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

208 LETTERS IN CANADA 2000 Alexander Nagel. Michelangelo and the Reform of Art Cambridge University Press. xvi, 304. US $75.00 Historicism of one kind or another has been all the rage among literary critics over the last half-generation. Despite some drift in the direction of the same kind of semiotic analysis that accompanied the development of literary historicism, the concept has not resonated as strongly among art historians. Alexander Nagel=s book therefore marks something of a departure, for in it we get a fully historicized interpretation of Michelangelo as artist within the context of his understanding both of art history and of his moment in religious history. It is natural that such a historicized reading should itself be grounded in a fully historical understanding of art historical tradition; Nagel finds most inspiration not in his immediate predecessors but in Aby Warburg. Nagel attempts to show how Michelangelo struggled to preserve or better renew the cultic power of images of Christ, especially in the form of entombments and pietàs, by bringing the reader into the action and literally demonstrating how salvation occurred. In formal terms, this meant looking for a way to preserve the power of archaic images while at the same time dramatically transforming their appearance. Thus the appeal of both Christian and classical antiquity to Michelangelo. Nagel extends the work of Bill Wallace on Michelangelo=s frescoes in the Capella Paolina and on the Risen Christ in Domine quo vadis, showing that Michelangelo manipulated perspective in order to draw the viewer into the action, even if that viewer were the pope needing to be reminded of the martyrological basis of his office. Nagel stretches this kind of interpretation further, identifying Michelangelo=s concern with personal (but not affectively unrestrained) religion as the carrier wave of his effort to resolve a crisis in iconography. What was the role of art in religion? Nagel isolates Michelangelo=s effort to answer this question in a moment in time when his solutions coalesced first with humanist reform and then with the evanescent religiosity of the so-called Viterbo circle, only to suffer ultimate failure to reconcile or reform either art or religion. A short review can give very little idea of the richness of Nagel=s argument. Suffice it to say that he contributes a great deal to knocking on the head the interpretation of Michelangelo as lonely (and especially tortured) genius. Instead, Nagel locates Michelangelo=s work in its generic contexts and argues that reform of art and reform of religion were two sides of the same coin for him. We get a fully dialectical interpretation, except that Nagel occasionally gets ahead of himself and telescopes the argument into the conclusion that Michelangelo=s project was ultimately impossible, symbolized by the unfinished and unfinishable Rondanini Pietà. The most important narrowly generic argument Nagel makes is that Michelangelo=s efforts to transform the altar piece from a static to a dynamic image paradoxically contributed greatly to the success of the new, secular easel HUMANITIES 209 painting. On the way to this conclusion, Nagel also argues that Michelangelo disdained painting in oils because of its ability to represent the kind of overly demonstrative religiosity (or more simply, emotional display) Michelangelo loathed. Instead, his religion was perfectly suited to the presentation drawing, a concept Michelangelo developed to a high pitch in his famous pietàs for Vittoria Colonna which embodied his conception of salvation as unrestrained gift. Again paradoxically, this departure fed straight into the commodofication of art. Nagel makes gestures in the direction of broader context, especially in chapter 6 on Michelangelo and Colonna, which appeared earlier in Art Bulletin. In this respect, his work marks a signal advance on Maria Cali=s study of Michelangelo=s religious context, which Nagel (probably quite properly) does not even cite. Nevertheless, it is here that Nagel=s book is weakest. His historicism turns out to be fundamentally formalist. Thus what we still need is work combining the merits of Nagel=s subtle generic analysis with the thick historical context of Massimo Firpo=s recent study of Pontormo. Historians and art historians could usefully talk to each a good deal more than they...