“Nothing is in the finest artist's head
That is not held inside a single stone
With surplus, but to this a hand may come
Only where the intelligence has led.”—Michelangelo Buonarroti, “Non ha l’ottimo arista,” in A Documentary History of Art, Volume 2: Michelangelo and the Mannerists: The Baroque & the Eighteenth Century, selected and edited by Elizabeth G. Holt (1958)
That titan of the visual arts, Michelangelo Buonarroti (that's his self-portrait in the image accompanying this post), born on this date in 1475, extended his mastery across painting, sculpture and architecture—and, as you can tell from this portion of one of his sonnets, he wasn’t bad as a poet, either.
In its way, this sonnet is an artistic conceit. He’s addressing a lady and, in particular, hailing “your beauty”, but it all feels pro forma, as if following the fashion of courtly love literature of the time. That would not have been surprising, as the artist is commonly believed to have been homosexual and thus would find it difficult to summon a passion for a woman he couldn’t feel.
What does come through—powerfully—in the sonnet, in the above lines, is the formative instinct of the great artist. Even though the shape of the statue lies waiting to be discovered in the stone, it is only “the intelligence” of the sculptor that extracts it.
The first great art historian, Giorgio Vasari, praised Michelangelo in these terms: “in his own self he triumphs over moderns, ancients, and nature, who could scarcely conceive anything so strange and so difficult that he would not be able, by the force of his most divine intellect and by means of his industry, draughtsmanship, art, judgment and grace, to excel it by a great measure.”
Nevertheless, I think it is in sculpture, above all else, where Michelangelo exercised his intelligence the most—perhaps, oddly enough, because it’s the most tactile of the arts to which he turned his hand. When Ernest Hemingway’s posthumous novel Islands in the Stream was adapted to film, it was decided to convert his hero, Thomas Hudson, from painter to sculptor, partly because of the same sense.
Michelangelo would have understood this decision, as well as Papa’s ferocious work ethic. He would not have understood Hemingway’s instinct to destroy himself.
That is not held inside a single stone
With surplus, but to this a hand may come
Only where the intelligence has led.”—Michelangelo Buonarroti, “Non ha l’ottimo arista,” in A Documentary History of Art, Volume 2: Michelangelo and the Mannerists: The Baroque & the Eighteenth Century, selected and edited by Elizabeth G. Holt (1958)
That titan of the visual arts, Michelangelo Buonarroti (that's his self-portrait in the image accompanying this post), born on this date in 1475, extended his mastery across painting, sculpture and architecture—and, as you can tell from this portion of one of his sonnets, he wasn’t bad as a poet, either.
In its way, this sonnet is an artistic conceit. He’s addressing a lady and, in particular, hailing “your beauty”, but it all feels pro forma, as if following the fashion of courtly love literature of the time. That would not have been surprising, as the artist is commonly believed to have been homosexual and thus would find it difficult to summon a passion for a woman he couldn’t feel.
What does come through—powerfully—in the sonnet, in the above lines, is the formative instinct of the great artist. Even though the shape of the statue lies waiting to be discovered in the stone, it is only “the intelligence” of the sculptor that extracts it.
The first great art historian, Giorgio Vasari, praised Michelangelo in these terms: “in his own self he triumphs over moderns, ancients, and nature, who could scarcely conceive anything so strange and so difficult that he would not be able, by the force of his most divine intellect and by means of his industry, draughtsmanship, art, judgment and grace, to excel it by a great measure.”
Nevertheless, I think it is in sculpture, above all else, where Michelangelo exercised his intelligence the most—perhaps, oddly enough, because it’s the most tactile of the arts to which he turned his hand. When Ernest Hemingway’s posthumous novel Islands in the Stream was adapted to film, it was decided to convert his hero, Thomas Hudson, from painter to sculptor, partly because of the same sense.
Michelangelo would have understood this decision, as well as Papa’s ferocious work ethic. He would not have understood Hemingway’s instinct to destroy himself.
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