Hollow Men: Writing, Objects, and Public Image in Renaissance Italy

Notes

Notes introduction 1. “Di qui a mille anni nessuno non ne potea dar cognitione che fossero altrimenti.” Letter of Niccolo Martelli, July 1544, quoted in John Pope-Hennessy, Italian High Renaissance and Baroque Sculpture (London: Phaidon, 1970), 336. 2. See Hans Belting, Likeness and Presence: A History of the Image before the Era of Art, trans. Edmund Jephcott (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994). Recent art history criticism suggests that the “presence” of the art object continues today. W. J. T. Mitchell argues for a reconciliation of the ontological and visual studies approaches, insofar as objects are animated by their association with viewers; see What Do Pictures Want? The Lives and Loves of Images (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005). Such arguments are further complicated by Alexander Nagel and Christopher S. Wood, who perceive a visible tension between “substitutional” (medieval) and “authorial” (modern) notions of the artwork from the fifteenth to the early sixteenth century; see Anachronic Renaissance (New York: Zone, 2010). 3. Stephen Campbell, “‘Fare una cosa Morta Parer Viva’: Michelangelo, Rosso, and the (Un)Divinity of Art,” Art Bulletin 84, no. 4 (2002): 596–620. 4. Campbell, “(Un)Divinity,” 609–10. See also Charles Dempsey, Inventing the Renaissance Putto (Chapel Hill, N.C.: University of North Carolina Press, 2001), 190–231, for the larva as the false dream of Medici glory. 5. The lack of inscriptions—originally planned but never included—renders the identification of the statues problematic. See Richard C. Trexler, “True Light Shining: vs. Obscurantism in the Study of Michelangelo’s New Sacristy,” Artibus et Historiae 21, no. 42 (2000): 101–17. 6. See Thomas Greene’s foundational article, “The Flexibility of the Self in Renaissance Literature,” in The Disciplines of Criticism, ed. Peter Demetz, Thomas Notes 296 Greene, and Lowry Nelson Jr. (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1968), 241– 64; see also The Light in Troy: Imitation and Discovery in Renaissance Poetry (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1982); Terence Cave, “The Mimesis of Reading in the Renaissance,” in Mimesis: Mirror to Method, ed. John D. Lyons and Stephen G. Nichols Jr (Hanover, N.H.: University Press of New England, 1982) 148–65; Timothy Hampton, Writing from History: The Rhetoric of Exemplarity in Renaissance Literature (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1990); and David Quint, “‘Alexander the Pig’: Shakespeare on History and Poetry,” Boundary  10, no. 3 (1982): 49–67. 7. John Martin, “Inventing Sincerity, Refashioning Prudence: The Discovery of the Individual in Renaissance Europe,” American Historical Review 102, no. 5 (1997): 1309–42. 8. François Rigolot, “Problematizing Renaissance Exemplarity: The Inward Turn of Dialogue from Petrarch to Montaigne,” in Printed Voices: The Renaissance Culture of Dialogue, ed. Dorothea Heitsch and Jean-François Vallé (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2004), 5. While Rigolot points to the difficulty in establishing a clear trajectory of this failure, I hope to offer some clarity by expanding the discussion from literature into the visual arts. 9. On performance and interiority, see Harry Berger Jr., Fictions of the Pose (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2000), as well as Chapter 1 of this book. For an attempt to suspend the “pre-given voluntarist subject” so as to adhere to Judith Butler’s notion of performativity, see Catherine Bates, Masculinity, Gender and Identity in the English Renaissance Lyric (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007). I do not emulate Bates as the texts I am working with presuppose a masculine author-narrator who chooses to write—a figure that works to constitute itself as an authoritative, unified masculine subject. 10. William Egginton, How the World Became a Stage: Presence, Theatricality, and the Question of Modernity (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2003). Egginton uses theater as the paradigmatic case of the emergence of “theatrical” subjectivity in all the visual arts. 11. I thank Stuart Lingo for pointing out the staring eyes beneath the mask. 12. See Nagel and Wood, Anachronic Renaissance, and “Toward a New Model of Renaissance Anachronism,” Art Bulletin 87.3 (2005), 403–15. See also the responses in the same issue by Charles Dempsey, “Historia and Anachronism in Renaissance Art,” 416–21; Michael Cole, “Nihil sub Sole Novum,” 421–24; Claire Farago, “Time Out of Joint,” 424–29; and Nagel and Wood, “The Authors Reply,” 429–32. For the changing status of the image, see also Georges DidiHuberman , Fra Angelico: Dissemblance and Figuration, trans. Jane Marie Todd (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995). 13. Nagel and Wood, “Reply,” 429; Anachronic Renaissance, 32–34; their distinction between “document” and “nondocumentary texts...