Renaissance Intensifies - Michelangelo and the Big Picture

The High Renaissance, Michelangelo, and reflections on where we're going on this journey through the arts of the West.

If you are new to the Band, this post is an introduction and overview of the point of this blog that needs updating. Older posts are in the archive on the right. Shorter occult posts and reflections on reality and knowledge have menu pages above.

Comments are welcome, but moderated for obvious reasons. If you don't see it right away, don't worry. We check regularly and it will be up there.

Picture - the face of perfection. Mary from Michelangelo's Pietà, 1498–1499

Time to get back to the arts of the West. We got caught up on Leonardo da Vinci for a little bit - his absurd gifts make that easy to happen - so let's regroup. We are trying to understand how something as profound and beautiful as art was inverted so fast. And since art expresses culture, it could help us grasp what happened on a bigger level as well. 

Armory Show, 69th Regiment Armory, New York City; The Cubist room, Armory Show, International Exhibition of Modern Art, Art Institute of Chicago, 1913

We aren't comfortable tackling the 20th century in this kind of holistic way because there are too many spells and it's too recent. Our earlier historical sweeps have ended with World War One. But it turns out Modernism officially arrives in America with the Armory Show in New York in 1913. 

The year lines up with some other big days on the road to globalism. It made a good target date to work back from. The plan is to go from the foundations of the arts of the West in Greco-Roman antiquity, see how it formed, and then collapsed in Modern times. If you want to follow the journey, see the Arts of the West page up above. They're in chronological order.

This aptly-named link - "How the 1913 Armory Show Dispelled the American Belief that Good Art Had to Be Beautiful" - presents the typical beast story. With a nicely direct title. There is a glimpse of truth in it though - the counter-culture rebellion of Modernism was against an equally fake Academic establishment. 

Thomas Pollock Anshutz, The Ironworkers’ Noontime, 1880, oil on canvas, Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco

Really mediocre academic realism - like this weirdly homoerotic life-drawing class

Will Hicok Low, Love Disarmed, 1889, oil on panel, Brooklyn Museum

Or tepid echoes of stale European modernism - "mythology" as the transparent fig leaf over little more then a picture of a naked lady.

Low was a teacher at the National Academy of Design - the establishment gatekeeper of American art art the time.

If you're interested, this is the same pattern that gets repeated in pop culture during Tavistock Presents The 60s!ᵀᴹ, only with pop culture. Fake "counter-culture"takes down fake "mainstream". The easiest way to see the homology is to update the graph from the earlier post [click for a link].

It's pretty obvious once we lay it out...

So there's that recurring ploy...

By 1913, the sublime glories of the Hudson River School were a distant memory. Perhaps because of the changing times, there doesn't appear to have been the sort of talents who could replace a William Trost Richards. Nowadays, most don't even know who William Trost Richards is. Which is a shame really, and something we've actually made some very small steps to rectify thanks to our readers. To be fair, it difficult to run an official national culture when the big global financial elites are against it. The fetishizing of European "culture" was another major issue we touched on in earlier posts on Modernism and architecture [click for a link]. 

William Morris Hunt's The Breakers is a Newport summer mansion built for the Vanderbilts between 1893-1895. The Italian Renaissance style is typical of the elite fetishizing of European culture. Roots of globalism.

The traditional strengths that made 19th century American painting such a beacon of beauty suffered from the same afflictions that lead to Art! throughout the West. As the art world became more formalized and incestuous, virtues like beauty took a back seat to self-conscious "artiness". Formal qualities and innovation for their own sake as artistic effects. The most famous 19th-century painters today - like Whistler and Homer - are famous because they prefigured the beast system in their work.

The frontier closed, art became urbane and effete, and the glories of Bierstadt sank into the self-conscious contrivances of Tonalism and insipid pre-modernisms. Not that tonalist effects are inherently bad - even coloring overglaze could have lovely landscape effects - as in the Hudson River School's Sanford Gifford's work -

Sanford Robinson Gifford, White Mountain Scenery, 19th century, oil on canvas, private

The problem comes in when the tonalist effects become the point of the painting and not the catching the glare of the setting sun. That's part of that Modernist retardation that artworks are "autonomous" - springing autochthonic from the bosom of the earth to mystify us with cryptic patternings. Best spend billions on teams of experts in high-tech facilities to collect and preserve these purposeless, autonomous geodes...

Good golly it's stupid. Even Postmodernism recognizes that people make art for reasons. But it was appealing because it let artists claim to be what they always were - and be given the same freedoms society allows true creators - while having to master way less techne. LARPing as genius without needing effort or talent beyond connections. Globalist cash made up the lost popularity and the nation was slowly disconnected from its art. Inness isn't a bad painter because there were still expectations that a painting not be easy to do. But look at this and think trajectory...

George Inness, The Home of the Heron, 1893

It is an appealing effect in some ways. But it isn't the sort of thing that is connecting you to logos or beauty in a lasting way. It's a trifle. Cotton candy. "Tone" is a good cognate since it suggests a calming seascape - a fleeting pleasure. Evocative perhaps, but soon to be forgotten. This isn't a coincidence. 

As a movement, Tonalism changed the idea of a painting from meaningful representation of something into presentation where the titular "subject" was secondary. The real goal was to use the formal and material components of a painting to to create a mood in the audience. The resonances of a place, the aspirations and values of a people - all these associations are cast aside for a vague emotional twitch.

 

Part of pretending art is autonomous is to split techne - putting colors on a support - from logos - truth and beauty. 

European modernists were doing similar.

Pablo Picasso, Dawn at Riera de Sant Joan,1903, oil on canvas

Picasso's Blue Period is a series of pictures where the only real subject is the emotional impact of the color blue. People who profess to like them like them for the feeling or mood they create. 

Which is our point. It isn't logos driven beauty. It's allure. The only truth is awareness of our emotional response to a color.

And that really doesn't require art at all.

Hi beast system...

Hence the arts of the West journey. We don't want to get bogged down in American modernism right now - that's where the path is going. We wanted to reconnect with what's going on and at stake and keep dropping pieces of the Modernism inversion to prepare the path. Combination of foreshadowing and consciousness-raising to help readers see where this is heading as it makes its way. Because if you know where it goes, it's easy to pick up the lessons.

Separate off the larger conclusion for clarity with the return of an old Band feature, then into the Renaissance. 

Modern art needed autonomy to further the globalist aim of destroying national identity. When you see that the gray goo - one world xenocidic dystopia - has been the mephetic chessmaster's plan all along, Modernism makes far more sense.

Albert Pinkham Ryder, Moonlit Cove, around 1890, oil on canvas, The Phillips Collection

 

This is one place where the materialist pygmies that cohabitate with us in Creation really get bewildered. Consider how often a bag-wearing agnostic wonders why culture has been so consistently downwardly terrible for so  long? Or a libertarian pries his lips off the paste bottle and asks why hasn't the free market produced a single institution that has cashed in on the repressed demand for beauty? Or an atheist pops into existence ex nihilo to ponder why all the organs of higher culture seem to have bought into the same anti-human program at the same time? It's a puzzler...

In a perpetual war against the act of Creation - against the Good, the Beautiful, and the True, immortal evil takes passive and active forms. Passive being the materially and morally entropic nature of our fallen finite material existences. Active being the Prince of this World. Satan, Lucifer, Prometheus, Old Nick, Morgoth - the primordial, real, entity that drives this world.

If you are interested in seeing how this works, our Truth of Culture posts on The Chronicles of Thomas Covenant go into it.

Click for part 1 and part 2]. 

Those books are masterpieces of applicability - especially the interactions between passive and active evils in a fallen world.

It's not a coincidence that Modernism in America followed massive waves of 19th-century immigration. This is actually very interesting because it gives a cause-and-effect set-up that could have gone different ways. So that the way it did go is informative because it represents choices. 

Start with the realization that no one likes Modern art. Even the most inverted use it as a prop to discuss some theoretical or ideological tangent. It's the narrative service they admire, not the techne. 

And obviously not the logos, because there isn't any to be admired - beyond the cautionary tale.

 But that level of self-awareness precludes being in the modern gallery in the first place.

If the goal was to somehow create a new hybrid nation out of the mix of cultures, the art world would have embraced different traditions. Most newcomers were European and European art has a common substructure.   There were certainly precedents - many of the Hudson River School had studied  at the Dusseldorf School in Germany. 

The compatibility is obvious in Dusseldorf School painter Herman Herzog who joined the Hudson River School and spent most of his career in America,

Herman Herzog, Caribou by a Mountain Lake, 1865, oil on canvas

Herzog is an especially clear case, but it isn't hard to see.  How hard would it be to find common ground between the Hudson River School's Whittredge, the Italian Camino, the Russian Shishkin, and the Spanish  Sánchez Perrier?

Clockwise from top left: Worthington Whittredge, The Pine Cone Gatherers, 1866; Giuseppe Camino, The Depths of the Forest, 19th century; Ivan Ivanovich Shishkin, Brook in a Forest, 1880; Emilio Sánchez Perrier, L'étang à Friaucourt, Ault (Picardie), 1887

Even many non-European traditions have enough compatibility for dialogue. 

The point is that any real attempt - possible or not - to build real culture from newcomers would have created space for traditions to mingle or coexist organically.   Like a Chinese artist combining Chinese and European painting techniques in very original pieces.

He Baili, Sunrise Over Yuen Long, 2018,  mounted and framed ink and color on paper

This is what's happened by default for contemporary logos-facing artists  - they assemble skills by studying different sources. This definitely didn't happen.

If the goal was to somehow swell the existing America, the art world would have been looking to assimilate foreign art to American norms and hammering this as the "values of the nation".  Obviously that didn't happen either.

What happened is that all the cultural traditions were erased and American norms were first dismissed as primitive and embarrassing to even mention, the eventually oppressive.

Note the subtle equivalence between cave painting - the dawn of representational techne - and the garbage on modern art museum walls. Inversion.

Francis Picabia, The Dance at the Spring, 1912, oil on canvas, 47 7/16 x 47 1/2 inches (120.5 x 120.6 cm), Philadelphia Museum of Art

Another pearl from the Armory Show, The graphic design is kind of interesting. But it's opposite the cave painting - one might even say inverted.  The cave painting begins a process of representational art that is refined for millennia. The Armory Show signals the opposite of refinement - degeneration.

Simply judging by the fruits, autonomy decoupled art from culture and is therefore part of the destruction of culture in general. By not representing anything, there is nothing to identify with. And declaring representation impossible attempts to wall people off from the very possibility of finding logos in their art.

So by opting for fetishizing their specialist workshop materials and practices, painters like the Tonalists were midwifing modernist gray goo atavism. And while the moods were appealing enough, there was no substance. This didn't speak to the nation any more than the insipid classicism of Low.

William Trost Richards, Indian Summer, 1875, oil on canvas

Just compare  the work of American landscape genius William Trost Richards...

Charles Warren Eaton, Forest Edge, 1900s, oil on canvas

...to the crappy smudges of a Tonalist hack  like Charles Warren Eaton. 

Just a few decades  to reverse millennia of technical progress. But it is moody...

In any case, the National Academy of Design was not connected to the culture in a vital way. And the culture itself was fragmented by waves of immigrants, urbanization and industrialization. The historical specifics are less important than the notion of big change and cultural dissociation. And this meant that the Armory Show doesn't represent an art of beauty and nation vs. the perverse horrors of globalism. It was the perverse de-moralized posturing of a backwater academy art vs. the perverser horrors of globalism. With the big money on the side of the new fakes, the old fakes didn't have a chance. 

Marcel Duchamp, Nude Descending a Staircase (No. 2), 1912, oil on canvas, Philadelphia Museum of Art; J.F. Griswold, The Rude descending a staircase, The New York Evening Sun, March 20, 1913

When has the hurp durp strategy ever worked for self-parodic poseurs trying to keep   organized globalist atavism out of institutions  they already killed?

Sort of like trying to keep a demon from possessing a corpse after any resistance-enabling life is long gone. All that was missing was some pre-forgotten 50s talking head cracking wise about the Beatle's haircuts.

But don't feel bad for the old fakes. They had done their part by de-enervating the vital world of American art and serving it up on a cannibal's banquet table. 

And here we are.

We aren't going to ignore the 20th century - we just can't trace the main historical patterns with the same kind of clarity. Too many conflicting stories, third rails, deliberate disinformation, on-going conspiracies, and closed archives for big picture we'd be comfortable defending. We've found the better path is to look at bits and pieces - whether in occult posts, positive culture posts, or other things. 

There are two purposes for tracing art from origins to the Armory Show.

Henri Matisse, Le Luxe II, 1907–8, distemper on canvas,  Statens Museum for Kunst, Copenhagen

1. To try and illuminate what went so wrong - in art and the larger culture.

Another "sensation" from the Armory Show.

For this crap to slide into the center of the art world with nothing more than a few half-hearted harrumphs indicates that the people had already checked out from any interest that they might have had in art.  

Daniel Gerhartz, Her Mother's Harp, 2010s, oil on canvas, private

 

2. To trace out the road not taken - the real legacy of the arts of the West and the real direction for the future.

Gerhartz is far from classically perfect, but there is no comparison in techne. Or in logos. 

Simply ask, which has something to contribute to the construction of a vital civilization and which greases skids to the abyss?

Once get a clear picture of Modernism we will swing into fragmented Modern mode and look into Postmodernism. There needs to be a Derrida and Deconstruction post, but our thinking on that is evolving and we're not ready to share the implications. Not that it's urgent - we're sitting in the High Renaissance. So back on the horse with another big turning point. 

First are the big moments that got us here.

Limbourg brothers, June from the Très Riches Heures du duc de Berry, f.6v., 1412-1416, tempera on vellum, Musée Condé, Chantilly

I. Gothic art develops into a cultural space with its own standards and expectations.

It's not written so the traditional story misses it. But by the late Middle Ages,  there is an implicit aesthetic basis of taste, an established client class, preferred media, and standards for artists to use for improvement and to be judged by. Contracting is regularized and artist's guilds assure quality and protect painters' social and economic rights and permissions.

Art in all but name.

Masaccio, St. Peter Healing the Sick with his Shadow, 1426-27, fresco, Cappella Brancacci, Santa Maria del Carmine, Florence

2. The Early Renaissance starts formally defining art and linking it to Humanist ideas and motifs. 

Defining art raising the status of artists and sets theoretical parameters. This is where antiquity comes in as the gold standard in art and theory.

In the larger culture, this is a big step towards the de-moralized secular transcendent Flatland of the beast system. Because the old ontologically hierarchical medieval world view - logic bridging unreliable materiality and unknowable God - has to change when humans are raised to the authoritative level. Even really old ones with cool names like Pythagoras and Trismegistus. 

Renaissance culture was Christian, but by raising classical antiquity to the level of moral cultural standard it started the path to ontological confusion. Which is what Flatland is.

The metaphysics of the arts of the West are also Christian - the Logos is the objective foundation of Truth, refined skills reflect every culture, and art appears in-between. The "standards" are abstract - serve truth in some way - but the techne is not. Techne develops and formally organizes organically  

 By building an abstract theory from Classical sources, Renaissance theorists commit the category error of secular transcendence - imputing abstract certainty to something that is material and contingent.

"Antiquity" is a concept that has as many meanings as the people using it. We usually assume it's Greco-Roman antiquity unless otherwise specified but it can be any ancient culture. Renaissance antiquity was mainly Roman with trace elements of Greek filtered through. 

It doesn't happen right away, but the ontological harmonious definition of the arts of the West is disrupted. Instead of the material standards of techne being culturally subjective and not universally binding, we get the opposite. We get subjective human authorities pretending their opinions about style and medium are absolute. First alongside truth, then in place of it.

Modern art is a fake religion now - with profane temples and eyeless priests. But this could only happen if the Truth in art - the Christian logos or even the Greek episteme - is replaced with sociopathic whims.

In an interesting post, Bruce Charleton classifies the evil impulses we see at work in the modern world. His argument is that we have entered a phase described as Sorathic evil -

Sorathic evil is neither about pleasure nor about control; it tends towards the purely destructive.

If Luciferic evil is motivated by short-teremist pleasure; while Ahrimanic evil is motivated by God-denial, spiritual blindness and reductionism towards a meaningless world of mechanical procedures; then the Sorathic impulse is driven by negative impulses - primarily fear, resentment and hatred.

It is consistent with the world we see today. And if so, Modernism - with its atavistic destruction of age-old traditions of truth and beauty driven by resentment and hate - is the harbinger.

The road to Art! begins in the optimistic theorizing of the Renaissance. And what they were theorizing about starts with Leonardo.

High Renaissance Intensifies

Leonardo's legacy for art is manifold. We saw two related sides -

Leonardo's drawing of female anatomy. 

On one hand, his skill at painting and drawing were among his myriad talents and important tools for understanding the world. 

We've mentioned this before, but when you consider his tools and the state of anatomical knowledge in the 16th century...

Second version of the Madonna of the Rocks in its frame.

 

On the other, his innovative approached changed the direction of art the developing arts of the West

The understanding the world part was important for our epochal minds posts and ongoing reflections on thinking. It's easy to understand now why Leonardo never really belonged to a group. This mix of cognitive isolation with his visual thinking, singular powers of observation, and manual dexterity allowed him to rethink drawing and painting.

This is the part that we are interested in now,

What are the main things Leonardo brings to the arts of the West?

The biggest is a higher level of composition. He completely overhauled the old 'figures in a perspective background'  that had been the big innovation of 15th-century painting. His new vision was so different that it really can be taken as the symbolic birth of the post-medieval Western concept of painting. There are at least three parts to this.

1. Harmonious arrangements

That Virgin, Child, St. Anne, and St' John cartoon is such good illustration of this. See how the figures are perfectly individuated and perfectly integrated into a visually-pleasing harmonious group. And the space isn't a pre-existing box they're pasted onto. It organically forms around them. 

The whole thing becomes reality transposed to higher order.

Leonardo da Vinci, St. Jerome in the Wilderness, around 1480, tempera and oil on walnut panel, Vatican Museums, Rome

2. Individual realism... enhanced.

Leonardo's empirical studies fed into his artistic innovations. Attention to light and shadow taught him define forms that way rather than use lines. Anatomy and physiognomy made his figures pose and move like real people. Observations of nature sharpened treatment of atmosphere, plants, cloth, etc.

An unfinished painting lets us see how he constructs the setting around the figure, right down to the color contrasts.

Leonardo, Compositional Sketches for the Virgin Adoring the Christ Child, with and without the Infant St. John the Baptist; Diagram of a Perspectival Projection, 1480–85

3. Expanded use of Drawing throughout the Planning Process

Drawing was the link between mind and page. Leonardo used drawings to work out paintings the same way he did natural phenomena. Drawing is central to each stage of the new Florentine art - details, figures, groupings, overall arrangements, etc.

You drew to get the figures right, then drew to get them into a harmonious arrangement. 

Put it together, and Leonardo worked out a solution to the problem of adapting the humanist Classical ideal to painting when there were no ancient models to look at. It's thematic - an independent way of expressing a common value. The humanist-Classical concept of art called for realism and idealism in a single image. It sounds paradoxical, but they could see how ancient sculptors managed to accomplish it. It's why sculpture always had closer ties to ancient art - Renaissance sculptors had models to follow and painters didn't.

Leonardo came up with a way of painting that may or may not have resembled Roman art - it didn't - but it achieved the same goals. At least as far as the humanists understood them, which is all that matters historically since that's what was guiding the intellectual culture.

 

By harmonizing unprecedented attention to realistic detail and higher-order reality Leonardo created a template for Renaissance art.

What he does is rethink what a painting is as a conceptual category. Not an object - his material refinements take place within the traditional understanding of media. But as type of representation.

Optical studies of visual rays from around 1508, Codex Atlanticus

One thing that's become clear is how isolating Leonardo's gifts would have been. Psychometric communication gaps mean few people he could have a meaningful conversation with. In general he worked in his own mental world. He did form relationships with field-specific geniuses like Pacioli in math or Raphael in painting - this was how his ideas crossed into the wider public.

When it comes to art, Leonardo expressed his thoughts through drawing and painting, and visual arts are limited in ways that thought isn't. You can think of anything. By codifying his mental world in the more comprehensible world of drawing, he made his insights more accessible. Like writing down an idea, only depicting it. And from here, you don't need to match Leonardo. You just need people who can get it on one end and make it even more accessible on the other. 

Raphael, Portrait of Agnolo Doni, 1504-1507, oil on panel, Uffizi

Raphael doesn't have to understand optics on the theoretical level to understand how shadow makes a portrait seem more alive.

The transformation in his own art upon seeing Leonardo is astounding. He was the ideal bridge.

The process is progressive systematization. Arcane explorations of genius create possibilities that are distilled once through representation and then distilled again by the early adapters. Mainly Raphael in Leonardo's case, but there were some others too. From here you get formulas and models that can be widely adapted.

Bringing us to "theory" and why this is the historical inflection point for the arts of the West.

After at least a year without the Roots of Globalism, two in one post! Because this is such an inflection  point for the globalist Art!  art of the beast system. 

Start with a simple but necessary fact. 

Art comes before theory. 

It has to - theory is abstracted from observations about art. Now consider -  everyone notes how ugly and unwanted Modernism and Postmodernism are. That is because they represent a fundamental change in what art is ontologically. Art qua art. 

Maurice Prendergast, Picnic by the Inlet, around 1918-23, oil on canvas, Metropolitan Museum of Art

We  differentiate  devolved soiled canvases like this from the arts of the West as Art! 

 Art! can only replace art when theory is put before the art itself.

The critic before artist or even collector.

Here's a recurring pattern that leads right into modern globalism...

Art "theory" is fake

It's a post-facto spin made up by self-fluffing secular transcendent non-creators by abstracting from what artists already did.  If art is the living creative tradition, theory is a parasite that feeds off and eventually kills the host. 

This obviously doesn't mean we can't theorize about art. We're literally doing it right now.  What it means is that post-facto abstractions cannot replace the real things they are based on in terms of ontological priority.  It's not a "chicken or the egg" thing.  There are clear historical patterns. Artists create, theorists try and explain. When the order of operations is reversed, you no longer have anything connected to culture in a meaningful way. 

The actual problem is that the theory comes to lead the dance over time.   Modern art happens when theorists control the budgets and artists dance for coins.  But that power is economic  and political. There is nothing creative or logos-expressing there. At best, the theory is the imposition of subjective, ideological, pretense  on  the fundamental human activity of  creating in God's image.

It's the same with every aspect of the beast system - free market, democratic process, rule of law - none of these phrases mean what the words denote. 

Orwellian Newspeak is a crap analogy that boomers seem unable to think past - mainly  because calling it New acknowledges an old. 

Beast theory pretends to be a consistent extension of what came before. Obscene inversions of nature are falsely presented as fitting within existing frames of reference, no matter how perverse.

Which is how art can go from this... 

Diego Velázquez, Las Meninas, 1656, oil on canvas, Museo del Prado, Madrid

An absolute masterpiece that reflects on  the nature of power, reality, seeing , and representation.  One of the great figures in the Western tradition's greatest painting.

...to this...

Pablo Picasso, Las Meninas VI, 1957, oil on canvas,  Museu Picasso, Barcelona

The Band is certain - absolutely positive - that there is a "theoretical reason" why this  degenerate shit is ensconced in a "museum".  It might even be interesting. 

But it has no place in a discussion of the arts of the West. In fact, were our culture healthy,  there wouldn't be any need to ever mention it at all.

...and still be "art".

Obviously it can't. Any more than a market can extend rights to corporate "persons" that aren't extended to real ones and still be "free".   Theoretical pretenses of continuity aside, the fundamental meaning of the thing in question has changed. 

The words become a grotesque parody that lasts only as long as the willingness to play make-believe. And that gets harder over time, because the longer a fake inverted structure is taken as reality, the larger the gap from real reality gets. 

Imagine a visitor from outer space trying to figure out what this is about...

Replying that it's the Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth probably wouldn't clear things up.

For theory to supplant actual making, buying, and selling of art a couple of things have to happen. To start, art has to get separated off from the  real processes of organic culture.  This means taking all the cultural history, purposes, techniques - everything that has defined the ever-changing story of art since the dawn of humanity - and replacing it with some arbitrary rules that a guy recently made up.  Read that last sentence again. 

Remember, the arts of the West map onto the ontological because of course they do. The ontological hierarchy is the simplified nature of reality.  Techne has a logos, but the preferences are culturally determined.

Theory is the category error of secular transcendence - pretending subjective human whims can rise to the level of abstract universal truths.

Is Leonardo at fault because he started from  the Renaissance premise that art has material rules  beyond the culturally-determined techne that expresses logos? Not knowingly. How could anyone have foreseen contemporary culture?  The lesson for us is that the beast turns inches into miles by selective reading terms of an arrangement and brazenly ignoring the unwanted parts.

Theorizing takes an organic development and pretends it's law. Techne is standardized, but it is  cultural consensus, not a timeless absolute. The only abstract Law in art is Truth - how and what are wide open. Which is why the arts of the West are so high-level and diverse. Cultures using their own technes to shine light on the same Logos. 

Barend Cornelis Koekoek, Winter Landscape, 1835-1838, oil on canvas, private

Like  the subtle light and delicate atmospherics of a Dutch landscape painting.  It differs from the Romantic sublimity of a Hudson River School one. But both have truth and both are beautiful.

There are no Truths or higher states in the morally-lobotomized world of secularist vanity.  So truth can't be external to the artwork - the material is all there is. And the world isn't an entropic, fallen, valley of shadow with unknowable limits. It's crystal clear because truth and morality are whatever we want them to be right now.  Except for  the de-moralized wallow in acquisitionist slop being followed by death part.   Bringing us to a question for agnostics and atheists...

Look back over your time here. Are you content with how everything went? The legacy you leave behind? The meaning of your life's work?  Are you ready to go peacefully, content that you found the thing you had to?

Jean-François Millet , Death and the Woodcutter, 1859, oil on canvas,  Ny Carlsberg Glyptotek, Copenhagen

 Or are you scared? 

Consider the old saw about repeating the same failure and the definition of insanity. It may prove fortuitous.

Leonardo wasn't writing theory - he was working out techne standards in the organic terms of his culture. Remember - he doesn't even appeal to the humanists' beloved ancients. But art gets formulized and turned into rules - partly on Leo's authority. As human "sources" are raised to the level of the divine, ontology flattens out and secular transcendence creeps in.

But it's not all on him. Another archetypal artist followed shortly after - one equally as important historically but one combining different facets of the Renaissance. If Leonardo was the ideal Renaissance man as total genius, Michelangelo was the total artist. 

Michelangelo

Michelangelo was no dummy, but he wasn't the cognitive outlier Leonardo was. His gifts were more purely artistic. If Leonardo was the extremity of logical intelligence harnessed to pantheon-level techne, Michelangelo was the extremity of emotional torment and titanic creative struggle.

Michelangelo, model for the dome of St. Peter's, 1558-1561, wood, Fabbrica of St Peter's

1:15 scale model for Michelangelo's greatest architectural work - designing the dome of St. Peter's.

It was his recognized mastery of the Renaissance big three of painting, sculpture, and architecture plus his considerable talent as a poet that made his name as the ultimate artist.  

Along with the range of talents comes the personality - famously brooding and abrasive, though hard to say how much is storytelling. What isn't storytelling is the sense of depth in his art. A quality impossible to put into words that supports stories of titanic struggle.

Nowhere is this clearer than in the unfinished "slaves" or "prisoners" for the ill-fated Julius II tomb project. These have been the source of any number of Neoplatonic interpretations of Michelangelo's art - ideal forms struggling for release from brute matter. 

The problem is that Michelangelo's Neoplatonism was superficial at best. It's more likely that this is just his technical skill at work - lowering the stone around a figure he sees in his mind's eye.

Historically Michelangelo more than Leonardo is the culmination of Florentine Renaissance art. He was a Florentine patriot, and even though he spent large portions of his life in Rome, he always considered himself Florentine. This extended to the city's art tradition. His youth was spent studying the works of Florentine masters from Giotto to Donatello in a conscious desire to build on their legacy. If we are thinking of art as a defined cultural space, Michelangelo begins by epitomizing the blend of national identity & universal beauty that is Florentine phronesis. The rest of his career maps the turbulent 16th century eerily well.

As with Leonardo, the amount of material on Michelangelo is ridiculous. We've been using the Harvard library as a proxy since it's the biggest academic library in the world. It's not a perfect measure, but they should undersell the volume of stuff the least. Plus the catalog is online - none of it is accessible but we can see in detail what's there. 

No one is reading all of that regardless of access. The good news is that the details of his life are about as well known as you could hope for 500 years out and even the summaries tell coherent stories. To the point where you can get a picture of him and his work. Here's a great resource that puts the information in an accessible form [click for the link].

Look at his early years and you can see some of that archetypal Florentine background. Start with the apprenticeship to Ghirlandaio at 12. He didn't stay that long - there may have been friction. He was known for being very difficult to get along with throughout his life. In any case, it was a short apprenticeship, but enough to learn the full range of painting techniques and project management. 

The House of the Medici

The next stop was the house of Lorenzo de Medici. Lorenzo the Magnificent as he was known was the culmination of the first wave of Medici power and influence. A ruler behind the scenes who maintained the illusion of the old system - more Julius Caesar than Augustus - but ruler all the same. Lorenzo was typical of the Florentine elites for his high regard of art and culture. He patronized a range of activities and created an environment where the other elites did the same. By the end of the 1400s, the revolutions of Donatello and Brunelleschi were old and Florence was well-established as the hub of art and culture.

Domenico Ghirlandaio, Sassetti Chapel, 1483-85, fresco, Santa Trinita, Florence

Maybe Ghirlandaio's most famous chapel. It was painted for the Sassetti - a Florentine elite banking family with close ties to the Medici. The frescos show the life of St. Francis, but members of the Sassetti and Medici households appear. 

Lorenzo's patronage of the arts was generous, but not exceptional among the wealthiest Florentines. He may have been even more significant as an influencer - encouraging people like the Sassetti do do things like this.

Where Lorenzo did stand out was in his support for what we can call intellectual infrastructure. Supporting humanist study and translation activities and setting up the family's ancient sculpture collection for artists to study. 

These efforts include his collaborations with Marsilio Ficino and other main humanists who we met in our occult posts. That's the same Ficino who translated Plato and Hermes Trismegistus for Lorenzo and became a major vector for hermetic thought to reinfect the West.

Marsilio Ficino’s introduction to his Latin translation of the Corpus Hermeticum, presentation manuscript dedicated to Lorenzo il Magnifico, Biblioteca Medicea Laurenziana

Even after the invention of the printing press, manuscript copies of new books would be prepared for important sponsors and supporters. These were called presentation copies and kept the illuminator's arts alive.

From a Roots of Globalism perspective, Ficino, Lorenzo, and their Platonic Academy are a big step in the de-moralization that leads to Modernism and the current day. Check out the Occult Posts if interested, but the point is that elevating pagan sources to spiritual authority near or equal to Christian ones is the gateway category error of secular transcendence. We can only know ultimate reality through faith in revelation. Fresh human addenda are self-evidently not that. 

Plato is at least structurally compatible with Christian metaphysics on some levels. Probably because early Christian theologians used Platonic thought structures to express metaphysical relationships and because the Greeks were partially right about a few unlikely things. But Hermes...

The infusion of Hermeticism into respectable letters - into ground zero of the beast system fake Progress! timeline - is a more significant problem on the inversion front. To his credit, there are no obvious Hermetic themes in Michelangelo's work. But both break the connection between ontology and epistemology and begin the road to Flatland.

Michelangelo, Delphic Sibyl, 1509, fresco, Sistine Chapel

Michelangelo had started in a Florentine humanistic school - Renaissance grammar school - before moving to Ghirlandaio's shop. He had no aptitude for schooling but was obsessed with drawing, and his father recognized that a different career plan made sense. Troubles in the shop aside, the talent was obvious, and Ghirlandaio was one of the preeminent painters in Italy. One of the biggest names in Florence and part of the original Sistine Chapel project in Rome. Florence wasn't that big, and it was through Ghirlandaio that Michelangelo met the Medici. 

Artists had gone way up in prestige in 15th century Florence and the client class were fellow guildsmen - bankers and merchants, not titled aristocrats. The level of social contact between the elites, scholars, and artists seems to have been a major factor in making Florence such an artistic hotbed. Lorenzo was looking to start formally training young humanist artists and asked Ghirlandaio for recommendations. Michelangelo made such an impression that Lorenzo invited him into the Medici household as a virtual son. A formal agreement was made for the boy to have his own quarters and be raised and educated alongside the Medici children.

Ghirlandaio's Sassetti Chapel fresco shows the pope approving the Franciscan Rule in the background and a more current scene up front. Lorenzo is the dark haired man on the right between the Sassetti elders and Platonic Academy humanist Poliziano leads the Medici children upstairs. The same Medici Michelangelo will live and study with. 

This only lasted a couple of years before Lorenzo's premature death, the rise of the radical preacher Savonarola, and the French invasion of Italy bring that whole humanistic dreamworld to a sudden end. But two components of Michelangelo's archetypal Renaissance identity are forged here.

While living with the Medici, Michelangelo was educated by humanists connected to the Platonic Academy with the other household youth. This meant he knew the next generation of Medici extremely well, and probably explains how he could keep crossing them and make his way back into their graces. They literally "went to school together". Intellectually, it exposed him to the same Neoplatonic and other esoteric humanist ideas that were the currency of high culture at the time. 

Villa Medici at Careggi was the first of the Medici Tuscan country estates. It was remodeled by Michelozzo and was the home of the Platonic Academy. Lorenzo died here in 1492 and Ficino in 1499.

The exact origins of the informal group is uncertain and it disbanded after the death of its great champion Lorenzo.

Michelangelo wasn't academically minded and never engaged in speculative thinking - in writing anyhow. But his poetry in was shaped by themes of Neoplatonic love, longing, and refinement, and just about everyone can see the compatibility with his art. Insomuch as there was a Neoplatonic cast to his thinking, it probably came from here.

Here's a good academic essay on Michelangelo's Neoplatonism, spiritual progress, and struggles as a Christian with homosexual desire. And a link to his complete sonnets in English. If the poetry and biography is any indication, he seems to have remained chaste - first trying to sublimate desire in Neoplatonic terms, before finding the solution in intensified Christian devotion. We've drawn a lot from these links because the essay is consistent with the general summary material and the poems are his own words.

Michelangelo, Ideal Face, 1512-30, red chalk sketch, Uffizi Galleries, Florence

The visible intensity of his art is consistent with internal torment and struggle. And the sublimated eroticism of the early stuff does appear to give way to intense personal religious feeling.

Pieces like this, where haughty coldness can barely contain the smoldering feeling. 

The two incompatible sides of the Renaissance and the fiction that art can resolve them on something more than the odd individual case.

Artistically, the time spent in the Medici sculpture collection and with its overseer Bertoldo di Giovanni - an old sculptor who had been an assistant of Donatello. Di Giovanni was more a link to the past and storehouse of knowledge than techne role model. And he met the Medici's demand for humanistic-type decoration. Like small bronzes with antique subjects.

Bertoldo di Giovanni, Bellerophon and Pegasus, 1481-82, bronze, Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna

These were popular with wealthy Renaissance collectors. Di Giovanni is competent - there's action and the nude isn't bad - just not inspired. Good enough for his pedigree to ensure a comfortable place in the Medici palace.

He also dies at the Villa at Careggi. 

The influence of the sculpture collection on Michelangelo is clear right away. The earliest works we can be certain are his set the course for a long fascination with ancient art. 

The time with the Medici was only a couple of years, but it was pivotal in Michelangelo's early development. He had the freedom to hang out in the sculpture garden, draw and experiment as he saw fit, and pick di Giovanni's brain about the history of Florentine art. His own genius was given that perfect blend of structured support and free play. The result transformed the arts of the West:

 Michelangelo independently finds a different path to the same 

synthesis of real and ideal as Leonardo. 

It looks different in style and appearance because he's coming at it from a different angle. Leonardo abstracted from empirical observation while Michelangelo built out of the study of ancient sculpture. He adds the empirical dimension - Michelangelo was the other Renaissance artist that was dissecting corpses to learn internal structure. Only he applied this knowledge to enhance the already-present realist dimension in ancient art.

Michelangelo, Battle of the Centaurs, 1492, marble, Casa Buonarroti

This unfinished relief from the Medici period shows some basics that will define Michelangelo's early career. Complicated and difficult figure poses and anatomical structures. Powerful forms that make his figures seem superhuman. And clear inspiration from ancient sources - including the nude male form as ideal form of expression. It's not hard to see where Neoplatonic interpretations came from when looking at this tangle of figures struggling to escape the rock.

His prodigious technical ability is also on display. Look at the contrasting technique in this piece from the same time.

Michelangelo, Madonna of the Stairs, around 1491-1492, marble, Casa Buonarroti

This piece is a Florentine shout-out - ultra-flat relief carving was something that Donatello had invented in the early 1400s. Perhaps di Giovanni explained the technique. 

This is a different challenge - one where strict and subtle control is needed to render a form with minimal contrast. The pensive Mary foreshadows the death of her son. Jesus is nursing - a medieval way of indicating his human nature - and his muscular body is another early reflection of that anatomical interest.

Savonarola

The last piece of the puzzle that makes Michelangelo the archetypal Florentine Renaissance artist is pretty different from the Medici. One might say opposite. The radical Dominican preacher Savonarola rose to prominence in the vacuum around Lorenzo's death and comparative ineptitude of his brother and successor. He claimed to have received apocalyptic prophecies of imminent doom in the form of a terrible invasion. Tensions were high with turn of the century near and when the French invaded Italy in 1494, people flocked to him. 

Fra Bartolomeo, Portrait of Girolamo Savonarola, 1498, oil on panel, Museum of San Marco

It's a small world. Bartolomeo was a successful painter - an interpreter of Leonardo and friend of Raphael - inspired by Savonarola to abandon painting and join the Dominican order. Here he's using the traditional Renaissance profile portrait and not Leonardo's new pose.

When Raphael comes to Florence the two become friends and the younger artist inspired Bartolommeo to balance his lives and resume painting. He's not on Raphael or Leonardo's level, but he's really good - an A-lister in most other eras.

Savonarola preached moral renewal - the term "bonfire of the vanities" comes from his large public burnings of art and other luxury objects. Purely voluntary - the appeal of the preacher gripped Florence like a frenzy. 

His era ended badly when he challenged the authority of the Borgia pope Alexanver VI. Savonarola was tortured until he confessed his prophecies were false and then executed as a heretic. The lesson is that the elites will tolerate all sorts of disruptions to ordinary people, but even hint at rocking their boat... 

Francesco Rosselli, The Execution of Savonarola and Two Companions at Piazza della Signoria, 16th century, oil on canvas, Galeria Corsini

Savonarola and his companions were hanged then burned and the ashes cast into the Arno. Click for an account. Interestingly, the public celebrations at Savonarola's death indicate a return to order after too much chaos. 

In the aftermath - with the Medici temporarily gone - the old Republic reformed. It had a short run before the ascension of one of the next generation of Medici to the papal throne brought too much pressure. Michelangelo was an active defender of the republic - applying his architectural skills to defensive engineering and carving the David as a symbol of the wary vigilance of the underdog, among other things. This didn't sit terribly well with his old Medici schoolmates and his relationship with Pope Leo X was poor.

The Savonarola years added a deep and almost anxious Christian piety that balanced the humanistic trends. Looking at his art, this Christian dimension only gets stronger as he ages and the promise of the early Renaissance founders on reality.

Christ on the Cross with the Virgin and St John, both 1555-64, black chalk and white heightening, Royal Collection, Windsor, British Museum, London respectively

Late private drawings are almost medieval in their religious feel. The way he goes over and over the forms also seems devotional.

So those are the archetypal pieces of the Renaissance wrapped up in this pillar of the Western tradition. 

1. Florentine roots and formal training 

2. Immersion in antique art and humanist thought in the house of the Medici 

3. Intense religious feelings foreshadowing later Reformation and renewal movements.

All filtered through a set of technical gifts and vision that may never have been fully replicated in one person before or after. We'll conclude with some important stages in his early career with an eye on how those pieces develop.

His first trip to Rome in 1496 is productive and frustrating. The works are incredible, but struggles with payment will be recurring problems. The Bacchus was carved for a French Cardinal in Rome who balked at the lasciviousness. It wound up with another collector but caused Michelangelo problems.

Michelangelo, Bacchus, 1496-97, marble, Bargello, Florence

The sculptor deviated from ideals of classical perfection to capture the wild, inebriated, and dangerous side of the feral god of wine.

He manages to convert the classical contraposto into a drunken swagger and the impression of fleshiness over the powerful physique suggests debauchery. The facial type and texture are so close to Roman copies of Hellenistic sculpture that is could almost pass as a high-level antique. The balance and sense of form is intuitive sculptural genius.

Divine madness in the intoxication and the demented little satyr with the grapes. The head and hair of Bacchus are so close to Hellenistic prototypes but the satyr is Michelangelo's creation.

The greatest of the first Roman works is one of the greatest sculptures of all time anywhere. The theme was not traditionally Italian, leaving Michelangelo room to invent. The result is as pure a statement of the classical ideal - the balance of idealism and realism - as anything Leonardo concocted. Perhaps superior. 

There is no pure intelligence pathway to this...

Michelangelo, Pietà, 1498–1499, marble, St. Peter's Basilica, Vatican City

Note the combination of realistic detailing and ideal superhuman beauty. Beauty that seems more consistent with ancient sculpture than medieval art but doesn't look like any earlier work. The flawless youthful beauty of mother and son does reflect the Neoplatonic - and Christian - idea that the level of ultimate reality, Beauty and the Good are the same. So not realism as in what they looked like at the time. Realism in the cosmic Truth embodied in their flawless marble forms.

The delicate beauty of the face is complemented by the most technically intricate and detailed carving of Michelangelo's career. This was a deliberate coming out party - it's even the only piece he signed.

The faces really are astounding. 

The serenity defies words while the contrast between the flawless features and rippling veil is a demonstration of pure techne.

Moving to Jesus, this picture captures his tranquil form and the glassy perfection of the marble.

He really does seem more asleep than dead...

The harmony is so good and the techne so captivating that you don't notice the scale is a little off. Jesus is a tad too small - a correction that lets him fit in her lap without seeming ridiculous. Her bulky robes and Michelangelo's unearthly design skills do the rest.

The return to Florence in 1501 seemed like a new beginning. The Medici and Savonarola were gone, the humanist Republic was back, and the city was abuzz with the genius of Leonardo who had himself returned the previous year. Unlike the Turtles, Michelangelo and Leonardo didn't like each other although it doesn't seem anywhere near as intense as Michelangelo's hatred for Raphael. 

Leonardo was actually on the committee that was convened to decide where to place Michelangelo's David. The statue was planned for the wall of the cathedral but plans changed when people saw the finished work. 

Michelangelo, David, 1501-1503, marble, Florence, Academia

The David - more than the comparatively chaste Pietà - catches the antique inspiration, insane techne, and dangerous secular transcendence of the High Renaissance. You need to appreciate the scale to grasp the achievement.

The contrapposto is flawless and the anatomy perfect. The head is oversized because he designed it to be seen from far below. Shadow plays a huge part in sculptural illusion so placement is very important. The funny thing is that the block was considered flawed - which is why such a huge piece of marble was lying around.

It's easy to see here how the light and shadow on the surface makes the contoured surface look like muscle definition.

Following the David he spent a couple of years in Florence before Pope Julius II's summons to Rome began the tumultuous relationship that defined both their careers. There are a number of small works from that time - too many to look into. So we picked two that seem relevant to what Leonardo was doing and Michelangelo's future direction. 

Michelangelo, Pitti Tondo, 1503–1505, marble, Museo nazionale del Bargello, Florence

Like Leonardo, Michelangelo was plagued by unfinished work.  In his case it seems to be due to disinterest. The challenge was to design what figure the block could best yield. Once that was done, the rest was just labor.

Here he is working out harmonious arrangements and complex positions only the inspiration is classical.

There's that quality again that we can't put into words. A hint of something like the decadence of the Art Nouveau or something with some classical reserve and an eerie life.

The power that defies expression is the thing that most defines him as an artist.

His first serious attempts at painting occur then too. This one looks to be the best known - an attempt to compete with Leonardo's radical new design unity with the mastery of complicate anatomy that becomes his calling card. Look how intricately the Holy Family are woven together. But also notice the lack of subtle lighting and smooth blended transitions. By his own admission, Michelangelo was never a painter. He was a master of design.

Michelangelo, Doni Tondo, 1506-1507, oil and tempera on panel, Uffizi, Florence

The clustered nudes are mysterious. One interpretation claims the Holy family represents the world under Grace and John the Baptist behind the wall represents the world under Old Testament Law. If so, the nudes are either the world before Law or Christian Humanist reference to antiquity as another precursor to Christianity. We have no idea.

When Pope Julius engaged Michelangelo, it was for a tomb that was to cause decades of frustration. To Michelangelo it seemed the perfect project - a huge group of statues in a massive setting. But Julius quickly lost interest. He seems to be an unusual figure - a megalomaniac, but in the service of the Church and not himself. His big art projects were in the service of an even bigger dream - to remake Rome into the Christian Humanist capital of a new spiritual Roman Empire. One combining all knowledge in universal fulfillment in the coming of Christ and establishment of the papacy. 

When he took the name "Julius" it wasn't for his predecessor Julius I. It was for Caesar. 

Fortunino Matania, Pope Julius II. The Lamb in the Role of a Lion, 2018,  mixed media

This included personally leading armies to drive back the French and strengthen the papal states. It's unusual for a pope to be so off without it centering on personal pleasure or wealth.

When it came to art projects, Julius' attention was monopolized by the massive architectural works being undertaken by Bramante. Including the radical decision to demolish the old basilica of St. Peter's that had been built by the first Christian emperor Constantine and replace it with a symmetrical humanist design. At the same time, the Vatican palace was undergoing vast expansion into the sprawling complex it is today. 

Bronze medal of Saint Peter’s basilica; pearled border, Attributed to Cristoforo Foppa, called Caradosso, 1506, Frick Museum, New York

Medal celebrating the planned new basilica. Little did they realize Bernini would still be working on the courtyard 150 years later...

With his mind on the good of the Church, the tomb seemed a waste of resources and Michelangelo's talents. Instead, he wanted him to finish painting the chapel his uncle Pope Sixtus IV had build - the famous Sistine Chapel that Ghirlandaio and other 15th-century masters had worked on earlier. This led to tremendous conflict - Michelangelo didn't want to do it, claimed he couldn't paint, even had to be threatened with death if he quit. Artistically it was worth it.

Jack Hayes, Michelangelo Painting the Sistine Chapel, 1964, gouache on board

The ceiling was a herculean feat of creativity. Clashes with assistants meant he did an unusual amount of the painting himself. The whole thing took him four bitter years. It isn't the finest painting ever. But there is an argument that it is the single greatest burst of artistic creativity ever.

Biographers claim he blamed Bramante for talking Julius into it and despised him for the rest of his life. The close ties between Bramante and Raphael probably fueled his supreme hatred for that painter.  

There was no precedent for the result. Nine scenes from Genesis carrying the Lives of Moses and Jesus back before the Flood to Creation. Additional scenes with the ancestors of Christ, typological scenes, sculpture and architecture, mysterious nudes - all ringed with Old Testament prophets and pagan sibyls who foretold the coming of Christ. More on that next time. For now, here's most of it.

It's the perfect symbol of Julius' ambition - a unified Christian humanist vision with the worst Hermetic stuff pared out, but with Classical antiquity in an important supporting role. Just how the pope saw the future of his Christian Roman empire. 

But by bringing in a classical vocabulary that wasn't Christian - even to express deeply passionate Christian feelings - starts secularizing the sacred.

Michelangelo wasn't a great painter in terms of technical range, but he was an exceedingly powerful one. Maybe the most powerful artistic personality ever. He recognized and worked within his limits - avoiding complex settings and delicate lighting for unforgettable forms, endless design brilliance, and sheer emotional force. Look at the balance, simplicity and clarity of the message of Adam and Eve.

Here's a question. 

The Limbourg Brothers, The Ascension, from Les Très Riches Heures du duc de Berry, f.184r, Musée Condé, Chantilly

If the goal is to balance realism and idealism, what's the ideal? Aesthetics can change a lot while still serving the same set of ideas. Before hitting the Renaissance we spent quite a bit of time on the International Gothic - the last stage of medieval art with a reputation for courtly elegance. Both it and Michelangelo produce things of beauty. His work is far more profound, but it also replaces the Gothic Beauty of Holiness with a Humanist beauty of antiquity. 

One is Christian and the other... isn't. At least not in important ways. Something to think about for next time while we attempt to come to grips with whatever Raphael is. Other than someone who didn't get the memo about fresco not being capable of real chiaroscuro light effects. 

We can't even...