Michelangelo and the Reform of Art by Alexander Nagel (review)

REVIEWS 218 This collection of essays will be very helpful to scholars, particularly in comparative literature, who hope to understand better the complex role of conduct literature within its context. By asking difficult questions which complicate the practice/discourse dichotomy and expand the medieval conduct genre itself, these authors offer thought-provoking ways to view multiple functions of conduct literature and responses from its audiences. NICOLE ARCHAMBEAU, History, UCLA Alexander Nagel, Michelangelo and the Reform of Art (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press 2000) 303 pp., 105 ill. Given the rather harsh criticism that Michelangelo’s masterpiece, the Last Judgment, received for its unorthodox, indecent, and even sacrilegious portrayal of the Second Coming of Christ, it is perhaps surprising to encounter a book whose fundamental tenent is that his art must been seen in the context of his profoundly devout and reformist theological ideas.28 This, however, is precisely Alexander Nagel’s argument in his recent, prize-winning book, Michelangelo and the Reform of Art. Tackling many oft-studied masterpieces in the context of his interpretation of Michelangelo’s personal project to employ a new conception of religious art to enhance devotional experience, Nagel offers a new perspective, or framework, for approaching these works, which include Michelangelo’s Entombment, now in the National Gallery in London, and his late Pietàs. Nagel founds his interpretation on the personal, spiritual life of Michelangelo, including particular insights gleaned from the artist’s poetry and letters, and sets this personal life in the context of the artist’s known involvement with religious reform movements. Nagel asserts that the religious works by Michelangelo discussed in the text may be seen as manifestoes of Michelangelo ’s life-long attempt to render sixteenth-century aesthetic concerns compatible with the religious demands of Christian worship. Perhaps equally audacious is the central role played by Michelangelo’s Entombment in Nagel’s argument. This work, whose attribution to Michelangelo has been much disputed in the last century, is the primary focus of part 1, “History Painting and Cult Image in the Altarpiece.”29 Nagel argues that the Renaissance aesthetic sensibility, which emphasized the importance of naturalism , history, and narrative, conflicted with the devotional purpose of religious images, which functioned more successfully as objects of sustained, devotional attention when their subjects were depicted iconically, ahistorically, and frontally . This latter form of presentation allowed the gaze of the viewer to linger over and be directly and seemingly contemporaneously addressed by the participants in the scene. Tendencies toward naturalism and historical accuracy in the depiction of sacred events, the very artistic tendencies with which Michelangelo was engaged, thus conflicted with the central, theological importance of sacred narratives on altarpieces as not merely, or even most importantly, depictions of historical events, but as sacred events imbued with present and future 28 Nagel, 192, for a description of Pietro Aretino’s criticism of 1545, among others. 29 For a dissenting voice, see James Beck, “Is Michelangelo’s Entombment in the National Gallery Michelangelo’s?” Gazette des Beaux Arts 127, no. 1528–1529 (1996) 181– 198. REVIEWS 219 significance in virtue of their role in salvation. This fundamental, and in the end largely irreconcilable tension between aesthetic development and the traditional function of the religious image is the overarching theme of Nagel’s work. Nagel thus reads Michelangelo’s Entombment as the artist’s attempt to reconcile the conflicting artistic and religious sensibilities of his age. In chapters 1 and 2, Nagel interprets the artist’s unusual composition as crafted so as to suggest that the historical event, i.e., the entombment of Christ, resolves itself into an iconic image akin to the presentations of the body of Christ in the “Man of Sorrows” genre of images. The artist’s aim, in contrast to history or narrative, is to produce an iconic presentation, which he accomplishes by his manipulation of pose and composition, resulting in a frontal portrayal of the dead body of Christ above the altar. Perhaps Nagel could even go further than he does and suggest that Michelangelo’s use of the by-this-time archaizing, frontal address restores a relationship to the viewer that once again endows the sacred historia, which...