Michelangelo

A Rage to Create

Page III

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A drawing is a thought, or rather, the beginning of a line of thinking—every thought is the beginning of a new line of thinking, for one who thinks well enough—and the sheer power of Michelangelo’s manner, of his style, is freighted with the capabilities of the reconceptualization of the world, with the capacity of genius. His style is the mark of, and the means by which, he saw a new vision, a new meaning to things: an alteration of all we know, or more precisely, an alteration of the most essential things we know, those things by which we understand all else.

It is often the case with genius, and perhaps reflective of something deep in the fate of genius in the world, to be best appreciated and suddenly illuminated by its opponents, by plaintiff observations that condemn the very thing they should celebrate—to be revealed by that which sees it least well. Such is the case with Michelangelo, through a remarkably incisive notation made by probably the best mind to appreciate him worst: that of John Ruskin.

In his book Mornings in Florence, in discussing the significances of meaning in the methods of rendering drapery in Renaissance painting, Ruskin observes in an aside: “The relation of the two modes of composition was lost by Michel Angelo, who thought to express spirit by making flesh colossal.” (section 115) There is a tone of chortling mockery clearly written into the phrasing. Obviously, the observation is intended as a rank criticism, as if the proposition were self-evidently absurd. And even those who do not share Ruskin’s dismissive estimation of Michelangelo can acknowledge that he has something of a point—at the least, he has his facts straight. Massiveness and sheer strength of physicality are evidently Michelangelo’s visual cues for spiritual presence. And the code is as distinctly his as Ruskin implicitly accuses it of being.

Considering Ruskin’s particular love of Giotto and the general trend of coding in much Renaissance fresco painting, one can recognize and appreciate Ruskin’s taste. His was a preference for delicacy of expression, in bodily gesture and face, the incisive presentation of inner life through the sheer humanness of the appearance and what one might call a radiance of personality in the figure. One sees in the Sistine Chapel most evidently the contrast of approach between what Ruskin admired in early Renaissance painting and what he loathed in Michelangelo. Along the lower walls, one can find the Ruskin formula in full flourish in frescos by Perugino and Pinturicchio and Botticelli. Examine two by the entryway in particular—Temptations of Christ and the Purification of the Leper, and the Baptism of Christ—and compare them to the colossal Christ figure nearby in the Last Judgment. The opposition of means in the styles and devices for response is obvious. There is a bluntness and almost a brutishness to the Michelangelo Christ; the figures, of Christ and all, in the other frescos comparatively seem to glow with a spirituality and a preternatural gentleness—with a physical grace.

Yet, the response, the Ruskin seeing, is but momentary, and highly conventional. That the delicacy of rendering, in style and depiction, is signatory of spirituality is a coding of implication as arbitrary as is the gross physicality of Michelangelo. The essential fact is that there is no natural coding for the rendering of spirituality through physical expression. The essential fact, more precisely, is that “natural coding”—a concept upon which Ruskin’s criticism of Michelangelo completely depends—is a contradiction in terms: no coding is natural; it is all by definition conventional. Any method used will be metaphoric, and arbitrary, because the project at issue is to render the invisible through the language of the visible. The convention at the heart of the visual language of those who preceded Michelangelo is obvious: the spiritual is signified by a reduction and a distancing of the physical. That is the reason for the feel of the physical delicacy, one might even say the effeminacy, of the figures; they are to be seen as moving their entire bodies with a lightness of hand. That is also the reason for the preference for thin figures, especially among the holy personages. They lack any grossness of the physical, any feel of beefiness. The balance has shifted in such figures, away from the physical and, thus it is presumed, more toward the spiritual. The operative principle then becomes observable: the metaphysical abhors a vacuum—between the opposites of flesh and spirit, the less of one, the more inevitably there must be of the other.

One might therefore accuse such conventions of simple oppositional thinking, of treating the mystery of spirituality through the oversimplification of merely contrasting the physical with the spiritual. But the accusation would not be fair, not because the simple opposition isn’t engaged—it is—but because the simple opposition lies at the heart of the matter, it is the very gist of what is at issue. Spirituality is a concern, a pressing concern, for Schopenhauer’s reason: we are all going to die. When one dies, the body deteriorates and dissolves. It is demolished. The issue, and the only reason anyone should, or does, so deeply care over the spirit, is whether there is such a thing as an enduring soul that is not the body, that has no part in and may preserve and prevail after the body’s destruction. If one refuses to oppose the spirit to the body, one is just being coy about the reason the questions of spirituality are asked, are worth asking, at all.

Thus the coding of reducing physicality to imply spirituality is natural enough. And the formula has been carried through in many other arenas. There was, at the end of the nineteenth century, the extreme taste for seeing consumption—tuberculosis—as the outward sign of the artistic temperament. In essence, emaciation was the mark of being not of this world. The silliness in this is self-evident, but it is the silliness of the extremity, the exacerbation, not of the essential idea.

More than that, it is the silliness of literal-mindedness, as if to be truly emaciated meant to be truly spiritual. The equation—spirit equals drained physicality—is a question of the valency of metaphor, not natural fact. Natural as it may be, it remains that all coding is arbitrary, it can be used in any way one can make effective, but it must be used consistently. That is where one finds the flaw in the Ruskin formula, for it is inconsistent: it takes the lack of physicality as metaphoric, but the physicality itself as literal. Physicality is a sign of physicality, but lack of physicality is a sign of something other than simple lack of physicality. With Michelangelo, one finds the act of thoroughness. And it is the typical gesture of genius: the discovery, or simple assumption, that everything one has at one’s disposal is metaphor, nothing is to be intended literally, all literal-mindedness has been left behind. For Ruskin’s accusation is right. For Michelangelo, colossal flesh is the signature of the spiritual. But the implied absurdity is no absurdity. With all coding arbitrary, physicality as signal for spirituality is as apt as any formula, the relationship between vehicle and tenor cannot be prescribed and is proscribed by nothing other than efficacy. Ruskin’s error is to see the rendered flesh as, well, flesh, and so ask: how can it mean spirit? And beyond denying Michelangelo the prerogative of specifying his own symbolisms, Ruskin abrogates the central trope of religious art, even as he distinguishes between the better and worse of the modes. For this wide metaphor is built into the very nature of religious painting, not to say religion itself, and here is also demonstrated the simplicity of genius. Essentially in religious painting, human figures, physical figures, are used to express the spiritual. Michelangelo simply explodes the formula for the scale of his ambitions. His approach is an admission that religious painting is the use of rendered physical figures to express spiritual states; that is the heart of the business. That one aspect of physicality (muscles) has been traded on another aspect (delicate and often inwardly turned expression) hardly adds a degree of absurdity, or rather is no more absurd than is religion in its very premise and promise. But the quality of the spiritual has been changed.

In fact, Ruskin, whether he knew or not, was insisting on a specific variant of the physical metaphor—more precisely, of the subjectivity of the physical being, as gestured by the figure—for there is at stake a significant difference of import. His preference is implicit in the reduction of physicality: spirituality is like contemplation. In such paintings, perhaps as often as not, Christ and Mary cast their gazes downward, nearly lost in thought. Actions are never extreme; figures are always balanced, and the most religiously significant figures are generally those closest to passive. The religious figure almost always thinks more than it acts. The model for this is clearly the monk, but the metaphor is natural and old and other models are many: the Greek peripatetic philosopher, the Buddha, the yogi, the ascetic anywhere in the world. It is likely that this is most people’s conception of spirituality: it is something like rumination. Or, it is something like prayer.

Michelangelo’s metaphor is a different one, accounting for the difference in visual coding. It is likely different from that of most people, which may be more of an answer to why most people are not Michelangelo than most people would like to admit. Spirituality is not like contemplation; it is like will power. Spirituality is an active force, it is a dynamic principle, not a principle of duration, endurance, survival, promise of the future beyond the evident loss of this existence, but an existence of action, generation, exercised strength—a principle of power and creation, and destruction.

In his work, in every act of his mature work—which may be considered everything after the Vatican Pietà, everything commencing with the David—Michelangelo committed his reconceptualization of the world, or, for his time and place, of the fundamental and defining element of the world and of life: he redefined the nature of the spirit. What had been a permanence beyond time, and beyond the end of time, becomes power—an active force that is the essence of things, of us, of all, that is the truth behind appearance, that is the implicit promise not of timelessness but of the eternal, for the spirit is not beyond time but is time itself. It is the action of change, of progression, of that which follows: of implication.

Consider God on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel: he is never still, he is violently in motion, constantly in action. Being spiritual, he acts, and the inner quality of action is like spirituality. It is the vision of a sculptor, of one who smashes stone, not an artist who gently daubs paint. God carves the world. An inner strength—not so much character, as in Giotto, but power—is his chisel.

And consider further: only Michelangelo had the nerve, the spirit, to draw God, to confront God with his art. No others come to memory, not before or since. Not the son of God, but God—the God of the Old Testament, of the Torah, the God from whom a son would have come, without whom there could be no son—the God presumed. This is the God, not of judgment, or of forgiveness, but of power—creative power, destructive power. Others confronted judgment—judgment enacted or judgment suspended, revoked—for it is the same. The denial of the thought implies and imports the thought, for the sake of its meaningful revocation—judgment suspended is still judgment, only suspended. But Michelangelo confronted, not judgment revoked, but pure potency. This is something else.

“It is a fearful thing to fall into the hands of the living God”—a statement so odd to find in the New Testament, it has such an Old Testament caliber about it. That is the vision of God not as a judge and not as merciful, but as a nuclear furnace, as an exploding star, as galaxies in collision. That is God as the power that engines the universe: God as creator. That is what Michelangelo shows us; that is his art. And with the corpse now buried in Santa Croce, with the biographical fact of him 500 years gone and immaterial—with the name signifying, as it does with all artists, the body of work and not the body in the ground, the corpus and not the corpse—that is what his name now means. Look it up in the lexicon of the imagination—Michelangelo: (n) sheer power; sheer destructive force; sheer creative impulse. Look it up: Michelangelo: (v).

That verb is a name: for a thunderous elegance, a furious grandeur, a monumentality of rage. Nothing before or since ever burned so hot. In much of his work, you can see it in the eyes—in the terribilité, the look in the eyes of the David, which can be found in the eyes of Moses, of God on the ceiling, of Il Cristo, of Brutus, the human of them captured in the moment before action, in the incipience of the dynamic, and so frequently looking to the left, to the sinister.

It is in the eyes of them all, for the power is not just the principle of the initial creation. It is not just a principle of cosmogony, of the proposition by which the universe came into being, but of its being, of its continuity, in specifically the spiritual sense, meaning in the sense in which, as a foundational proposition and a central (explanatory) truth, we have intuitive insight into the heart of the very physics of things itself—by thinking, we see into that which we are not, for in truth, we are, and in the end, that physics is not physical. Spirituality is, in essence, the a priori synthetic—the discovery of truths without investigation of the external world, solely by mental inquiry—the only one we know other than mathematics, geometry, the principle of formal integrity. The power, the terribilité, is mind, and it is the truth of things universally, in all instances—it is the truth of us, what we are behind the mere appearance of being ourselves. The terrible power, power so great it can account for the creation of an entire universe, the power Michelangelo knows spirit to be, is not merely the first Creation—it is creation per se, the constant making and unmaking of all things, it is our power, our rage to create, and our rage to destroy. We are the making and unmaking, the germination and immolation of all things, of ourselves.

One might easily take that power to be the darkness, the sinister, the tearing away at the web of the human fabric, for genius has no consort but itself, and by its very nature must turn from the crowd, and people take their umbrage there, and it is now long known that the average loath excellence—they see in it a personal rebuke. But, more than that, we live now in the days of belief in weakness. It is the faith of the time, perhaps the only faith any longer in practice: that the agreement with what is, placidity in the face of presence—“acceptance” regardless of what is being accepted—will be our salvation, as if the lack of power will keep us safe, will put us at peace, will bring us to agreement and cooperation, will deliver us from the physics of energy consumption, from the consequences of gluttony, of rampant consumerism, of self-indulgence, of the wasting of resources that has been caused by nothing other than the wasting of life on petty pleasures: as if passivity were the same as peace and prostration the same as redemption; as if peace, in itself, were an inherent good. We live in an age of mutual dependency, thinking it will make us free of our fears rather than maximizing them. We listen to preachers who tell us it will, and promise to deliver it to us—if elected, if given power, the power that we are remiss to adopt. It is a logic of exhaustion, a logic of slavery, a failure to acquire the maturity of self-direction—a fundamental diffidence, a general collapse of moral will.

But we should know better, because we have been told better. We’ve been told by the few who knew, but we’ve been told time and again.

Energy is Eternal Delight
—William Blake

Power is not the dismay and it is not tragic—it is disruption, the stone in the pool of the stagnant. It is energy, vigor, the surge of enthusiasm, the erupting force of life—the willingness to live, the willfulness to live, the insistence of existence. It is the indignation at the wrong, the refusal of the unacceptable, and it is the rage to be free.

Wilhelm Worringer, in Abstraction and Empathy, speaking of Michelangelo’s slaves:

In contradistinction to this, with Michelangelo the compactness of matter is rendered perceptible not from without, but from within. In his case the strictly terminal limits of matter are not factual but imaginary, yet we are nonetheless clearly conscious of them. We cannot touch them, but we feel them with their cubic compactness. For it is only under the invisible pressure of this cubic compactness that the dynamism of Michelangelo’s formal language acquires its superhuman grandeur. Within a closed cubic space a maximum of movement; here we have one of the formulas of Michelangelo’s art. This formula comes alive for us when we recall the incubus, the oppressive dream, that lies over all these figures, the tormented, impotent desire to tear oneself free, which lifts every creation of Michelangelo’s spirit into a realm of profound and gigantic tragedy. Thus whereas the compactness of matter is physically tangible in the archaic figure, with Michelangelo we feel only the invisible cubic form in which his figures pursue their existence. The goal is the same in both, however, namely to approximate the representation to material individuality and closed unity.

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