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Elyzabeth NagodeItalian Renaissance Art History
Research Paper03/04/12
More Than Meets the EyeThe Latent Argumentative Function of the Colonna Presentation Drawings
Much has been written about the presentation drawings produced
by Michelangelo for Vittoria Colonna between 1538 and 1546. They
share, with the drawings produced for Tomasso de Cavalieri that
preceded them, a style unique in the artist's catalog. Unlike the Cavalieri
drawings, however, the meaning and function ofPieta and Christ on the
Cross is well-established in numerous documents that survive from the
period, including, most significantly correspondence on the subject
between Michelangelo and Colonna herself. What these documents make
clear is that the drawings had a profoundly personal meaning for the
artist as well as the recipient, that they functioned for the former as an
expression of religious devotion, and that they functioned for the latter as
an object of similar devotion. But what these documents also suggest is
that these drawings latently served at least one other function for the
artist as well: to offer a definitive argument against the increasingly
popular public opinion expressed by Colonna about the inherent inability
ofdisegno to affect the same kind of direct emotional response from the
viewer as colore.
Evidence of Michelangelo's intent to defend this approach in the
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drawings made for Colonna can be found in the style of their execution.
According to Vasari, the artist could draw and compose in a wide range of
styles, making simple designs that conformed to the tastes of craftsmen
like Il Menighella and even drawing badly to win a simple bet.1 The
majority of Michelangelo's drawings were made for his own use,
fragmentary, and unfinished. The style he adopted for their execution
ranged from the clear, dramatic, precise, and detailed rendering of the
figure studies completed for the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel (fig. 1), to
the very loose and largely referential line work through which he worked
out the majority of his initial compositions (fig. 2). The drawings he made
as gifts, on the other hand, were organized narrative compositions done
in a distinct soft sfumato style with a carefully crafted colorito or finish.2
The two extant drawings done for Colonna, Pieta (fig. 3) and Christ on the
Cross (fig. 4), like the Tityus, The Fall of Phaeton, Ganymede, and Il
Sogno (figs. 5, 6, 7, and 8 respectively) created earlier for Tomasso de
Cavalieri, are clearly executed in this style. The figure work in all of these
drawings, while varying in their degree of muscular emphasis, also
displays that highly descriptive language of gesture characteristic of
Michelangelo's handling of the human form:3 the inspirational twisting
upward impulse of Colonna's Christ figure on the cross finding its
1 Giorgio Vassari, Lives of the Most Eminent Painters, Sculptors and Architects.Translated by Gaston Du C. de Vere. 1912-1915.http://www.fordham.edu/halsall/basis/vasari/vasari26.htm.
2 Una Roman D'Elia, Drawing Christ's Blood: Michelangelo, Vittoria Colonna, and theAesthetics of Reform, 91.
3 Noel Annesley and Michael Hirst, 'Christ and the Woman of Samaria' byMichelangelo, 613.
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synergistic counterpart in the upstretched arm of Cavalieri's Jupiter, for
example, or the seated Virgin's implacably ambiguous gesture of mixed
mourning and jubilation mirroring Ganymede's similarly mixed
expression of pleasure and fear.4
What sets the Colonna drawings stylistically apart from the
drawings produced
4 Angela Brundin, Vittoria Colonna and the Spiritual Poetics of the Italian Reformation,78.
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Study for the Sistine Ceiling (Fig. 1)
Study for The Deposition of Christ (Fig. 2)
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Above: Pieta for Vittoria Colonna & Christ on the Cross for VittoriaColonna (Fig. 3 & 4)
Below: Tityus for Tomasso de Cavalieri (Fig. 5)
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Above: Fall of Phaeton for Tomasso de Cavalieri & Ganymede forTomasso de Cavalieri (Figs. 6 & 7). Below: Il Sogno for Tomasso de
Cavalieri (Fig 8).
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for Cavalieri, however, is their subject matter and manner of
composition. Despite the mythical and/or fantastical scenes depicted in
the Cavalieri drawings, all represent a concrete, human situation
artistically-translated into a plastic group.5 Their compositions are fluid
and dynamic, with each element engaged in advancing the clearly-
defined linear of the visual narrative as a whole.6 They are, in this way, as
much an expression of that High Renaissance aesthetic ideal embodied
by the work of Michelangelo as everything else he produced.
The Colonna drawings are not. While they deal with iconographic
religious subjects that were repeatedly addressed by the artist over the
course of his career, they do so in ways that make them two of the most
decidedly unique pieces in his catalog. The scenes in both are supra-
historical to accepted canon, and conceived as symbolic events
revolving around the relationship that exists between the surrounding
figures, and/orsimply the viewer, to the central figure of Christ.7 Their
composition is uncharacteristically severe, stiff, and symmetrical.8 The
Virgin and cherubim of the Pieta serve, not to forward a linear narrative of
action, but to hold a moment in time through their absorption in worship,
as well as the efforts each is making to hold the dead Christ in the almost
5 Charles de Tolnay, Michelangelo's Pieta Composition for Vittoria Colonna, 62.6 Alexander Nagel, Observations on Michelangelo's Late Pieta Drawings and
Sculptures, 562.7 Charles de Tolnay, Michelangelo's Pieta Composition for Vittoria Colonna, 58, 62;
and Alexander Nagel, Observations on Michelangelo's Late Pieta Drawings andSculptures, 548.
8 Charles de Tolnay, Michelangelo's Pieta Composition for Vittoria Colonna, 62.
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supernatural and clearly cruciform position he's been given by the
artist.9 This same sense of static suspension is heightened when
everything but that cruciform position is abandoned in Christ on the
Cross, rendering singular visual focus on the suffering endured by the
living Christ in the moments before his death that have been made
uncomfortably visceral by the artist's unprecedented mastery of gestural
physical expression.10 The result, in both drawings, is an intentional
artistic elevation of essentially human situations beyond plastic narrative.
They become what Charles de Tolnay describes as hyper-idealized
religious symbols,11 and represent what Alexander Nagel calls a more
overtly archaizing return to the original conception of cult statuary. As
such, both drawings stand in sharp contrast, not only to those produced
for Cavalieri and Michelangelo himself, but to aesthetic ideals the artist
had helped redefine, realize, promote, and would continue to promote for
many years to come through his work with the offices of the Catholic
Church.12
The stylistic and aesthetic differences that make the Colonna
drawings so unique are clearly intentional. As the sheer volume of
correspondence on the design and development of his major public
commissions makes evident, every iconographical detail [of
9 Alexander Nagel, Observations on Michelangelo's Late Pieta Drawings andSculptures, 562.
10Una Roman D'Elia, Drawing Christ's Blood: Michelangelo, Vittoria Colonna, and theAesthetics of Reform, 103.
11Charles de Tolnay, Michelangelo's Pieta Composition for Vittoria Colonna, 62.12Alexander Nagel, Observations on Michelangelo's Late Pieta Drawings and
Sculptures, 563.
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Michelangelo's work] is precisely thought out ... very carefully
elaborated13 The choices of subject matter, composition, medium, finish,
aesthetic, and effect for the Pieta and Christ on the Cross reflect the
same rational disegno approach to their creation as that undertaken for
any other purpose by the artist. The difference lay only in the patron, the
intended audience, and the relationship shared by the two. Michelangelo,
in this case, was his own patron. His intended audience was a woman
with whom he shared an extraordinarily complex relationship, to whom
he looked for spiritual guidance, and for whom he was alleged to have
great affection, admiration, and respect.14 The drawings were intended to
serve as both the embodiment of their shared belief in salvation through
faith alone, as well as an expression of that faith itself.15 Choice of subject
matter, figural and symbolic elements, composition, gesture, medium,
atmosphere, finish, aesthetic, and affect were made by the artist
specifically to please and move the recipient. The repeated references
made in Colonna's poetry and prose to the Virgin with whose mourning
she seems to have personally identified would have made the Pieta an
obvious iconographic choice of subject for the artist's purposes.16 The
positioning of the dead Christ as both central and preeminent is a direct
13Secrets of the Dead, Michelangelo Revealed,PBS video, 11:48-11:5414Alessandro Nova, Vittoria Colonna. Vienna., 424, from Michelangelo, Pontormo and
the Noli me tangere, by Michael Hirst and Gudula Mayr, published in VictoriaColonna, Dichterin und Muse Michelangelos, Vienna (1997).
15Alexander Nagel, Gifts for Michelangelo and Vittoria Colonna, 328-331.16Una Roman d'Elia, Drawing Christ's Blood: Michelangelo, Vittoria Colonna, and the
Aesthetics of Reform, 119.
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reference to tenets of the faith Colonna shared with the artist.17 The
relationship of the Virgin acting as spatial mediator in direct line between
the body and the cross behind her, on the other hand, acknowledges
Colonna's personal belief that Mary had effectively been elevated by her
suffering to the role of coredemptrix.18 This position further allows Mary
to visually serve in the drawing as the cross upon which Michelangelo
more literally hangs the living Christ in the second of his drawings. This
iconographic image, like that of the Pieta, had deep personal significance
for Colonna whose belief that salvation necessitated contemplating
Christ struggling alive on the Cross was not shared by Michelangelo nor
supported by the il Spirituali as a whole.19
What these drawings intentionally fail to fulfill for Colonna,
however, is the desire expressed in her prose prayer on theAve Maria to
be given a Christ all full of blood, with a thousand wounds lacerated on
the Cross.20 Despite their settings within the inherently violent crucifixion
narrative, Michelangelo makes no attempt in either drawing to depict the
blood of Christ's wounds or the tears of the Virgin so graphically
described in the gospels. In both, as Una Roman d'Elia notes in an essay
on the subject, pain is not dramatized as a bloody horror, but meditated
17Alexander Nagel, Observations on Michelangelo's Late Pieta Drawings andSculptures, 560.
18Una Roman d'Elia, Drawing Christ's Blood: Michelangelo, Vittoria Colonna, and theAesthetics of Reform, 121.
19Una Roman d'Elia, Drawing Christ's Blood: Michelangelo, Vittoria Colonna, and theAesthetics of Reform, 108-111.
20Ibid, 122, quoting Paolo Simoncelli, Evangelismo italiano del Cinquecento: questionereligiosa e nicodemismo politico, Rome (1979), 430431.
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upon as a disembodied notion.21 The artist thus rendered these
moments with a carefully colored but colorless simplicity and softness
that communicates a vulnerable sense of deep personal empathy for the
suffering being endured by his figures through a sublime but visually
precise juxtaposition of their positioning, gesture, and spatial intimacy.22
By doing so, Michelangelo realized, not only the manifest purpose
for which he'd originally made the drawings, but the latent purpose of
demonstrating to Colonna the innate superiority of the disegno approach
over that of the colore in its power to elicit emotion. Colonna uses both
words to comment metaphorically on the religious salvation in her poetry,
associating disegno with the words of Christ and colore with the blood
through which salvation could more directly be obtained.23Disegno is an
abstract and ideal appreciated through sustained intellectual
contemplation; colore a direct experience whose apprehension was
immediate and profoundly moving.24 Most revealing as to Colonna's
opinion on the relative superiority of the two approaches are those
suggestions made repeatedly in her poetry that colore is the ultimate
end and perfect culmination of the incomplete disegno.25
The Pieta and Christ on the Cross, with their subtle but highly-
effective emotional interplay of black on white, assertively defied what
21Ibid, 124.22Ibid, 124.23Ibid, 96.24Una Roman d'Elia, Drawing Christ's Blood: Michelangelo, Vittoria Colonna, and the
Aesthetics of Reform, 97.25Ibid, 98.
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must have seemed to Michelangelo like such a naive understanding of his
skill to woman possessed of Colonna's intellect. Her response to both
drawings was immediate, direct, and deeply personal. In a letter to
Michelangelo she describes one of the drawings as so marvelous that it
surpassed in all ways all my expectations it is most perfect from all
sides and one could not wish more, nor come to wish so much.26 In the
same letter she states her belief that the works Michelangelo produced
for her were realized by virtue of Divine Grace and that she considered
them invested with divine forces of a miraculous nature that brought
comfort to her private devotions.27
That Michelangelo was able to realize both the manifest and latent
intent with the Colonna drawings reveals more, perhaps, about the power
disegno had to offer as an approach to making art that engaged
powerfully, directly, and deeply with viewers both known and anticipated,
as well as those generations removed from its creation. The major
commissions of those who embraced its application with such
breathtaking emotional effect during the High Renaissance continue to
seminally define western ideas of what art is, means, and is supposed to
do. It is little wonder, under the circumstances, that those same principles
when applied to the creation of something as private and heavily-
endowed with personal meaning as the Colonna drawings should have a
26Vittoria Colonna, quoted by Charles de Tolnay, Michelangelo and Vittoria Colonna,in Sixteenth Century Italian Art, 318.
27Charles de Tolnay, Michelangelo and Vittoria Colonna, in Sixteenth Century ItalianArt, 318.
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similar but even greater effect on the single viewer by whom they were
inspired, and for whom they were specifically, if not exclusively intended
to be seen.
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Works Cited
Annesley, Noel and Michael Hirst. 'Christ and the Woman of Samaria' byMichelangelo. The Burlington Magazine, 123 (1981):580+608+610+614
Brundin, Abigail. Vittoria Colonna and the Spiritual Poetics of the ItalianReformation. Burlington: Ashgate Publishing Company, 2008.
D'Elia, Una Roman. Drawing Christ's Blood: Michelangelo, VittoriaColonna, and the Aesthetics of Reform. Renaissance Quarterly, 59(2006): 90-129.
de Tolnay, Charles, Michelangelo and Vittoria Colonna. In SixteenthCentury Italian Art, edited by Michael W. Cole, 306-323. Oxford:Blackwell Publishing, 2006.
de Tolnay, Charles. Michelangelo's Pieta Composition for VittoriaColonna. Record of the Art Museum, Princeton University, 12(1953): 44-62.
Nagel, Alexander. Gifts for Michelangelo and Vittoria Colonna. InSixteenth Century Italian Art, edited by Michael W. Cole, 324-367.Oxford: Blackwell Publishing, 2006.
Nagel, Alexander. Observations on Michelangelo's Late Pieta Drawingsand Sculptures.Zeitschrift fur Kunstgeschichte, 59 (1996): 548-572.
Nova, Alessandro. Vittoria Colonna. Vienna. The Burlington Magazine,139 (1997): 423-425.
Secrets of the Dead. Michelangelo Revealed. PBS video, 52:32. May 13,2009. http://www.pbs.org/wnet/secrets/episodes/michelangelo-revealed/watch-the-full-episode/226/
Vasari, Giorgio. Lives of the Most Eminent Painters, Sculptors andArchitects.Translated by Gaston Du C. de Vere. 1912-1915.Accessed February 26, 2012.http://www.fordham.edu/halsall/basis/vasari/vasari26.htm