ART HISTORY
In the lines commemorating the death of his father
as well as the death of Buonarroto some years before, he
addresses his father saying that he will speak of his dead son first.
To him the poet was drawn by love, to the father by duty. ‘My
brother is painted on my memory but you, father, are sculpted
alive in the middle of my heart.’ I take this wording literally: the
very father, primitive as the stone, dwelt within him, a person to
be instructed, still more to be placated, a persecuting as well as a
persecuted figure, evoking nevertheless a certain pleasurable
passivity in a host who may often have desired to usurp the
mother’s place. Ludovico is so immediately settled in heaven
by the poet that some commentators have divined that
Michelangelo is voicing heresy, that is to say, the denial of purgatory. ‘In heaven’, he concludes, ‘the holy love of father and son
will grow. . . . ’
Thereafter he turned even more to religion, to a
father embroiled not only with images of God but with those of
the Saviour towards whom the last poems attest a deepening
passive attitude. On the other hand, the death of his father seems
to have released the full hatred of tyrants in his native land to
which he never returned.
It is part of my view that I assume the pressure (upon us all) of
some such once-corporeal object which Michelangelo carried
about with him, a figure he wooed, pacified, imitated, nursed,
even while the host performed similar conjuring tricks far more
widely with the materials of the actual world, primarily on
behalf of a maternal object through the sublimation, art. The
broader restorative aim never ousted the narrower: the striking
feature is their combination.
A strong passive, as well as controlling
and restorative, attitude towards the narrower and nearer
image was incorporated into the tensions of his art, whence
there flowers an all-inclusive tortured mastery characteristic of
his figures and of his own ideal self, his own self-mastery. Yet
even the wrapt, furcate agent, God the Father of the Adam ‘history’,
possesses a form and a position in regard to the lower half
of his body which would not be inappropriate to a reclining
Venus. The bisexual congregation of the Sistine vault
proposes a tremendous and overpowering strength: hence the terribilità. |
