Michelangelo

A Rage to Create

by Mark Daniel Cohen

Michelangelo, Vasari, and Their Contemporaries: Drawings from the Uffizi

The Morgan Library & Museum, New York, January 25 – April 20, 2008

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Published in Hyperion: On the Future of Aesthetics, a web publication of The Nietzsche Circle: www.nietzschecircle.com, June 2008. Copyright © 2008 Mark Daniel Cohen and The Nietzsche Circle. All essays, interviews, and reviews are shared copyright between author(s) and The Nietzsche Circle. All rights reserved. Please contact editors for any concerns or for usage rights.

Page I

. . . the stern ethics which sparkle on his chisel-edge . . .

—Emerson

Let every man who is here understand this well: design, which by another name is called drawing, and consists of it, is the fount and body of painting and sculpture and of architecture and of every other kind of painting, and the root of all sciences. Let whoever may have attained to so much as to have the power of drawing know that he holds a great treasure; he will be able to make figures higher than any tower, either in colours or carved from the block, and he will not be able to find a wall or enclosure which does not appear circumscribed and small to his brave imagination.

—Michelangelo

Energy is Eternal Delight

—William Blake

I

One might read Shakespeare; one might listen to Bach; one might do battle with Einstein, or with David Hilbert and G. H. Hardy. One might spend one’s life doing it. Or, one might look at Michelangelo.

Lists are by definition assemblies of comparables, and—ideally and in the sense in which their elements are comparable—their elements are incomparable to all else. Those names that accompany Michelangelo’s by a principle of appropriateness, by a decorum—and there are others to be added, but not an enormity—are incomparable in the sense that they hold nothing in common with anyone off their roster.

The decorum is genius, and it is the ultimate protocol of incomparability. It is the principle of the inhuman—or if one likes, the uncanny—for it has nothing in common with any of the defining characteristics of the human. One could well think that such as Michelangelo, Leonardo, and Beethoven do what others are capable of, only better, immeasurably better, but an element is omitted from the formula, the result is a mere compound, and the quiddity has been missed. There is more to this than a difference of degree so extreme that it amounts to a difference in kind. There is something further, something of the essence without which nothing of genius would appear to be genius and would indicate the essential nature of genius. There is something beyond these considerations that is unlike all else.

The physicist Freeman Dyson recently spoke to the matter in attempting to describe the distinguishing characteristic of Einstein’s work.

I don’t know how to describe it except to say, “that’s genius.” An ordinary person who is also a great scientist, he’s much cleverer than we are but still does things in roughly the same way. A genius does things totally differently, and that’s what was characteristic of Einstein. He just was profoundly original. It’s just like asking what was special about Mozart. You can’t describe it. All you can do is just listen.

Genius does not solve problems, it does not answer questions, it does not devise ideas, for problems are mere symptoms, questions are simply mice, and ideas are only splinters. Genius knows nothing of these fragments, these piecemeals. Its curiosity is global, its grasp is comprehensive, its reach unimpeded by self-restraint, by self-doubt, by self-perpetuating inability. It does not address—it steps back and transforms. It does not inch; it hurtles. It takes every opportunity for discovery as an impetus to reconceive the world—as the chance to begin again. It takes all it receives of past advances as material for a completely new conception, as moments of insight that require a return to zero in order to deliver their promise. Genius deals only in axioms, never in theorems. It accepts nothing that was seen before, and uses everything that was previously known. It is intrinsically universal, for it thinks only in terms of the universe. Which is to say there is a sense in which genius creates, and it creates always in works of art, for, regardless of its field of endeavor, it deals only in comprehensive conceptions. Its works are worlds unto themselves—they are complete and self-contained acts of imagination.

And so, genius is in its nature original; its defining characteristic is to be unlike. It continues no one’s work, except to employ its antecedents to idiosyncratic purposes, for its vision and its means are thoroughly its own, and its nature is alien. It is a sweep of the back of the hand across all that precedes it, a brusque dismissal of the inevitable folly of guesswork, make-do propositions, and bad stabs.

Adrian Stokes recounted the characterization by Donato Giannotti of Michelangelo’s invitations to company:

Donato Giannotti, the respected associate of both del Ricci and of Michelangelo, described in his two dialogues about Dante how that at the end of their discussions these close friends were unable to persuade Michelangelo to eat with them. He excuses himself on the grounds that he is more susceptible than anyone else of any time: on every occasion that he is among those who are skillful, who know how to do or say something out of the ordinary he is possessed by them, indeed robbed by them (et me gli do in maniere in preda): he is no more himself: not only the present company but anyone else at the table would separate him from a part of himself; and he wants to find and enjoy himself: it is not his trade to have much delight and entertainment: what he needs to do is to think about death: that is the only subject for thought which helps us to know ourselves, which may keep ourselves united in ourselves and save us from being dispersed and despoiled by relations, friends, geniuses, ambition, avarice, etc., etc.

Genius takes no companions, even when it desires them—it has no choice but to renege human society. It holds no compacts but with the widing perimeters of its wonderment, caught perpetually gazing at its inner suns, and the electric shocks by which it tempers its resolve and is recalled to its ambition. Genius thirsts for no ease and takes no rewards in rest. It has no investment in happiness, for the tirelessness of its dedication is to the final degree of fulfillment: self-completion. It seeks only to become what it is.

It is an exploding star, the spirit of thought. And genius fires from its center like solar flares, leaving immeasurable distances between itself and the surface lit comfortably tepid by the ordinary of inspirations. But as the radii course along their vectors, they gather monumental distances. They fan and spread like fingers stretching out into the midnight of the void, boosting the circumference along which they lie, and those possessed of genius are often at greater leagues from each other than they are from those they have left behind. And the further they progress, the more the growth of the expanses that separate them accelerates, the more rapidly they depart from the world, and from each other.

Even so, they are as like as they are unlike, for in everything but the material of their visions—in which each is distinct—in all but the universe in which each continually wraps himself, they are the stamps of each other. They partake of a single fate, which bears nothing of the common lot. And unknown as each ultimately is to the other, they have an instinct: that their brothers and sisters are not to be located among the normal of the species. The species is not theirs. They are of each other alone.

And this fact compels us to reconsider the categories of our own orientations. Our interests in art, or in science, or in philosophy—the three fields to which, throughout the ages, genius traditionally flocks—are ignorant, sentimental, and self-congratulatory formulations. For the products of the imagination in their calibers do not group in that fashion. Michelangelo has more in common with Einstein and Newton, with Faraday and Maxwell, with Plato and Nietzsche, than he has with Bandinelli, Monet, and Rodin, with whom he shares nothing. Bach has more in common with Spinoza than he has with Gershwin, with whom he shares nothing. To consider Michelangelo an artist is to do ourselves the compliment of implying he is engaged in that in which we can accomplish something, but it is not so. In the truth of it, there is no point at which his orbit and ours intersect. We gaze upon his achievement as upon a nebula.

Genius groups with genius, within the list of incomparables. The otherwise artists, and scientists, philosophers, craftspersons, and on, may belong with each other by trade, but they do not belong with such as these. And we may think that our interests in these crafts—our fascinations for the sake of their transportive potential, their transformative capabilities, their magic and possibilities for invoking sudden realization and ruminative recognitions—are calibrated to the component parts of the genius effect and not the capacities of the practices its occasion partakes. It may well be that it is genius that takes us, and not art, for if the extraordinary is the matter, it is genius that is the essential category, and not art.

This is a matter much to the moment, as art over the past several decades has, clearly and by intention, become democratized. But genius is not so distributable; it does not divide, it does not rehabilitate its allotment. It will be where it will be found, and if “art” is to be re-distributed among all who wish to practice it according to the mere impulse to practice it, if one warrants the legitimacy of the designation by self-nomination, then the reason of its attraction to others will be fled elsewhere. For the magic is not pinned to the business card, and the nomination, regardless of what was named, was never the point, but the authenticity, and the effect. The more people who can legitimately claim to be making “art,” the less we have reason to care, and if the power to see right through was the principle of the attraction, then all along, it was genius we cared for. Art was merely one of the repositories where we once reliably found it, and nothing more, and all of aesthetics was the analysis, more accurately, of power of mind, and the Dionysian is what genius does.

All of which is why there is a clear and inevitable imbalance in “Michelangelo, Vasari, and Their Contemporaries: Drawings from the Uffizi.” The exhibition contained two drawings by Michelangelo and nearly 80 drawings by other Florentine artists of the late Italian Renaissance, all coming from the collection of the Uffizi Gallery. The principal curatorial intent was to display drawings by the artists who worked on the redecoration of the Palazzo Vecchio under Cosimo I de’ Medici when Cosimo moved his residence from the traditional Medici family home to the governmental headquarters of Florence, a move intended to affirm his absolute political power. The project of restoration of the Palazzo Vecchio was begun in 1555 under the direction of Giorgio Vasari, and the curatorial contention here was that drawing—disegno—was central to the planning of the renewal of the palace.

However, the curatorial contention can be said to have been followed loosely at best. There were drawings that relate directly to the frescos created in the redecoration of the palazzo, but frequently the artists who were involved in the restoration project were represented by drawings that had nothing to do with their works in the palazzo. Furthermore, the artists who worked on the redesigned palazzo constituted only one of three groups in the exhibition. The pertinent artists were presented as the second group, “Vasari and His Collaborators,” which included Alessandro Allori, Benardo Buontalenti, Giovanni Stradanus, Santi di Tito, and Giovan Battista Naldini. The range of material was expanded by a first group—“The Great Masters,” the predecessors of Vasari’s artists, which included Michelangelo (who never would have worked for Cosimo I for he so loathed Cosimo that he moved permanently to Rome once Cosimo took power), Andrea del Sarto, Pontormo, Rosso Fiorentino, Francesco Salviati, and Bronzino—and a third group—“The Painters of the Studiolo,” those who worked for the heir of Cosimo I, which included such late Mannerist artists as Girolamo Macchietti, Maso da San Friano, and Poppi.

It is of course impossible to estimate the curatorial contention from the material presented. There was no comparison, or possibility of comparison, of the disegno with the frescos to which they contributed, and in more cases than not, the drawings were not those that made the contribution, for in many cases, the artists were not those who made the contributions. It is argued in the press materials that all the artists in the exhibition contributed works to the Palazzo Vecchio, at one time or another, which is a somewhat different contention from the stated purpose.

What one found, ultimately, was an exhibition of late Italian drawings, representing a significant number of the Florentine masters of the period through drawings of a kind that rarely come to this country, and it would be absurd to say that is not enough. The mere presence of two drawings by Michelangelo significantly increased the percentage of works in this hemisphere by the ultimate master of the art. Besides, these concerns are scholarly ones, and they are fair enough, but they are categorically different from the aesthetic concerns that are under consideration here. What one had was what one saw: a large collection of works from one of the most extraordinary periods in art, executed by some of the most impressive artists to have worked in the field, executed in the medium in which the artist is most exposed and revealed, in which the artist is most reliant on innate ability and on the most personal technique, in which the artist simply “thinks.” And one was thereby confronted by the most essential of aesthetic questions: among a display of sheer excellence, from one of the most “excellent” places and periods in art, one is compelled to consider, what is excellence worth? Aside from the pure dazzlement, what is accomplished? What does the genius of the excellent do?

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