentioned in his text. 10. Winner argues that the youth is a "lifeless body" receiving its soul from the angel above. Testa narrows this proposition, speculating that the figure represents the soul of the artist himself. 11. For the melancholic temperament and its expression in the visual arts, see Klibansky et al. See also Panofsky, The Life and Art ofAlbrechtDflrer, 4th ed. (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1955), 156-71. The sphere appears in Albrecht Diirer's Melancholia I and in several northern treatments of the theme roughly contemporaneous with the Sogno, including Lucas Cranach, Melancholy, 1528 (Royal Museum of Fine Arts, Copenhagen), and Hans Sebald Beham, Melancholy, 1539, as well as in the de Gheyn illustrated above (Fig. 2). For the translation of the attributes of geometry into the iconography of the melancholic, see Klibansky et al., esp. 333-38; and Panofsky, 167-68. 12. See Joachim Gaus, "Ingenium und Ars: Das Ehepaarbildnis Lavoisier von David und die Ikonographie der Museninspiration," Wallraf-RichartzJahrbuch 36 (1974): 199-228; Robert S. Nelson, The Iconography of Preface and Miniature in the Byzantine GospelBook (New York: New York University Press for the College Art Association of America, 1980), 75-91; Carl Nordenfalk, "Der inspirierte Evangelist," WeinerJahrbuchfitr Kunstgeschichte 36 (1983): 175-90; and Rainer Kahsnitz, "Matheus ex ore Christi scripsit: Zum Bild der Berufung und Inspiration der Evangelisten," in Byzantine East, Latin West:Art-Historical Studies in Honor of Kurt Weitzmann, ed. Christopher Moss and Katherine Kiefer (Princeton: Princeton University Department of Art and Archaeology, 1995), 169-80. By the 17th century, the turning head and upward glance, signifying divine possession, were well-established attributes of the personification of Painting and of the inspired painter himself. See Hans-Joachim Raupp, Untersuchungen zu Kinstlerbildnis und Kflnstlerdarstellung in den Niederlanden im 17. Jahrhundert (Hildesheim: Georg Olms, 1984), 181-208. I am grateful to Perry Chapman for this reference. 13. Edgar Wind, "Michelangelo's Prophets and Sibyls," Proceedings of the British Academy51 (1960): 47-84, reprinted in Wind, The Religious Symbolismof Michelangelo, ed. Elizabeth Sears (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), 124-48. See also Michelangelo's Leah and Moses, sculptural instances of the physiognomies of divine inspiration. 14. As Plato observed, "the greatest of blessings come to us through madness, when it is sent as a gift of the gods," Phaedrus 244a, trans. Harold North Fowler (Cambridge, Mass.: Loeb Classical Library, 1977), 465. It would be difficult to overstate Ficino's debt to Plato for his theory of divine inspiration. His own work repeats and develops concepts that Plato had introduced in the Phaedrus and Symposium. The loci classici for Ficino's theory of furor are his letter to Peregrino degli Agli, entitled De divinofurore (Dec. 1, 1457), and his commentary on Plato's Symposium. See Marsilio Ficino, The Letters of Marsilio Ficino, 5 vols., trans. Members of the Language Department of the School of Economic Science, London (London: Shepheard-Walwyn, 1975-94), vol. 1, 42-48, no. 7; and idem, El libro dell'amore (1469), ed. Sandra Niccoli (Florence: Leo S. Olschki, 1987). For Ficino's Neoplatonism, see Paul Oskar Kristeller, The Philosophy ofMarsilio Ficino, trans. Virginia Conant (Gloucester, Mass.: Peter Smith, 1964), esp. 234-46; and MichaelJ. B. Allen, The Platonism of Marsilio Ficino: A Study of His Phaedrus Commentary,Its Sources and Genesis (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984), esp. 145-47. 15. In addition to the classic study by Klibansky et al., see Andre Chastel, 110 ART BULLETIN MARCH 2003 VOL()IUME LXXXV NUMBER 1 "Melancholia in the Sonnets of Lorenzo de' Medici," Journal of the Warburgand Courtauld Institutes 8 (1945): 61-67. More recent studies have complicated our understanding of melancholia and its place in early modern culture. See, among others, Stanley W. Jackson, Melancholia and Depression:FromHippocratic Times to Modern Times (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1986); Juliana Schiesari, The Gendering of Melancholia: Feminism, Psychoanalysis, and the Symbolics of Loss in Renaissance Literature (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1992); and Lynn Enterline, The Tears of Narcissus: Melancholia and MasculinitTy in Early Modern Writing (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1995). 16. Aristotle, Problems, trans. W. S. Hett (Cambridge, Mass.: Loeb Classical Library, 1965), now generally considered Pseudo-Aristotle. 17. For Michelangelo and melancholy, see Rudolf Wittkower and Margot Wittkower, Born under Saturn: The Characterand Conduct of Artists, a Documented Historyfrom Antiquity to the French Revolution (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1953), 71-75. Michelangelo repeatedly insisted that his own gifts had been given to him at birth, expressing his belief that his art and his personality type were determined by a divine source, as implied in his less than generous appraisal of Raphael, as one who "had this art not from nature, but from long study [non ebbe quest'arte da natura, ma per lungo studio]"; in Condivi, 63. Condivi, 20, 52, twice calls Michelangelo's talent a gift of nature. See also Summers, 60-70, for the concept of furor and divine inspiration; and Poetry, 35, for the recurrence of the theme of divine election in Michelangelo's poetry. 18. See Deoclecio Redig de Campos, "I1 pensieroso della Segnatura," in Michelangelo Buonarroti nel IV centenario del Giudizio Universale (1541-1941), studi e saggi (Florence: Istituto Nazionale di Studi sul Rinascimento, 1942), 205-19. 19. Sculpted on the pedestal of this imaginary tribute, Lomazzo envisions Michelangelo's opposites, those artists who fall under the negative influence of Saturn and are "petulant, anxious, tedious, melancholic, unhappy, obstinate, rigid, desperate, dishonest, envious, and suchlike [petulanti, ansiosi, tediosi, melancolici, tristi, ostinati, rigidi, disperati, bugiardi, invidiosi, e simili]." Gian Paolo Lomazzo, Idea del tempiodella pittura, in Scritti sulle arti, ed. Roberto Paolo Ciardi, 2 vols. (Florence: Marchi e Bertolli, 1974), vol. 1, 279. 20. Virgil, Aeneid 6.42-51, trans. H. Rushton Fairclough, rev. ed., 2 vols. (Cambridge, Mass.: Loeb Classical Library, 1986), 509-10. 21. Longinus, On the Sublime 13.2, trans. W. H. Fyfe, revised by Donald Russell (Cambridge, Mass.: Loeb Classical Library, 1995), 211. 22. Winner, 229. 23. Panofsky, 224, refines Tetius's identification of the creature as an angel, suggesting its likeness to Cesare Ripa's personification of"Emulation, contest, and stimulus to glory." Dussler (as in n. 4), associates the trumpet more specifically with Fame. Winner identifies the figure as an inspiring angel. The figure of the angel also may have had significant personal resonance for Michelangelo. Girolamo Savonarola, the Dominican preacher whose voice Michelangelo claimed to remember to the end of his days, had published a text on prophecy, Compendium revelationum, in 1495. Savonarola identified angels as the agents of prophetic insight, assigning them the ability to "fill the imagination with holy figments." Wind (as in n. 13), 81 n. 1. 24. See Klibansky et al., 94. 25. For Renaissance faculty psychology and the place of the imaginatio, see E. Ruth Harvey, The Inward Wits: Psychological Theoryin the Middle Ages and the Renaissance (London: Warburg Institute, University of London, 1975). See also Martin Kemp, "From 'Mimesis' to 'Fantasia': The Quattrocento Vocabulary of Creation, Inspiration, and Genius in the Visual Arts," Viator8 (1977): 347-98, esp. 379-80. 26. The plate, dated 1545, is currently in the Detroit Institute of Arts; see n. 8 above. The inscription reads in full: "Daniello sogniando di vedere tuti li pechati mortali et era in grande afanno vinne langiolo dalcielo e si loro sveg(l)io." The plate was adduced as evidence in support of his interpretation by Ginzburg (as in n. 7) in his discussion of the Sogno. The identification of the central figure as Daniel, the biblical dream interpreter, seems due to the dreamlike quality of the arc of figures. I will return to this point in my discussion of the Sogno as a dream image. 27. Hartt and Winner both acknowledge the absence of Pride. Hartt (as in n. 4), 251, argues that Pride is metaphorically present, as the source of all other forms of sin. Winner, 228, simply states that "Pride (superbia) cannot be clearly connected with a particular image among the group. 28. See Klibansky et al., 3-15, 300-303. 29. Ibid., 284. 30. For Michelangelo's image of Duke Lorenzo as "the perfect votary of Saturn," see Panofsky, 209-11. The object in the duke's left hand, which Panofsky identifies as a handkerchief, is difficult to read. But in contrast to Duke Giuliano, who allows a few coins to slip out of his left hand (in Jovial generosity), it may well be a moneybag, symbolizing melancholic parsimony. 31. Aristotle, De somno et vigilia 3.457a, trans. W. S. Hett (Cambridge, Mass.: Loeb Classical Library, 1975), 339. 32. For the finger across the mouth, see ibid. Michelangelo uses the gesture for the Saturnine Duke Lorenzo and elsewhere, most notably in the meditative (and melancholic) prophet Jeremiah in the Sistine Chapel. 33. Aristotle (as in n. 16), 953a-953b. 34. Ibid., 954a. 35. Ibid. 36. Ibid., 953b. 37. Panofsky (as in n. 11), 158. Throughout the history of melancholy, both misanthropy and a strong desire for solitude have been characteristic of the melancholic profile. It is easy to see how disdain for the opposite sex might derive from there. Hildegard of Bingen, one of the few authors to address explicitly the differing effects of melancholy on men and women, writes that melancholic men "avoid the female gender because they do not care for women, and do not wish to have them," and melancholic women, similarly, "are happier without a mate than with one because they become sick from relations with a husband." Hildegard of Bingen, Causae et curae (ca. 1151-58), quoted in Jennifer Radden, ed., The Nature of Melancholy: From Aristotle to Kristeva (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), 84. The concept appears to have been popularly known, as testified by verses in the Augsburg calendar of 1495: "the melancholic.., .has but rare and weak desires, and is not much given to liking," and a mid-15th-century broadsheet published in Zurich, in which the melancholic declares, "No love for fame or woman have I/In Saturn and autumn the fault doth lie." Italian sources likewise mention this aspect of the melancholic personality. In La sfera, Leonardo Dati states that melancholics "are solitary and unfriendly [son solitari et di poca amicitia]," and F. Giovanni M. Tolosani, in La nuova sfera (1514), asserts that the melancholic "always has a bitter heart ... he is solitary and seems like a monk [sempreha il core amaro ... solitario e pare un uom monastico]." All of these sources are quoted in Klibansky et al., 116-17. 38. The issue is raised at least twice. In Francisco de Hollanda's dialogues, Michelangelo speaks in general terms, asserting that "excellent painters are not unsociable from pride, but either because they find few minds capable of the art of painting or in order not to corrupt themselves with the vain conversation of idle persons and degrade their thoughts from the intense and lofty imaginings in which they are continually rapt." Hollanda, Didlogos em Roma (1538): Conversations on Art with Michelangelo Buonarroti, ed. Grazia Dolores Folliero-Metz (Heidelberg: Universitditsverlag C. Winter, 1998), 7475. Condivi, 59, reports that "some considered him proud, others bizarre and eccentric, though he had neither the one vice nor the other; but, as it has happened with many excellent men, the love of virtii and its continual exercise made him solitary [fu tenuto da chi superboe da chi bizzarroefantastico, non avendo n4 l'uno nWl'altro vizio; ma, come a molti eccellenti uomini ? avvenuto, l'amore della virtii e la continua essercitazionedi lei lo facevan solitario .. .]." 39. According to Francisco de Hollanda, Michelangelo quoted Horace's assertion that "poets and painters have license to dare .... Hollanda (as in n. 38), 109. The passage is quoted in and discussed by Summers, 135-37, who traces audacia, its links to fantasia, and its role as a characteristic of the artist. 40. Carteggio,vol. 3, no. 608: "[S]opra qualche mia bizzarria o pazzia che e' dichon che io 6, che non nuoce se non a-mme...." 41. Ibid., no. 704: "di che ebi grandissimo piacere, perche usci' um pocho del mio malinchonicho, o vero del mio pazzo...." 42. Ibid., no. 838: "Per amor de Dio, guardatevi de qualche consiglio de umor melinconico, che sempre v'anno ruinato.... 43. "La mia allegrezz'& la maninconia," Poetry, no. 267. See also Antonio Corsaro, "Michelangelo, il comico e la malinconia," Studi e Problemidi Critica Testuale49 (1994): 97-119; and Enzo N. Girardi, "La mi'allegrezz'?la malinconia (Michelangelo, Rime, 267 v. 25)," in Malinconia ed allegrezza nel Rinascimento, ed. Luisa Rotondi Secchi Tarugi (Milan: Nuovi Orizzonti, 1999), 97-108. 44. "Have you never reflected on the poets who in composing their verses are unrelenting in their pursuit of fine literature and think nothing of erasing some of these verses in order to improve upon them? Therefore, painter, decide broadly upon the position of the limbs of your figures and attend first to the movements appropriate to the mental attitudes of the creatures in the narrative rather than to the beauty and quality of their limbs. You should understand that if such a rough composition turns out to be right for your intention, it will all the more satisfy in subsequently being adorned with the perfection suitable to all its parts." Leonardo da Vinci, Codex Urbinas Latinus 1270, fols. 61v-62r, quoted in Leonardo on Painting, ed. Martin Kemp (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1989), 222. 45. E. H. Gombrich, "Leonardo's Method for Working Out Compositions," in Norm and Form: Studies in the Art of the Renaissance, vol. 1, 4th ed. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1966), 58-63. See also David Rosand, Drawing Acts: Studies in Graphic Expression and Representation (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 50-53. 46. Francisco de Hollanda, Da pintura antiga, quoted in Summers, 68; Hollanda, Da pintura antiga, ed. Angel Gonzalez Garcia (Lisbon: Imprensa Nacional-Casa de Moeda, 1984), 92-93: "Como n'este ponto elle se tever, pora velocissima execugho a sua idea e conceito, antes que com alguma por nio perder aquele divino furor perturbagio se lhe perca e deminuia... e imagem que na fantesia leva." 47. Vasari, vol. 1, 174: "E perche dal furor dello artefice sono in poco tempo con penna o con altro disegnatoio o carbone espressi, solo per tentare l'animo di quel che gli sovviene, perci6 si chiamano schizzi." Elsewhere (vol. 2, 171), Vasari speaks of sketches "being suddenly born from the furor of art [nascendo in subito dalfurore dell'arte]." 48. Lomazzo, Trattato dell'artedella pittura, in Ciardi (as in n. 19), vol. 2, 99: ".. appena averanno delineato un corpo e formato un gesto, che gli ne nascono nella fantasia altri infiniti d'altra sorte, si che non possono, per l'estremo diletto che sentono de l'invenzione, aver pazienza di finire alcuna opera cominciata." 49. "I have in the past seen in clouds and walls stains which have inspired MICHELANGELO'S me to beautiful inventions of many things." Leonardo da Vinci, Codex Urbinas Latinus 1270, fol. 62v, quoted in Kemp (as in n. 44), 222. 50. Naturally, the drawing has suffered the effects of time as well as more direct intervention. Some of the more sexually graphic aspects of the arc, as I will discuss, have been rubbed out. But the differing degrees of finish are consistent throughout, leading me to believe that the misty form of the arc is a deliberate effect rather than a consequence of aging. 51. This quality is lost in the copies of the Sogno, sacrificed because of the constraints of medium and the need for legibility. 52. Nagel (as in n. 1), 653. 53. Vasari, vol. 7, 271: "[G]li disegn6 un Ganimede rapito in cielo dall'uccel di Giove, un Tizio che l'avoltoio gli mangia il cuore, la cascata del carro del Sole con Fetonte nel Po, ed una baccanalia di putti ." A letter from Cavalieri demonstrates that he was in possession of the ... Phaeton, Tityus, and Ganymedecompositions in September 1533. See Carteggio,vol. 4, no. 932. For Michelangelo and Cavalieri, see Baruch D. Kirschenbaum, "Reflections on Michelangelo's Drawings for Cavaliere," Gazette des Beaux-Arts, 6th ser., 38 (1951): 99-110; Frommel (as in n. 4); Liebert (as in n. 4), 270-311; and Saslow, 17-62. 54. A passage in Vasari's life of Marcantonio Raimondi repeats the grouping of the Cavalieri drawings cited above, adding the Sogno to the list. Although Cavalieri is not specifically mentioned, Vasari appears to divide the drawings into two categories: those linked to Cavalieri in the life of Michelangelo (with the addition of ArchersShooting at a Herm [Royal Library, Windsor] and the Sogno), and those executed for Vittoria Colonna: "Sono poi da altri il Faetonte, il Tizio, il state intagliate molte cose cavate da Michelagnolo... Ganimede, i Saettatori, la Baccanaria, il Sogno, e la Pietat, e il Crocifisso fatti da Michelagnolo alla marchesana di Pescara[.]" Vasari, vol. 5, 430-31. 55. Testa argues that the nude figure represents Michelangelo, in an idealized self-image, and that the four works together represent the narrative of the effect of love for Cavalieri on Michelangelo's soul. 56. Franco's painting also fixes a terminus ante quem of 1537 for the drawing, generally placed ca. 1533 based on stylistic links to the Cavalieri group. 57. This mix of the private and public finds a parallel in Michelangelo's poetry. Benedetto Varchi lectured to the Accademia Fiorentina on the content of Michelangelo's sonnets, presumably written for Cavalieri. See Leatrice Mendelsohn, Paragoni: Benedetto Varchi's "Due Lezzioni" and Cinquecento Art Theory (Ann Arbor: UMI Research Press, 1982). On both the sonnets and the gift drawings as public and private, see Leonard Barkan, Transuming Passion: Ganymede and the Erotics of Renaissance Humanism (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1991), 81. 58. Cavalieri to Michelangelo, in Carteggio, vol. 4, no. 932: "I1 cardinal de'Medici A voluti veder tutti li vostri disegni, e sonnogli tanto piaciuti che voleva far fare quel Titio e '1 Ganimede in cristallo; e non 6 saputo far si bel verso che non habbia fatto far quel Titio, e ora il fa maestro Giovanni. Assai 6 fatto a salvare il Ganimede." Giovanni Bernardi da Castel Bolognese engraved the Ganymede, Tityus, and Phaeton on rock crystal at the request of Cardinal Ippolito de' Medici. See Vasari, vol. 5, 374; and Vilhelm Slomann, "Rock Crystals by Giovanni Bernardi," Burlington Magazine 48 (1926): 9-23. 59. This is Saslow's reading of Cavalieri's letter to Michelangelo. Saslow, 50. See also Liebert (as in n. 4), 271. 60. Vasari, vol. 7, 271: "[E]d infinitamente am6 pii di tutti messer Tommaso de'Cavalieri, gentiluomo romano, quale essendo giovane e molto inclinato a queste virtii, perch4 egli imparassi a disegnare, gli fece molte carte ." stupendissime... 61. For this aspect of Michelangelo's production, see Hirst (as in n. 1), 13-14, 39; Perrig (as in n. 4), 2; and William E. Wallace, "Instruction and Originality in Michelangelo's Drawings," in The Craft of Art: Originality and Industry in the Italian Renaissance Workshop,ed. Andrew Ladis and Carolyn Wood (Athens, Ga.: University of Georgia Press, 1995), 113-33. Wallace (as in n. 1), 43-82, discusses the function of Michelangelo's "pedagogic" drawings and assigns the Cavalieri group to this category. 62. See Alexander Perrig, "Bemerkungen zur Freundshaft zwischen Michelangelo und Tommaso de'Cavalieri," in Stil und Uberlieferungin der Kunst des Abendlandes, 3 vols. (Berlin: Gebrfider Mann, 1967), vol. 2, 164-71; and idem (as in n. 4), 75-85. 63. See Hirst (as in n. 1), 113; Perrig (as in n. 4), 44; and Rosand (as in n. 45), 190. 64. For the identification of the Sistine figure as Eve, see Leo Steinberg, "Who's Who in Michelangelo's Creation of Adam," Art Bulletin 74 (1992): 552-66. 65. Michelangelo revisited the pose in a series of studies for an Expulsion of the Moneychangersin the British Museum, London. See Tolnay, 1975-76 (as in n. 4), vol. 3, nos. 385-87. 66. Thode (as in n. 4), vol. 2, 377. 67. Venusti created several paintings after Michelangelo's gift drawings, and Michelangelo served as godfather to Venusti's first child. See Johannes Wilde, "Cartonettiby Michelangelo," Burlington Magazine 101 (1959): 30-81. William Wallace, "A New Letter, a Michelangelo Drawing, and a Lost Sebastiano?" Source:Notes in the History of Art 4 (1985): 21-26, publishes a letter that confirms that Cavalieri served as the intermediary between Ottaviano Farnese and an unnamed artist, perhaps Venusti, who created a painted copy of one of the gift drawings. DREAM 111 68. Michelangelo created a cartoon of Venus and Cupid, later executed as a painting byJacopo Pontormo, for his friend Bartolomeo Bettini. See Vasari, vol. 6, 277, vol. 7, 277. The work is known only through copies. For the Venus and Cupid, see Andr6 Chastel, Art et humanisme & Florenceau temps de Laurent le Magnifique (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1959), 516; John Shearman, The Early Italian Pictures in the Collection of Her Majesty the Queen (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1963), no. 302; Tolnay, 1943-71 (as in n. 4), vol. 3, 194-95; Hartt (as in n. 4), no. 307; William Keach, "Cupid Disarmed or Venus Wounded? An Ovidian Source for Michelangelo and Bronzino," Journal of the Warburgand Courtauld Institutes 41 (1978): 327-31; Perrig (as in n. 4), 2; Angela Negro, Veneree Amore di Michele di Ridolfo del Ghirlandaio: Il mito di una Venere di Michelangelo fra copie, repliche, e pudiche vestizioni (Rome: Campisano, 2001); and the catalogue accompanying the recent exhibition of the Venus and Cupid and related images at the Galleria dell'Accademia in Florence, Veneree amore:Michelangelo e la nuova bellezzaideale, ed. Franca Falletti and Jonathan Katz Nelson (Florence: Giunti, 2002). 69. Condivi, 64. 70. Ibid.: "avend'egli dipinte tante migliaia di figure.... [Michelangelo] non ha fatta mai una che somigli l'altra o faccia quella medesima attitudine." 71. Ibid.: "che non tira mai linea, che non si ricordi se pii mai l'ha tirata." 72. Vasari, vol. 7, 277-78: "E stato Michelagnolo di una tenace e profonda ne ha mai fatto cosa nessuna delle sue, che riscontri l'una con memoria... l'altra, perche si ricordava di tutto quello che aveva fatto." 73. For Sebastiano's suggestion and its possible meanings, see Michael Hirst, "A Drawing of the Rape of Ganymede by Michelangelo," in Essays Presented to Myron P. Gilmore, ed. Sergio Bertelli and Gloria Ramakus, 2 vols. (Florence: La Nuova Italia, 1978), vol. 2, 253-60; and Saslow, 42. Hirst attributed the Fogg Museum's Ganymedeto Michelangelo in 1975. See Michael Hirst, "A Drawing of the Rape of Ganymede by Michelangelo," Burlington Magazine 117 (1975): 166. 74. For Leda, see William E. Wallace, "Michelangelo's Leda: The Diplomatic Context," Renaissance Studies 15 (2001): 473-99. 75. Mario Equicola's Libro de natura de amore 4.4 treats the "paventose imaginationi et horribili simulacri" of unhappy lovers and melancholics. See La redazione manoscritta del "Libro de natura de amore" di Mario Equicola, ed. Laura Ricci (Rome: Bulzoni, 1999), 422-24. 76. Tolnay, 1943-71 (as in n. 4), vol. 5, no. 169, noted compositional similarities between the two. 77. Poetry, no. 259: "s'ogni nostro affetto al ciel dispiace / a che fin fatto arebbe il mondo Iddio?" Saslow accepts Tolnay's dating of the sonnet (three versions of which are addressed to a "signor mio," presumably Cavalieri) to about 1546-47, some thirteen years after the Sogno. Tolnay, 1975-76 (as in n. 4), vol. 4, no. 591, bases his dating on a very faint architectural sketch that appears on the sheet, which he connects to plans for St. Peter's (Michelangelo was appointed to oversee the construction of the new St. Peter's in 1547). The sketch is extremely difficult to read, as it is almost completely covered by Michelangelo's writing. Tolnay goes on to suggest a resemblance between the fragmentary sketch and more complete designs produced "before October 1532" for S. Lorenzo (ibid., vol. 2, no. 260). The sonnet may well date from the mid-1530s, together with the Cavalieri drawings and sonnets. 78. These handbooks varied widely in tone and audience, from the Somnia Danielis, a text in circulation since the 9th century, which appeared in both Latin and vernacular editions, to the Somnia Salomonis, an encyclopedic and scholarly tome in Latin, published in the 16th century. Their classical precedents are Macrobius's Commentaryon the Dream of Scipio, treating the types, causes, and significance of dreams, and Artemidorus of Daldis's Oneirocritica, a catalogue of dream symbols. See Macrobius, Commentary on the Dream of Scipio, trans. William Harris Stahl (New York: Columbia University Press, 1990); and Artemidorus of Daldis, The Interpretationof Dreams, trans. RobertJ. White (Torrance, Calif.: Original Books, 1990). For sleep and dreams in the Renaissance, see Alice Browne, "Sixteenth-Century Beliefs on Dreams with Special Reference to Girolamo Cardano's Somnium Synesorium Libri IIII," M. Phil. thesis, University of London, 1971; Marjorie Garber, Dream in Shakespeare: From Metaphor to Metamorphosis (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1974); Gandolfo (as in n. 4); Marianne Zehnpfennig, "Traum"und "Vision"in Darstellungen des 16. und 17. Jahrhunderts, Eberhard-Karls-Universittit, 1979; Giuseppina Palma, "In the Arms of Hypnos: The Metaphor of Sleep in Medieval, Renaissance, and Baroque Literature," Ph.D. diss., Yale University, 1994; Eric MacPhail, "Prophecy and Memory in the Renaissance Dream Vision," in Visions in History: Proceedings of the XIIIth Congressof the International Comparative Literature Association, ed. Gerald Gillespie (Tokyo: University of Tokyo Press, 1995), 193-99; and the essays collected in Francoise Charpentier, ed., Le songe &la Renaissance: Association d' tudes sur l'humanisme, la reforme et la Renaissance, ColloqueInternational de Cannes 23-31 Mai 1987 (Universite de St-Etienne: Institut d'Etudes de la Renaissance et de l'Age Classique, 1990). Renaissance perceptions of sleep and dreams are treated at length in Maria Ruvoldt, "The Sleep of Reason: Inspiration and Creativity in Renaissance Imagery," Ph.D. diss., Columbia University, 1999. 79. Following the Macrobian example, dreams were designated as true or false depending on their origin. While the literary tradition consistently attributed dreams to divine intervention and poetically described the twin gates of horn and ivory through which true and false dreams pass into the world, medical and philosophical texts (as well as the pedestrian handbooks of dream interpretation) attributed true dreams to divine influence and false 112 ART BULLETIN MARCH 2003 VOLUME LXXXV NUMBER 1 dreams to physical overindulgence or imbalance. As Plato had argued in the Republic, 571c-572b, only the rational, virtuous, sober man was capable of prophetic, or true, dreams. It was the responsibility of the dreamer to determine the circumstances of his dream and thus its trustworthiness. 80. Summers, 215, suggests that Benedetto Varchi was making reference to the Sogno when he identified Tommaso de' Cavalieri as "that beautiful person or thing who sometimes awakens us from the dream of human life." 81. For the pictorial conventions of dream representation, see Sixten Ringbom, "Some Pictorial Conventions for the Recounting of Thoughts and Experiences in Late Medieval Art," in Medieval Iconography and Narrative: A Symposium, ed. Flemming G. Andersen et al. (Odense: Odense University Press, 1980), 38-69. See also Moshe Barasch, "The Dream in the Art and Lore of Late Antiquity," in The Language of Art: Studies in Interpretation (New York: NewYork University Press, 1997), 131-71; and David Freedberg, "Images dans les rives," in Crises de l'image religieuse: De Nice II &T Vatican II, ed. Olivier Christin and Dario Gamboni (Paris: Editions de la Maison des Sciences de l'Homme, 1999), 33-53. 82. Panofsky, 224. 83. As Leonardo wrote: "whatever there is in the universe through essence, presence, or imagination [the painter] has it first in his mind, then in his hands." Quoted in Kemp (as in n. 44), 22. 84. For sleep and dreams in antiquity, see Antonio Grillone, II sogno nell'epica latina: Tecnica e poesia (Palermo: And6, 1967); A.H.M. Kessels, Studies on the Dream in GreekLiterature (Utrecht: HES, 1978); Giulio Guidorizzi, ed., II sogno in Grecia (Bari: Laterza, 1988); Carlo Brillante, Studio sulla rappresentazione del sogno nella Grecia antica (Palermo: Sellerio, 1991); and Patricia Cox Miller, Dreams in Late Antiquity: Studies in the Imagination of a Culture (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1994). For the medieval period, see Steven R. Fischer, The Dream in the Middle High German Epic (Bern: Peter Lang, 1978); Kathryn Lynch, The High Medieval Dream Vision: Poetry, Philosophy, and Literary Form (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1988); Steven F. Kruger, Dreaming in the Middle Ages (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992); and the essays collected in Tullio Gregory, ed., I sogni nel medioevo: Seminario Internazionale Roma 2-4 ottobre1984 (Rome: Ateneo, 1985); and in Agostino Paravicini Bagliani and Giorgio Stabile, eds., Trdiume im Mittelalter: Ikonologische Studien (Stuttgart: Belser, 1989). In addition, see the transhistorical surveys, G. E. von Grunebaum and Roger Caillois, eds., The Dream and Human Societies (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1966); Vittore Branca, Carlo Ossola, and Salomon Resnik, eds., I linguaggi di sogno (Florence: G. C. Sansoni, 1984); Susan Parman, Dream and Culture (New York: Praeger, 1991); David Shulman and Guy G. Strousma, eds., Dream Cultures: Explorations in the Comparative History of Dreaming (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999); and Christine Walde, Antike Traumdeutung und moderneTraumforschung (Dfisseldorf: Artemis and Winkler, 2001). 85. Plato, Timaeus 71E, trans. R. G. Bury (Cambridge, Mass.: Loeb Classical Library, 1975), 187. 86. Pausanias, Description of Greece2.31.3, trans. W.H.S. Jones (Cambridge, Mass.: Loeb Classical Library, 1978), vol. 1, 417. 87. Synesius of Cyrene, I sogni, trans. Davide Susanetti (Bari: Adriatica, 1992), 73. Ficino translated Synesius's text about 1488, and it was published by Aldus Manutius in 1497. Another edition appeared in 1516. See Andrea Rabassini, "I1 De somniis di Sinesio tradotto da Ficino," 153-54, and the fascimile of the 1516 edition, 156-69, both in Accademia 1 (1999). 88. Aelius Aristedes, Sacred Tales 4.25, in The CompleteWorks,trans. Charles A. Behr, 2 vols. (Leiden: E.J. Brill, 1981), vol. 2, 322-23. Devotees of Asclepius slept in his temple, in the hopes of being visited by him in a dream and healed or given instructions for a cure. 89. Synesius (as in n. 87), 51: "Non trovo niente di straordinario nel fatto che un sogno abbia portato in dono a qualcuno un tesoro, tanto meno reputo incredibile che qualcuno, addormentatosi privo di doti poetiche, dopo essersi in sogno imbattuto nelle Muse ed aver udito alcune cose ed altre averle pronunciate lui stesso, sia divenuto abile poeta, come e caduto ai giorni nostri." 90. Delivered in Latin, April 8, 1341, Petrarch's coronation oration is translated in its entirety by E. H. Wilkins, Studies in the Life and Worksof Petrarch (Cambridge, Mass.: Mediaeval Academy of America, 1955), 300-313, at 311. 91. Giovanni Pontano, Actius (ca. 1499), in Idialoghi, ed. Carmelo Previtera (Florence: Sansoni, 1943), 127-239, esp. 144. See also Giovanni Pontano, Dialoge, ed. and trans. Hermann Kiefer (Munich: Wilhelm Fink, 1984). 92. Pontano, Actius, in Pontano, 1943 (as in n. 91), 144. 93. Poetry, no. 102: "O notte, o dolce tempo, bench& nero,/con pace ogn' opra sempr' al fin assalta; / ben vede e ben intende chi t'esalta, /e chi t'onor' ha l'intelletto intero. / Tu mozzi e tronchi ogni stanco pensiero/che l'umid' ombra e ogni quiet'appalta, /e dall'infima parte alla pid alta/ in sogno spesso porti, ovire spero./O ombra del morir, per cui si ferma/ogni miseria a l'alma, al cor nemica, / ultimo delli afflitti e buon remedio; / tu rendi sana nostra carn'inferma, /rasciughi i pianti e posi ogni fatica/e furi a chi ben vive ogn'ira e tedio." 94. For this tradition, see Stefano Carrai, Ad Somnum: L 'invocazioneal sonno nella lirica italiana (Padua: Antenore, 1990). Many poems praise night and sleep for their restorative powers, but the poets speak of their own respite from the turmoils of love. See esp. the poems by Callimaco Esperiente (Filippo Buonacorsi), Gasparo Visconti, Ercole Strozzi, Aquilano (Serafino Ciminelli), and Andrea Navagero reprinted by Carrai. 95. Poetry,no. 103. 96. Ibid., no. 104. 97. Michelangelo to Luigi del Riccio, in Carteggio,vol. 4, no. 963: "Ancora vorrei un'altra gratia dawvoi, e questa &che mi cavassi d'una certa anbiguitt in che io son rimasto stanotte, che, salutando l'idolo nostro in sognio, mi parve che ridendo mi minacciassi; e io, non sappiendo a qual delle dua cose m'abbia a-ttenere, vi prego lo intendiate da-llui, e domenica, riveggiendoci, me ne raguagliate." 98. Condivi, 15-16. 99. Piero de' Medici's insight is also called into question, for he dismisses Cardiere's warning, arguing that surely Lorenzo would have appeared to his own son to deliver such an urgent message. Ibid., 16. 100. "For the imagination of a good painter is full of figures, and were it possible for him to live for ever he would always have from his inward 'ideas,' whereof Plato speaks, something new to set forth by the work of his hand." Albrecht Diirer, in Literary Remains of Albrecht Dfirer, ed. William Martin Conway (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1889), 177, 197. 101. Ibid., 180. 102. Leonardo da Vinci, in The Literary Worksof Leonardo da Vinci, ed. Jean Paul Richter, 2d ed., 2 vols. (London: Oxford University Press, 1939), vol. 2, no. 1144. 103. "If a painter chose to join a human head to the neck of a horse and to spread feathers of many a hue over limbs picked up now here now there, so that what is at the top is a lovely woman ends up below in a black and ugly fish, could you, my friends, refrain from laughing? Believe me ... quite like such pictures would be a book whose idle fancies shall be shaped like a sick man's dreams ." Horace, Satires, Epistles, and Ars Poetica, trans. H. R. Fairclough (London:... Loeb Classical Library, 1970), 451. 104. Pliny, Natural History 35.71-72, trans. H. Rackham (London: Loeb Classical Library, 1942), vol. 9, 315. 105. See Dfirer (as in n. 100), 145; and Jean Michel Massing, "Diirer's Dreams," Journal of the Warburgand Courtauld Institutes 49 (1986): 238-44. In a reflection of his own fascination with deluge, Leonardo's "profetie" on dreams include the imagery of rushing water. See Leonardo (as in n. 102), vol. 2, no. 1293. 106. Michelangelo to Vasari, in Carteggio,vol. 5, no. 1215: "Mi ritorna bene nella mente come un sognio una certa iscala. . 107. Hollanda (as in n. 46), 95. 108. For Bosch, see Walter S. Gibson, "Bosch's Dreams: A Response to the Art of Bosch in the Sixteenth Century," Art Bulletin 74 (1992): 205-18. For grotesques, see Andre Chastel, "Les 'grotesques,"' in Branca et al. (as in n. 84), 293-305. 109. See, for example, Pirro Ligorio's collection of fantastic images, entitled Grotteschee insogni e stravaganti pitture, anzi mostruose,and the use of sogni to characterize the production of the seicento artist Cecco Bravo. For these and other examples, see Winner. 110. Anton Francesco Doni, Disegno (1549), in Scritti d'arte del cinquecento, ed. Paola Barocchi, 3 vols. (Milan: Riccardo Ricciardi, 1971-77), vol. 1, 585. 111. Although the mask is an attribute of Night, used to signify the deceptive nature of some dreams (and it appears in Michelangelo's own Night), masks generally do not appear in medieval and Renaissance depictions of dreams. In the decades after the Sogno, however, masks enter the iconography of dreams, as evidenced by Taddeo Zuccaro's House of Sleep, discussed below, and the street procession Trionfo dei Sogni staged for Francesco de' Medici in 1565. For the mask and its significance, see Moshe Barasch, "The Mask in European Art: Meanings and Functions," in Art the Ape of Nature: Studies in Honor ofH. W.Janson, ed. Moshe Barasch, Lucy Freeman Sandler, and Patricia Egan (New York: Harry N. Abrams, 1981), 253-64; Eckhard Leuschner, Persona, Larva, Maske: Ikonologische Studien zum 16. bis frithen 18. Jahrundert (Frankfurt: Peter Lang, 1997); and Charles Dempsey, Inventing the Renaissance Putto (Chapel Hill, N.C.: University of North Carolina Press, 2001), esp. 103-4, 128-37, 220-21. 112. SelectedLettersof St. Jerome(London: Loeb Classical Library, 1933), 175, quoted in Winner. There are at least ten masks visible; piled on one another, they recede into the space of the box. 113. Angelo Poliziano, Le stanze per la giostra di Giuliano de' Medici 2.24, quoted in Dempsey (as in n. 111), 105: "sogni drento alle lor larve." Dempsey, 221, links the phrase to the mask that accompanies Michelangelo's Night. See also Charles Dempsey, "Portraits and Masks in the Art of Lorenzo de' Medici, Botticelli, and Politian's Stanze per la giostra," Renaissance Quarterly52 (1999): 1-42. 114. Cesare Ripa, Iconologia, ed. Piero Buscaroli, 2 vols. (Turin: Fogola, 1986), vol. 2, 121. For the mask and the iconography of Painting, see Leuschner (as in n. 111), 279-316. 115. Caro's program, in a letter dated November 21, 1562, is published in his collected letters and is also excerpted in Vasari's life of Taddeo Zuccaro. See Annibale Caro, Letterefamiliari, ed. Aulo Greco, 3 vols. (Florence: F. Le Monnier, 1957-61), vol. 3, 676; and Vasari, vol. 7, 115-29. For the program of the Camera dell'Aurora at the Farnese villa, seeJean Seznec, The Survival of the Pagan Gods, trans. Barbara F. Sessions (New York: Pantheon, 1953), 291-98; Gandolfo (as in n. 4), 199-235; and Clare Robertson, "Annibal Caro as Mythographer," Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes 45 (1982): 160-81. Condivi, 60, reports that Michelangelo "was very fond of Annibal Caro, and he has told me that he regrets not having met him sooner, having MICHELANGELO'S found him much to his liking [s'bfatto molto affezionato d'Annibal Caro, del quale m'ha detto che si duole di non averlo prima praticato, avendolo trovato molto a suo gusto]." 116. Ovid, Metamorphoses11.588. 117. Vasari, vol. 7, 126: "Morfeo 4 chiamato da Ovidio artefice e fingitore di figure: e per6 lo farei in atto di figurare maschere di variati mostacci, ponendone alcune di esse a'piedi." 118. Ovid, Metamorphoses11.672-73, trans. FrankJustus Miller (Cambridge, Mass.: Loeb Classical Library, 1984), 167. 119. It is tempting to credit Michelangelo as the source of Caro's idea and as the inspiration for Zuccaro's rendering of the House of Sleep. Zuccaro's original study evokes some of the Sogno's compositional elements, suggesting that, perhaps through the agency of Caro, Zuccaro may have had access to the drawing or a copy. Having reached this conclusion independently, I have since discovered that Leuschner (as in n. 111), 213, makes the same observation. The House of Sleep emerged as a popular decorative theme in the later cinquecento, but it has attracted little scholarly attention. As a result, images of the House of Sleep are routinely misidentified, frequently as representations of Selene and Endymion. See, for example, Mogens Nykjaer, "La Villa Farnesina: Identificazione di un motivo ovidiano nella Sala delle Prospettive," Analecta Romana Istituti Danici 21 (1993): 213-18, who recognizes Baldassare Peruzzi's so-called Selene and Endymion as a depiction of the House of Sleep. J.V.G. Mallet, "The Painter of the Coal-Mine Dish," in Italian Renaissance ed. Timothy Wilson (London: British Museum, 1991), 62-73, Pottery, identifies the subject of a majolica plate in the Victoria and Albert Museum as Diana or Selene with Endymion. I believe the plate instead represents the House of Sleep. 120. See Paoletti (as in n. 4), 428; and Saslow, 47, for the identification. 121. Testa. 122. See Winner, who links the convention of depicting the naked soul paired with a more physiognomically accurate rendering of the deceased to the Sogno. 123. Carteggio, vol. 4, no. 1045: "... che non vi possin disporre se non Gherardi et Tornai." Aretino refers to Gherardo Perini and Tommaso de' Cavalieri, objects of Michelangelo's affection. 124. Vasari, vol. 7, 271. 125. Elizabeth Cropper, "The Place of Beauty in the High Renaissance and Its Displacement in the History of Art," in Place and Displacement in the Renaissance, ed. Alvin Vos (Binghamton, N.Y.: Medieval and Renaissance Texts and Studies, 1994), 159-205, relates the Petrarchan poetics of desire to the development of a model of affective beholding that is particularly appropriate for Michelangelo's gift drawings. 126. Two letters survive, dated Jan. 1, 1533, Carteggio,vol. 4, nos. 899, 900; both include the phrase: "Sarebbe lecito dare il nome delle cose che l'uomo dona, a chi le riceve: ma per buon rispecto non si fa in questa." 127. Ficino, 1987 (as in n. 14), 51 (3.3). 128. Ibid., 216 (7.15). 129. For Neoplatonic thought, see Nesca A. Robb, Neoplatonism of the Italian Renaissance (London: George Allen and Unwin, 1935); Kristeller (as in n. 14); and Allen (as in n. 14). For Petrarchan lyric and its conventions, see Carlo Calcaterra, "I1Petrarca e il petrarchismo," in Problemied orientamenti di lingua e letteratura italiana, 3 vols. (Milan: Vallecchi, 1949), vol. 3, 167-73; E. H. Wilkins (as in n. 90); John Charles Nelson, Renaissance Theory of Love: The Context of Giordano Bruno's "Eroicifurori" (New York: Columbia University Press, 1958); Leonard Wilson Forster, The Icy Fire: Five Studies in European Petrarchism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1969); John Freccero, "The Fig Tree and the Laurel: Petrarch's Poetics," Diacritics 5 (1975): 34-40; DREAM 113 and William J. Kennedy, Authorizing Petrarch (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1994). 130. "alcuni o per natura o per uso sono piui apti al parto dell'animo che del corpo, alcuni (e questi sono e pii~) sono piui apti al parto del corpo che dell'animo." Ficino, 1987 (as in n. 14), 159 (6.14). 131. Poetry,no. 260. This sonnet appears on the same sheet as no. 259, cited above for its evocative use of "s'ogni." See n. 77 above for the question of dating. 132. Testa. 133. Poetry, no. 166. 134. The relative position of hand and penis allows for another possible reading: backhanded masturbation rather than an encounter with another person. Amid this sexually graphic imagery, it is possible to read the drinking figure at the lower left of the drawing as suggestive of fellatio. 135. This is a fairly consistent theme in Michelangelo's sonnets. See Poetry, 31-32. 136. "Now both the juice of the grape and the atrabilious temperament are full of breath.... So wine and the atrabilious temperament are similar in nature.... And for this reason wine makes men inclined to love, and Dionysus and Aphrodite are rightly associated with each other; and the melancholic are usually lustful. For sexual excitement is due to breath. The penis proves this, as it quickly increases from small to large by inflation." Aristotle (as in n. 16), 958b. 137. Marsilio Ficino, De vita, ed. and trans. Albano Biondi and Giuliano Pisani (Pordenone: Biblioteca dell'Immagine, 1991), 158. I treat the tradition of sexual metaphors and the gendering of inspiration and creation in Ruvoldt (as in n. 78), chap. 3. 138. Pietro Aretino to Michelangelo, Carteggio,vol. 4, no. 1040: " .. qualchuna de le maraviglie di contitinuo partorite da la divinita che ingravida lo intelletto." 139. The term is most famously employed in the sonnet "Non ha l'ottimo artista alcun concetto," Poetry, no. 151. See also "Amore &un concetto di bellezza," no. 38, and "Passo inanzi a me stesso/con alto e buon concetto," no. 144. For Michelangelo and concetto,see Erwin Panofsky, Idea: A Concept in Art Theory, trans. Joseph J. S. Peake (New York: Harper and Row, Icon Editions, 1968), 115-21; and David Summers, "Form and Gender," New Literary History 24 (1993): 243-71. 140. Condivi, 51: ".. . pieno di concetti, e forza che ogni giorno ne partorisca qualcuno." In addition: "and also the worthy recipient of whatever most divine concetto [degno subietto ancora di qualunche divinissimo concetto]" (20); and "how many beautiful concettimight be born from that divine spirit [ ... quanti bei concetti naschino da quel divino spirito]" (64). 141. Nagel (as in n. 1), 653. 142. Giuseppe Maria Mitelli, Alfabeto in sogno: Esemplareper disegnare (Bologna, n.p.: 1683), fol. 2r: "lo... tutto rilassato in poter del Sonno, fui da quel suo gentil minestro Morfeo circondato con forme e Visioni pertinenti alla nobilissima Arte del Disegno. ..." 143. For the possibility that Goya was aware of Mitelli's image, see Hanna Hohl, "Giuseppe Maria Mitellis Alfabeto in Sogno und Francisco de Goyas Suehio de la raz6n, "in Museum und Kunst: Beitragefur Alfred Hentzen (Hamburg: Hans Christans, n.d.), 109-19. 144. For the development of the Sleep of Reason as the frontispiece to the Caprichos,see Alfonso E. P6rez Sanchez and Eleanor A. Sayre, eds., Goya and the Spirit of Enlightenment (Boston: Little, Brown, 1989), nos. 50-52. 145. Francisco Goya, quoted inJanis A. Tomlinson, Francisco Goyay Lucientes 1746-1828 (London: Phaidon Press, 1994), 142.