1 00:00:00,100 --> 00:00:04,940 Welcome to this special event within the History Heart Departmental Research Seminar, 2 00:00:04,940 --> 00:00:09,240 an especially special pleasure to welcome to Oxford Professor Leonard Barkan, 3 00:00:09,240 --> 00:00:13,320 whose class of 1943 university professor of comparative literature, 4 00:00:13,320 --> 00:00:20,460 Princeton Professor Bachman, has taught at numerous universities, northwestern Michigan, NYU. 5 00:00:20,460 --> 00:00:28,140 He's been an actor and a director, and he's a regular contributor to publications around the world in the USA and Italy, 6 00:00:28,140 --> 00:00:36,870 including on the subject of food and wine. He's published numerous important and influential works which are known to many here, 7 00:00:36,870 --> 00:00:44,100 perhaps most famously to date, unearthing the past archaeology and aesthetics in the making of Renaissance culture, 8 00:00:44,100 --> 00:00:52,230 which won prises from the Modern Languages Association, the College Association and the American Comparative Literature Association. 9 00:00:52,230 --> 00:00:57,540 His books also include The Gods Made Flesh, Metamorphosis and the Pursuit of Paganism. 10 00:00:57,540 --> 00:01:03,270 And most recently and the work that we're here to celebrate tonight, which we have a please of a copy on the table. 11 00:01:03,270 --> 00:01:09,180 His current work, Michelangelo A Life on Paper, which also provides the title of his thoughts this evening. 12 00:01:09,180 --> 00:01:18,270 Please welcome Professor Bondman. Thank you. 13 00:01:18,270 --> 00:01:22,260 As I said to Craig, I have a background in the theatre. 14 00:01:22,260 --> 00:01:28,500 So when I see a Sell-Out crowd, my heart opens up, which I very rarely saw in the theatre. 15 00:01:28,500 --> 00:01:33,960 So I'm glad I'm seen it in this other lesser career of mine. 16 00:01:33,960 --> 00:01:41,250 It's a good place to begin. If I'm going to tell you about Michaelangelo's life, perhaps I'd better start with a little bit of my own. 17 00:01:41,250 --> 00:01:42,780 When I was five years old, 18 00:01:42,780 --> 00:01:50,670 I was taken by my mother for some kind of toddler IQ test where it was discovered that I could read as well as an eighth grader, 19 00:01:50,670 --> 00:01:58,920 but that my inability to draw pictures was so severe as to suggest slight mental retardation. 20 00:01:58,920 --> 00:02:03,930 And many have concurred subsequent to decades when I was 14. 21 00:02:03,930 --> 00:02:08,880 A very canny English teacher responding to some now forgotten question for me about poems and 22 00:02:08,880 --> 00:02:15,390 pictures put into my hands a monumentally important book by Jean Hagstrom called The Sister Arts. 23 00:02:15,390 --> 00:02:19,080 I believe at the time that I looked at the pictures, but I never read the text. 24 00:02:19,080 --> 00:02:23,430 In fact, fifteen years later, Hagstrom hired me as his colleague at Northwestern. 25 00:02:23,430 --> 00:02:25,830 But that's getting ahead of my plot. 26 00:02:25,830 --> 00:02:35,280 During my junior year at the same high school, I made a film based on a short story by staff on Saige, entitled The Invisible Collection, 27 00:02:35,280 --> 00:02:39,540 about an art collector who had gone blind and was forced to describe each 28 00:02:39,540 --> 00:02:44,190 etching and engraving in his collection to a dealer who had come to buy them. 29 00:02:44,190 --> 00:02:52,860 Unbeknown to the old man, however, his family had actually sold off every piece of art and left nothing but shiny bits of cardboard in their place. 30 00:02:52,860 --> 00:02:57,540 So the old man's verbal descriptions were in fact all that was left of the collection. 31 00:02:57,540 --> 00:03:01,410 And these textual strings got as my film went along. 32 00:03:01,410 --> 00:03:10,740 Attached to a long sequence of visual emptiness is, suffice it to say that I seem to have had a lifelong interest in words and images, 33 00:03:10,740 --> 00:03:16,320 but more particularly in some sort of jagged and unstable relationship between them. 34 00:03:16,320 --> 00:03:21,540 Like those old man's empty sheets that he so fulsomely describes. 35 00:03:21,540 --> 00:03:29,250 For years I've been working on these relations, focussing as well on reciprocal connexions between antiquity and the Renaissance. 36 00:03:29,250 --> 00:03:37,980 Essentially, I've been performing a set of deconstructive rhetorical moves upon the ever popular pick to replace Rice as a poet, as a painting. 37 00:03:37,980 --> 00:03:47,520 So a poem in which I attempt to demonstrate that this enormous Gulf Stream of cultural history is less a grand scheme of analogy than a KRUX, 38 00:03:47,520 --> 00:03:53,270 a shell game, an active invasion, an attempt to promote one discourse at the expense of another, 39 00:03:53,270 --> 00:04:02,340 a particularly persistent skirmish in long running wars for cultural prestige amongst different aesthetic and intellectual enterprises. 40 00:04:02,340 --> 00:04:10,410 At the same time, to put the matter more positively, I see word and image as a kind of empowering figure that has been used to enable 41 00:04:10,410 --> 00:04:16,440 makers of text and makers of pictures both to theorise and to practise their craft. 42 00:04:16,440 --> 00:04:19,650 Now, Michelangelo entered into this realm of my interests. 43 00:04:19,650 --> 00:04:25,450 It wasn't only indeed, not even largely because he was both a great artist and a great poet. 44 00:04:25,450 --> 00:04:27,270 Of course, that is true. 45 00:04:27,270 --> 00:04:36,180 Around the time I wrote Transforming Passion, which placed his drawings of Ganymede and Tity is at the centre of its argument, 46 00:04:36,180 --> 00:04:43,470 I started looking at other Michelangelo drawings. I noticed, first of all, that many of these sheets of paper also contained writing. 47 00:04:43,470 --> 00:04:51,350 Indeed, his writing. I also noticed that by and large, nobody else was paying much attention to this, despite a notable example. 48 00:04:51,350 --> 00:04:53,340 While Charlotta this corpus. 49 00:04:53,340 --> 00:05:04,560 Dizzy and sort of my favourite pictures just to prove that I own this monstrous thing, indespensible and supremely authoritative in many ways. 50 00:05:04,560 --> 00:05:11,010 While he succeeds in documenting the my need details of each sheets pictorial contents, 51 00:05:11,010 --> 00:05:16,380 only in rare cases do the entries include transcription or discussion of the text. 52 00:05:16,380 --> 00:05:23,820 Take the case of this sheet in a Vatican codex of Michaelangelo's autograph work just to give you the amount, 53 00:05:23,820 --> 00:05:27,360 a sense of the amount of scholarly production involved in Bertoni. 54 00:05:27,360 --> 00:05:39,000 It is most of this huge double space spread that is devoted to this sheet, but it is entirely devoted to the visual sketches. 55 00:05:39,000 --> 00:05:45,480 The words, though occupying a considerably larger space, are not even transcribed. 56 00:05:45,480 --> 00:05:51,630 Things are not much different on the literary side into Noid Girot of these exhaustive edition of the poetic texts. 57 00:05:51,630 --> 00:05:56,310 Still, the benchmark in the field, though desperately in need of replacement, 58 00:05:56,310 --> 00:06:04,650 includes every possible variant in Michaelangelo's many verbal revisions, but relegates the presence of the adjacent sketches to these revisions. 59 00:06:04,650 --> 00:06:10,080 To what? As you can see, the tiniest little footnote from Girardi's edition. 60 00:06:10,080 --> 00:06:16,000 For instance, you would scarcely be aware that in that Michaelangelo's poetic lines to. 61 00:06:16,000 --> 00:06:20,860 It's up to a more male contract, all Cuno, known as Sensa, is part of tequilla mode. 62 00:06:20,860 --> 00:06:25,840 They only laugh daily, ingenuously. Billig what if in your name I have conceived somebody's image? 63 00:06:25,840 --> 00:06:32,470 This never happens without death. Likewise, appearing with it, which makes my powers of art and intellect fade away. 64 00:06:32,470 --> 00:06:39,220 You would never know from Girardi's that these lines are composed indeed directly on top of a drawing, 65 00:06:39,220 --> 00:06:43,180 which is itself, of course, being made to fade away. Good. 66 00:06:43,180 --> 00:06:49,420 In short, the whole question of Michelangelo writing and drawing in the same spaces seems to have suffered from a similar sort 67 00:06:49,420 --> 00:06:57,610 of jagged and unstable relationship in the scholarly realm to that which these topics had occupied in my own life. 68 00:06:57,610 --> 00:07:04,010 But there were surprises awaiting me in my attempt to disentangle and reorder all of this matter. 69 00:07:04,010 --> 00:07:11,650 Subspace. Michelangelo. If I imagined that a work, say, like this sheet with beautiful poetic lines, 70 00:07:11,650 --> 00:07:18,610 you give me only what I what you already have left over and ask from me what I do not have, 71 00:07:18,610 --> 00:07:22,690 which are drawn in parallel to an exquisite, if faintly sketched need. 72 00:07:22,690 --> 00:07:35,080 If I imagined that they would invite the kind of inter art analysis that one might offer up for, say, illuminated manuscripts or for emblem books. 73 00:07:35,080 --> 00:07:43,660 If I thought that the tools of interpreting emphases like the shield of Achilles and Homer's Iliad or W.H. Auden is beautiful music. 74 00:07:43,660 --> 00:07:47,020 They both are based on Brueghel Fall of Icarus. 75 00:07:47,020 --> 00:07:53,830 If I expected to work the same tricks that I have with paintings that actually contain words like Placenta's Arcadium, 76 00:07:53,830 --> 00:08:02,860 Shepperd's or Rembrandts Belshazzar Feast. If indeed I thought that the less the dialogical milestones in the world in image tradition, 77 00:08:02,860 --> 00:08:09,100 from paresis ars poetica to lessons lay-off go on would be of much use. 78 00:08:09,100 --> 00:08:13,180 I was destined to be the longest sentence of the afternoon. 79 00:08:13,180 --> 00:08:21,790 I was destined to be sadly disappointed. I realised in the course of my researches that all these interrelated expressions 80 00:08:21,790 --> 00:08:27,010 of picture and were dependent on some sort of aesthetic premeditation. 81 00:08:27,010 --> 00:08:34,360 Michaelangelo's pages, on the other hand, with all their multiple markings, tend to be documents in artistic practise. 82 00:08:34,360 --> 00:08:38,620 The trance consequences of a creative moment mentality that spontaneously 83 00:08:38,620 --> 00:08:43,720 expressed itself in an unregulated mixture of visual and verbal inscriptions. 84 00:08:43,720 --> 00:08:47,860 They were best understood neither as essays in the tradition of cross medium 85 00:08:47,860 --> 00:08:53,620 correspondence nor as milestones on the way to the production of end stage masterpieces. 86 00:08:53,620 --> 00:09:01,450 Indeed, they were best deployed as a way, and I'm putting this in particular and deliberately provocative language to read Michaelangelo's mind. 87 00:09:01,450 --> 00:09:06,910 And so the pick to replace this book turned into a psycho biography. 88 00:09:06,910 --> 00:09:13,660 What I'm going to do this afternoon is to take you through a few of these sheets of paper so that you can judge both the method and the results. 89 00:09:13,660 --> 00:09:21,490 But first, a brief introduction to the archive. Michelangelo was, of course, both an artist and a writer, though in the former role, 90 00:09:21,490 --> 00:09:28,570 he was the most famous practitioner in the world, whereas in the latter role he was known only to a few and published in extent. 91 00:09:28,570 --> 00:09:33,430 So only 60 years after his death, credited to him and in his own hand. 92 00:09:33,430 --> 00:09:42,400 We have circa 500 drawings, 500 letters and 300 poems, not to mention contracts, memos and the equivalent of laundry lists. 93 00:09:42,400 --> 00:09:46,900 In every instance, there may be questions of attribution, though, for our purposes. 94 00:09:46,900 --> 00:09:51,040 It's interesting to note that scholars tend to agree far more easily on the 95 00:09:51,040 --> 00:09:56,230 authentication of his handwriting than on the authentication of his draughtsmanship. 96 00:09:56,230 --> 00:10:01,690 Whatever the precise degree of authentication, all of these activities took place on paper, 97 00:10:01,690 --> 00:10:10,840 often more than one kind on a single sheet in Michaelangelo's time paper was certainly not a throwaway commodity, nor was it enormously scarce either. 98 00:10:10,840 --> 00:10:16,270 If there was a multiplicity of work on a single page, it may have been in part because of economy. 99 00:10:16,270 --> 00:10:24,340 But it also is the case that some extremely trivial efforts of both picture and word are permitted by him to occupy paper. 100 00:10:24,340 --> 00:10:29,290 Mere questions of materiality and price then cannot account for his practise. 101 00:10:29,290 --> 00:10:34,900 So far, his writings on the drawings are concerned. Just to give you a statistical sense of the phenomenon. 102 00:10:34,900 --> 00:10:43,540 About 25 percent of the drawings cohabit with text of some kind on the same sheet, and the proportion rises higher if one counts. 103 00:10:43,540 --> 00:10:49,210 All the architectural drawings where words are often the logical and necessary adjunct to the image. 104 00:10:49,210 --> 00:10:57,940 Conversely, fully one third of the poems that we have in Michaelangelo's autograph make appearances on the same pieces of paper as do drawings. 105 00:10:57,940 --> 00:11:04,120 And this proportion would be even higher if one were to consider all the fragmentary bits of text. 106 00:11:04,120 --> 00:11:12,400 As as though they were poems. At this point, what I'll do is take you very swiftly through a series of images just to give you a sense of the range. 107 00:11:12,400 --> 00:11:15,490 Sometimes the texts and images situate themselves to. 108 00:11:15,490 --> 00:11:22,650 Gather because Michaelangelo actually meant them to be related by the fundamental parallelisms of, say, 109 00:11:22,650 --> 00:11:30,450 picture and caption, as in the case particularly intriguing to me of this extremely interesting drawing in which he, 110 00:11:30,450 --> 00:11:35,580 the artist, writes three lists of foods and Trev's tortellini, fennel soup, 111 00:11:35,580 --> 00:11:41,660 two breads for bread, six breads, etc., and sketches their visual equivalents next to them. 112 00:11:41,660 --> 00:11:45,030 A more famous instance is this sheet of paper. You have to read. 113 00:11:45,030 --> 00:11:48,510 You have to buy the book to know what I have to say about these. Are they? 114 00:11:48,510 --> 00:11:56,440 These are the teasers, the trailer thing. Watch the incredible arguments on this sheet of paper. 115 00:11:56,440 --> 00:12:05,120 Famously, a sheet devoted to painting the Sistine ceiling where he writes a poem ridiculing his own physical position while executing the work. 116 00:12:05,120 --> 00:12:08,670 And next to it produces a caricature of the activity, 117 00:12:08,670 --> 00:12:19,980 strangely presenting himself as a heroic nood and his sacred subject matter as a kind of infantile stick figure with these two images. 118 00:12:19,980 --> 00:12:23,910 You've now seen virtually all the drawings, 119 00:12:23,910 --> 00:12:29,310 and this will amount ultimately with the other basically the other two, one of which we look at in a moment, 120 00:12:29,310 --> 00:12:37,680 something like two percent of the total in which this kind of straightforward caption picture relationship can be observed. 121 00:12:37,680 --> 00:12:43,800 That's it for that. Beyond that one, a more complicated territory at the opposite extreme. 122 00:12:43,800 --> 00:12:49,680 Let's say there are cases where it is the merest happenstance that words and pictures are on the same sheet. 123 00:12:49,680 --> 00:12:54,870 Not for me, uninteresting for that reason, but nevertheless causally a happenstance. 124 00:12:54,870 --> 00:12:59,700 Consider this beautiful drawing on the back of which probably early, 125 00:12:59,700 --> 00:13:10,030 probably for the caption frescoes on the back of which he has composed detailed records about his nephew's expenses or was a problem in his life, 126 00:13:10,030 --> 00:13:18,060 or this resurrection drawing, which also houses bookkeeping, details themselves stretched amongst weird incongruities. 127 00:13:18,060 --> 00:13:25,660 Cape arms, oxen, a jacket for an assistant. My father's funeral, things like that lumped together. 128 00:13:25,660 --> 00:13:30,270 Don't go there sometimes in a similar but somewhat more deliberate thing. 129 00:13:30,270 --> 00:13:36,660 He doodles on letters or writes letters on doodles here, and Michaelangelo plays with the address side of a letter. 130 00:13:36,660 --> 00:13:43,390 Whereas here he writes his himself, writes a letter, an important one, in fact, on top of previous drawing. 131 00:13:43,390 --> 00:13:49,740 Sometimes it's poetry that gets juxtaposed and interlaced with sketches in this direction. 132 00:13:49,740 --> 00:13:56,610 We can read a line from Dante from this suicide count of the inferno while turned upside down. 133 00:13:56,610 --> 00:14:00,660 What we can read is some of Michaelangelo's own verse efforts. 134 00:14:00,660 --> 00:14:09,210 Sometimes there are messages for which drawing paper is used or drawing paper or vice versa, particularly in relation to his pupils and associates. 135 00:14:09,210 --> 00:14:18,570 Here have patients, lovely constellation enough and here, draw, Antonio, draw, draw and don't waste time, 136 00:14:18,570 --> 00:14:23,940 he says to a pupil who clearly has been wasting time or at least wasting chalk. 137 00:14:23,940 --> 00:14:30,990 Given how terrible the drawings, the copies are next to the originals that Michelangelo has set for him, 138 00:14:30,990 --> 00:14:38,160 sometimes the text stands in our family demonstrable relationship to a project that is the endpoint of the sketching, 139 00:14:38,160 --> 00:14:43,620 as is as in this for the reading room of the Laurentian library, especially with architectural materials. 140 00:14:43,620 --> 00:14:49,620 Whereas in other times the income drawings are so extreme that they seem to revert to a kind of a. 141 00:14:49,620 --> 00:14:54,810 With pictorial pieces of their own, as in this subject, which is probably the Annunciation, 142 00:14:54,810 --> 00:15:00,570 which includes a very pedestrian message about paying for a shipment of wood in the position where indeed, 143 00:15:00,570 --> 00:15:09,750 traditionally the angel's met words are spelled out. And then there are the juiciest cases of all vul of randomness and incongruity, 144 00:15:09,750 --> 00:15:14,970 but also with greater and lesser temptations toward some sort of large scale interpretation here, 145 00:15:14,970 --> 00:15:25,680 including such phrases as our Maudet Dorsami Ocado Prego cannot do Rahmi Amico, Senor Alesandro Nobbys own. 146 00:15:25,680 --> 00:15:30,060 It's this kind of page that suggests to me most directly the ways in which the composite of 147 00:15:30,060 --> 00:15:35,670 word and image comes to represent a special kind of self-expression on the part of the artist. 148 00:15:35,670 --> 00:15:42,360 I have no working hypothesis for putting organically together the meticulously rendered body parts, 149 00:15:42,360 --> 00:15:48,240 the two profiles of possibly contrasting moods and the tiny little, almost invisible doodles. 150 00:15:48,240 --> 00:15:57,360 Alongside these tantalising snippets of text about love, friendship and unidentified Alesandro and a bit of slightly mangled Petrarch, 151 00:15:57,360 --> 00:16:06,150 but another sheet which unlike most of these, has indeed occupied a lot of scholarly attention, well, at least set us on the right path. 152 00:16:06,150 --> 00:16:14,730 This page in the Louvre from about 15 to appears to include drawings from two different and concurrent projects for a sculptor, David. 153 00:16:14,730 --> 00:16:20,330 The Bronze. Version long in the making and now long lost is imagined in toto. 154 00:16:20,330 --> 00:16:25,590 On the left, while the marble version triumphantly completed in 54, 155 00:16:25,590 --> 00:16:33,720 is represented by a sketch of its right arm in a radically different scale and presumably upside down in relation to the other drawing, 156 00:16:33,720 --> 00:16:38,490 much could be said about the purely compositional relationship of the two drawings, 157 00:16:38,490 --> 00:16:46,740 which for me leaves no doubt that there was there is a compositional relationship rather than one dictated by mere questions of space on the page. 158 00:16:46,740 --> 00:16:52,110 My concern for the moment, however, is one of the pieces of writing on the page. 159 00:16:52,110 --> 00:16:58,410 Davide Kollar froma Ayo Calarco. Michelangelo. David with his slingshot. 160 00:16:58,410 --> 00:17:01,710 And I with my article, whatever that means. 161 00:17:01,710 --> 00:17:06,720 Exactly, but generally translated properly as both in my book. 162 00:17:06,720 --> 00:17:11,790 I spend quite a few pages considering what sort of bow this might be, how it might be like, 163 00:17:11,790 --> 00:17:20,430 or unlike David's weapon or some mixture of a like an omelette and the ways in which a confrontational relationship between Davide and Eel 164 00:17:20,430 --> 00:17:28,200 may itself derive from the biblical story about the confrontation between David and Goliath or between the Israelites and the Philistines. 165 00:17:28,200 --> 00:17:34,110 Is Michelangelo the slender young David, up against the artistic establishment? 166 00:17:34,110 --> 00:17:41,550 Is he the wielder of some Seftel almost musical weapon like David's David's other accoutrements, 167 00:17:41,550 --> 00:17:45,480 as opposed to the kind of brute force represented by the Philistine? 168 00:17:45,480 --> 00:17:53,010 Is he the sculptor up against the giant, which was actually the name widely given to the huge piece of marble out of which the David statue was cast? 169 00:17:53,010 --> 00:17:59,070 And what of the fact that uniquely in this version of the story, Goliath doesn't get represented at all, 170 00:17:59,070 --> 00:18:03,900 whereas David becomes a giant for answers to these and other questions? 171 00:18:03,900 --> 00:18:10,560 You can buy the book. What's important for today's argument, which is available at Blackwells? 172 00:18:10,560 --> 00:18:16,920 How did this scam. I am told. I don't know why have that popped into my head, but there it is. 173 00:18:16,920 --> 00:18:22,920 What is important for today's argument is that Michelangelo has drawn two Davids on this sheet and that whether previously, 174 00:18:22,920 --> 00:18:32,130 concurrently or subsequently, he has first engaged in some complex introspection about his own stake in this piece of artistic production. 175 00:18:32,130 --> 00:18:38,010 And second, he has composed a record of that introspection, whether for his own viewing or for that of others. 176 00:18:38,010 --> 00:18:43,530 And third, he has sealed that communicative act by, say, in effect, signing his name, which, 177 00:18:43,530 --> 00:18:50,520 as it happens, he is famous for not doing on virtually every finished artwork he ever produced. 178 00:18:50,520 --> 00:18:56,040 What we have here, then, is a smoking gun for the proposition that Michaelangelo's sheets of paper were 179 00:18:56,040 --> 00:19:02,160 sites where his meditations in relation to artistic practise express themselves. 180 00:19:02,160 --> 00:19:10,350 What is extreme almost unique about this love sheet, and it goes with that nearly unique signature, is not just that Michelangelo was introspecting, 181 00:19:10,350 --> 00:19:19,590 and not just that he's recording his introspection, but that he knows he is performing this act of writing his interior life into the picture. 182 00:19:19,590 --> 00:19:23,070 If we're looking for the richest sort of auto revelations, however, 183 00:19:23,070 --> 00:19:29,870 we may do better to catch him in the act when he is not quite so self-aware about the procedure. 184 00:19:29,870 --> 00:19:37,500 The very beautiful drawings on both sides of this page have caused much dispute as to subject matter, purpose and date. 185 00:19:37,500 --> 00:19:42,960 What can be said for certain is that they consist of three different groupings featuring the Madonna 186 00:19:42,960 --> 00:19:47,790 that all of them show the influence of Leonardo and that whatever their precise destination, 187 00:19:47,790 --> 00:19:54,840 if indeed they had a destination. And they may not have they probably date from the opening years of the 16th century. 188 00:19:54,840 --> 00:20:03,270 Besides the extraordinary finish of the pen war, what's perhaps most distinctive here is that both sides include some form of squaring off lines 189 00:20:03,270 --> 00:20:08,700 that apparently make reference to the external outworn a future finished work on the Recto. 190 00:20:08,700 --> 00:20:10,860 These Lorens seem merely functional, 191 00:20:10,860 --> 00:20:18,090 and they're accompanied by a cryptic autographed notation that probably refers to some projected transfer of the design to another. 192 00:20:18,090 --> 00:20:24,930 For the rectangle on the verso, however, is a representational part of the design itself, 193 00:20:24,930 --> 00:20:33,360 creating a sense of depth out of which the Madonna and child emerge in what may be relief or may be in fact fully three dimensional sculptural form. 194 00:20:33,360 --> 00:20:39,410 Suffice it to say that this sheet is to an unusual degree, geared toward a final product and particularly on the VAIR. 195 00:20:39,410 --> 00:20:47,100 So here, that gives the drawing a special sort of monumentality, almost as though it were the final product, like a presentation drawing, 196 00:20:47,100 --> 00:20:53,820 except it's 30 years before Michelangelo made any present or presentation drawings and that he did very few. 197 00:20:53,820 --> 00:21:03,210 He did not leave the drawing in that form. However, sometime later he inscribed 24 lines of verse, an elegant script and without correction, 198 00:21:03,210 --> 00:21:07,560 the first eight with a firmer hand and in slightly larger letters than the rest. 199 00:21:07,560 --> 00:21:11,820 Beneath that, and presumably still later, he composed some alternative lines. 200 00:21:11,820 --> 00:21:15,390 Not all of them decipherable the body of the. 201 00:21:15,390 --> 00:21:23,070 As laid down in such a fashion that it's right. Edge finishes precisely at the point where the fictive marble slab begins. 202 00:21:23,070 --> 00:21:28,320 Clearly, those 24 lines do not represent a working draught, as we often see on these sheets. 203 00:21:28,320 --> 00:21:35,580 Rather, they are formally inscribed in this space on the page. Otherwise, obviously, the lines wouldn't all end at exactly the right place. 204 00:21:35,580 --> 00:21:41,850 You can begin lines in a straight spot, but you cannot by accident, end them there. 205 00:21:41,850 --> 00:21:49,260 Whatever the artist originally chose to represent here, say a Madonna who opens her cloak in the style of a misericordia or a current 206 00:21:49,260 --> 00:21:53,370 tests to reveal or protect a Christ child who's absorbed in reading a book. 207 00:21:53,370 --> 00:21:56,400 The whole thing inside some sort of marble frame, whatever it was. 208 00:21:56,400 --> 00:22:03,090 The ensemble was subsequently expanded to include a lengthy piece of writing that, depending how you look at it, 209 00:22:03,090 --> 00:22:08,550 may simply be adjacent to the pictorial sketch on the page and live on the page, as it were. 210 00:22:08,550 --> 00:22:15,150 Or it may be imagined as actually inscribed in the space of the fictional monument itself. 211 00:22:15,150 --> 00:22:21,480 Whatever the rabbit duck possibilities here, the content of the text bears close attention. 212 00:22:21,480 --> 00:22:26,460 You have a face sweeter than grape must, and it looks like a snail seems to have passed across it. 213 00:22:26,460 --> 00:22:30,330 It shines so much and it is more beautiful than a turnip teeth. 214 00:22:30,330 --> 00:22:38,310 White is parsnips so that you would charm even the Pope and eyes the colour of medicinal treacle and hair whiter and blonder than leeks. 215 00:22:38,310 --> 00:22:47,280 So I shall die if you do not come to my help. So if I stress the formal aspects of this design, it's in order to establish just how complex. 216 00:22:47,280 --> 00:22:52,320 Not to say bizarre the relation between the drawing and verse making has become. 217 00:22:52,320 --> 00:22:59,430 You have already noticed that an element of irony and self irony appears in some of these word image combinations, 218 00:22:59,430 --> 00:23:05,670 like the list of foods and the painting of the Sistine ceiling, both of which in some sense are Jakobsson. 219 00:23:05,670 --> 00:23:10,110 But here the incongruity in this case, not just between picture and word, 220 00:23:10,110 --> 00:23:16,260 but also between sacred visual representation and verbal low comedy is at its most radical. 221 00:23:16,260 --> 00:23:24,180 The poem itself, after all, is in the mode of mock encomium. It's a form that depends historically on a periodic relation to predecessor texts. 222 00:23:24,180 --> 00:23:33,180 In this case, the Petrarch and Blah's, or the list of the beloveds beauties Michaelangelo's It Happens operates at a second level of relation to his 223 00:23:33,180 --> 00:23:39,500 predecessors since he patterned his poem with uncharacteristic fidelity after comic first by barely bertke, 224 00:23:39,500 --> 00:23:43,590 yellow and notably Lordan. So they made Tichy in each of these cases. 225 00:23:43,590 --> 00:23:48,870 The jokes depend on the intensity of the Speaker's engagement with the high literary tradition. 226 00:23:48,870 --> 00:23:54,480 That is to say that careful reading of literature at the same time is the same speaker turns out to 227 00:23:54,480 --> 00:24:03,990 have a preposterously earthbound field of reference with which to build his glorious erotic similitude. 228 00:24:03,990 --> 00:24:11,690 But Michaelangelo's able to go. His call is comic predecessors one better because he is possessed of an additional instrument whereby loftiness 229 00:24:11,690 --> 00:24:18,390 may be deflated with mockery to inscribe these ludicrous lines next to what is not only a Madonna and child, 230 00:24:18,390 --> 00:24:26,220 but also the sculpture of a Madonna and child. And with the Christ child's head buried in a book, no less is to add yet one more dimension, 231 00:24:26,220 --> 00:24:30,930 literally to the complex gap between the heroic and the prosaic. 232 00:24:30,930 --> 00:24:35,790 From the point of view of self-revelation in the style of David with a slingshot and I with my boat. 233 00:24:35,790 --> 00:24:43,670 Perhaps the most important thing is that this Protic move enables Michelangelo to step into the poetic persona in a new way. 234 00:24:43,670 --> 00:24:51,450 When Lorenzo, they made Achee magnifico himself, who probably composed the poem in question but may not it, but was believed to have anyway. 235 00:24:51,450 --> 00:24:57,600 When he composes the long Polyphemus like love monologue of the boorish Barberini. 236 00:24:57,600 --> 00:25:05,760 The joke is that the real poet could not possibly be further from the bumpkin whose voice he assumes for Michaelangelo, as it turns out. 237 00:25:05,760 --> 00:25:12,630 The alternative identity is a little closer to home, he concludes the formal verses with. 238 00:25:12,630 --> 00:25:16,990 If it were possible for me to have blocks of stone, we understand. 239 00:25:16,990 --> 00:25:22,410 I'm here to today make incredible things when he concludes with that. 240 00:25:22,410 --> 00:25:30,130 In other words, he adds a clumsy boast about artistic accomplishment to all the poems, other awkward love language, 241 00:25:30,130 --> 00:25:37,470 and on a sheet of paper that is probably for some considerable period of time represented the remains of some uncompleted project. 242 00:25:37,470 --> 00:25:42,480 In effect, the pages become a sort of skewed mi's on a beam in which the maker of both picture and 243 00:25:42,480 --> 00:25:48,210 word is outed as someone whose every ambition is doomed to laughable disappointment. 244 00:25:48,210 --> 00:25:56,100 The idea of accomplishing Kosa incredibly remains in the realm of unpublished text and uncompleted statuary. 245 00:25:56,100 --> 00:26:01,740 And the goal of self scrutiny and self representation is most decidedly achieved by placing these 246 00:26:01,740 --> 00:26:09,780 visual and verbal marks in such curious proximity on the page one step further toward the unconscious. 247 00:26:09,780 --> 00:26:15,150 The recto of yet another louvres sheet represents one of many relatively stable efforts at a fully. 248 00:26:15,150 --> 00:26:22,020 Realised figure on paper, though, its central Apollo Belvedere, a style nude, has clearly been reworked. 249 00:26:22,020 --> 00:26:29,390 And another classical figure added, But it's the vair, so that turns as it turns into a maelstrom of angel. 250 00:26:29,390 --> 00:26:33,750 The work there began as a tracing of the rector's principal figure. 251 00:26:33,750 --> 00:26:36,450 But beyond that point, all hell breaks loose. 252 00:26:36,450 --> 00:26:47,490 Crowded into a small space, there are no fewer than nine additional drawings executed, either with pencil or various forms of pen and ink or both. 253 00:26:47,490 --> 00:26:52,710 And in all four possible orientations of the page, with the tracing an upright position, 254 00:26:52,710 --> 00:26:59,280 Michaelangelo drew a slave like figure with upraised arm produced and quick outline, as well as a likely hatch. 255 00:26:59,280 --> 00:27:02,640 Will Pluto's head and you'll have to work your own. 256 00:27:02,640 --> 00:27:06,210 Where's Waldo? And finding all of these as as I've had to do. 257 00:27:06,210 --> 00:27:15,390 Turning the page 90 degrees to the right, we find a finely drawn male midsection with a suggestion of upper body and legs in a similar style. 258 00:27:15,390 --> 00:27:23,250 He sketches a profile head and beneath it another possibly similar head, so faint that even its medium is difficult to determine. 259 00:27:23,250 --> 00:27:27,210 It won't be visible in this form with the next turning. 260 00:27:27,210 --> 00:27:32,220 We can see a Pluto complete to the ankles in ink outline its posture reminiscent of 261 00:27:32,220 --> 00:27:37,530 the lock on younger son and virtually invisible in what is now the lower left corner. 262 00:27:37,530 --> 00:27:41,850 A reclining figure, perhaps in the style of a river God. 263 00:27:41,850 --> 00:27:51,330 The final turning gives us a heavily outlined left leg and a bearded man wearing an elaborately plumed hat, both very carefully drawn in ink. 264 00:27:51,330 --> 00:27:59,190 And of course, I do this in order. But we have no idea precisely in what order he originally produced it. 265 00:27:59,190 --> 00:28:03,120 In one sense, and we are seeing a dizzying range of inventions, 266 00:28:03,120 --> 00:28:08,520 while in another sense it is clear that many of these fragments are recurrent efforts to sketches sampling 267 00:28:08,520 --> 00:28:15,030 a particular body parts torso arm profile had been appear on many other of the artist contemporary sheets. 268 00:28:15,030 --> 00:28:20,040 Then in a third sense, whether we emphasise similarity or difference amongst these images, 269 00:28:20,040 --> 00:28:28,620 we can only wonder at their old but monstrous interrelation a giant leg that traverses a torso while a smaller torso blots out an ankle. 270 00:28:28,620 --> 00:28:36,300 One man's feather hat that tickles another man's headdress. A face that nuzzles testicles in the midst of all this. 271 00:28:36,300 --> 00:28:44,430 Perhaps the most surprising set of markings on the page are laid down in what turns out to be a largely undisturbed bit of space. 272 00:28:44,430 --> 00:28:49,380 The words appear in a quite elegant handwriting. Lot of dainty nordo over your food door. 273 00:28:49,380 --> 00:28:58,950 I know what I could Tom-Tom uneven to the light of day and appraisal Motegi showed say najai my Taipei's or provide the cradle the fiery not. 274 00:28:58,950 --> 00:29:03,330 I was caught in hour by hour, burning for a count of twenty one years. 275 00:29:03,330 --> 00:29:11,640 Death has untied. Nor have I ever felt such a weight. Nor do I believe that man and he breaks. 276 00:29:11,640 --> 00:29:18,630 It is an almost verbatim rendering of Petrarch to be made to 271. One of the poems written after Louris death. 277 00:29:18,630 --> 00:29:24,060 The sonnet goes on in a rather curious vein to announce the death of another woman whom the speaker loved. 278 00:29:24,060 --> 00:29:27,770 But Michaelangelo breaks off just before the poem moves in that direction. 279 00:29:27,770 --> 00:29:33,210 And its quotation is the more interesting because he's one mistake on leave in tune out of Dendle. 280 00:29:33,210 --> 00:29:36,840 He writes for uneven Tuno in Taggerty in the original. 281 00:29:36,840 --> 00:29:44,580 That one mistake brings the text in line with a different instance of Petrarch counting the years of his love in Remake 364. 282 00:29:44,580 --> 00:29:54,150 Paradoxically, it is Michaelangelo's misquotation his as his pulling of one Petrarch poem into another that corroborates his deep familiarity, 283 00:29:54,150 --> 00:29:58,950 as all the contemporary biographers attest with the Petrarch and Poetic Corpus. 284 00:29:58,950 --> 00:30:03,900 The text itself, to be sure, is written in associated significance. 285 00:30:03,900 --> 00:30:09,180 Even the very young Michaelangelo, it turns out, is highly conscious of time, ageing and death, 286 00:30:09,180 --> 00:30:17,640 focussing as he does frequently on the later sonnets, the the immortal sonnets of ending this passing at approximately age thirty. 287 00:30:17,640 --> 00:30:25,080 The artists could not possibly possess twenty one years worth of erotic memories, but maybe not anyway. 288 00:30:25,080 --> 00:30:31,380 I couldn't, Petra. I even now have trouble. 289 00:30:31,380 --> 00:30:37,110 Petrarch provides them vicariously. But what happens in this ventrilo causing transfer? 290 00:30:37,110 --> 00:30:42,000 Everything on the page is a fragment when we repeatedly see truncated or disjointed 291 00:30:42,000 --> 00:30:47,280 efforts at draughting body parts just to pick a bunch of instances where that happens, 292 00:30:47,280 --> 00:30:53,940 we tend to conclude rightly that Michelangelo is facing challenges, aesthetic challenges, technical challenges, 293 00:30:53,940 --> 00:31:00,810 psychological challenges or all of the above in regard to these pieces of representation. 294 00:31:00,810 --> 00:31:09,000 The same goes for the textual fragment. Michelangelo plucks outlines from his reading memory undertakes to transcribe what he recollects, 295 00:31:09,000 --> 00:31:14,960 misremembers, and then breaks off just short of completing the first stanza. 296 00:31:14,960 --> 00:31:20,600 The slide from one poem to another via the borrowing of our DNA tells us that his memory is 297 00:31:20,600 --> 00:31:27,840 creating its own filing system to flag a particular kind of passionately melancholy retrospection. 298 00:31:27,840 --> 00:31:35,060 And in the process, eliding a crucial distinction in Petrarch between recovering from Laura's death because of a new love, 299 00:31:35,060 --> 00:31:39,470 which is the case in one of these bone and recovering from her death. Because God wills it. 300 00:31:39,470 --> 00:31:40,430 So which is the case? 301 00:31:40,430 --> 00:31:48,530 And the other of these bones more revealing still is the truncation apparently in mid word in the lines that are otherwise so meticulously. 302 00:31:48,530 --> 00:31:52,340 Remember, Michelangelo has stopped writing or his memory has failed him. 303 00:31:52,340 --> 00:31:58,550 And after all, it's a poem about memory, precisely where Petrarch has made a rather surprising move. 304 00:31:58,550 --> 00:32:04,370 Petrarch reviews the 21 year long bond No Deal of Loving Laura. 305 00:32:04,370 --> 00:32:11,330 The death has now dissolved and he declares that he has never experienced such a heavy weight. 306 00:32:11,330 --> 00:32:16,220 Nor, he says, does he believe that? Dot, dot, dot. 307 00:32:16,220 --> 00:32:19,550 This is where Michaelangelo breaks off at this point. 308 00:32:19,550 --> 00:32:27,860 Doubtless an astute, disinterested in new, critically trained reader noticing Daeso say Payzant on the tide and weight might find it quite a lot. 309 00:32:27,860 --> 00:32:34,550 Quite logical that the statement, a belief that what he didn't believe with which the stanza ends, 310 00:32:34,550 --> 00:32:42,140 is the proposition that man cannot die of grief, which is what Petrarch in fact, said Nakato to Donald Mortal. 311 00:32:42,140 --> 00:32:50,420 In other words, that the dissolving of the bond and the lifting of the weight point toward recovery from the sorrow both of loving and losing Lauter 312 00:32:50,420 --> 00:32:56,870 a recovery that Petrarch will pursue precisely in the poem that McAllen's or mixes up with this one in the direction of serene, 313 00:32:56,870 --> 00:33:03,260 heavenly acceptance. But when I read the three and a half lines that precede the dot, dot, dot, 314 00:33:03,260 --> 00:33:09,170 particularly in relation to the hundreds of Petrarch and agonising lines that precede them, 315 00:33:09,170 --> 00:33:13,790 I entertained an expect expectation, quite contrary to where Petrarch actually goes. 316 00:33:13,790 --> 00:33:19,100 That is, I expect, the reader icepack the speaker to say that he will die of grief, 317 00:33:19,100 --> 00:33:24,770 a conclusion that is encouraged by the syntactic parallelism between the two NAIT nor Klauss. 318 00:33:24,770 --> 00:33:29,000 The first of which speaks to such Danti and suffering Linnaeus' to suppose 319 00:33:29,000 --> 00:33:34,670 that the second will intensify rather than diminish this expression of pain. 320 00:33:34,670 --> 00:33:37,640 Michaelangelo is stuck at this crossroads of possibilities, 321 00:33:37,640 --> 00:33:43,520 which is actually a multiple crossroads not only before the question of whether one can recover from grief, 322 00:33:43,520 --> 00:33:48,980 but also whether the inability to die of grief should be understood as a good thing or a bad thing. 323 00:33:48,980 --> 00:33:55,010 Petrarch, for his part, complicates that question with an equally ambiguous recourse to a second beloved, 324 00:33:55,010 --> 00:34:00,320 which leads him into the weird territory of suggesting that Louris death was a piece of good fortune, 325 00:34:00,320 --> 00:34:05,670 since it trained him to have an easier time with the death of her successor and his affection. 326 00:34:05,670 --> 00:34:11,950 Go. Go figure. You say New York. Michaelangelo can't go down that particular road. 327 00:34:11,950 --> 00:34:19,520 He is unable to pursue Petrarch and role playing so far as to hypothesise a second beloved or even at this point a first. 328 00:34:19,520 --> 00:34:25,880 But he is able to move forward from this verbal rupture in a manner that Petrarch did not have at his disposal. 329 00:34:25,880 --> 00:34:31,550 As in many other cases, I hesitate to declaim the precise temporal or causal relation between words and images, 330 00:34:31,550 --> 00:34:38,330 though here the ink does look quite similar. But however, these two sets of markings managed to find themselves in proximity and the 331 00:34:38,330 --> 00:34:44,900 interrupted Petrarch lines next to the Wingard Moreno angel right below them, 332 00:34:44,900 --> 00:34:51,860 barely visible. Take my word for it seem to converge on questions of death, love in the hereafter. 333 00:34:51,860 --> 00:34:56,810 It's a decidedly jagged connexion, of course. Once again, hardly a case of what Victoria Police's. 334 00:34:56,810 --> 00:35:04,730 But it will lead us to one final page where I think we can assert the kind of logic that may animate my material cycle. 335 00:35:04,730 --> 00:35:07,250 Biography a couple of decades later. 336 00:35:07,250 --> 00:35:13,760 And Michaelangelo's career, though dates are rarely certain when writing poetry began to occupy him as much or at any rate, 337 00:35:13,760 --> 00:35:20,390 as intensely as the making of visual art. He works on a set of tests rhema verses that reveal, in fact, 338 00:35:20,390 --> 00:35:27,890 close indebtedness to the Petrarch sonnet that he had stopped in the middle of inscribing amid the drawings on the last year we've talked about. 339 00:35:27,890 --> 00:35:33,380 He has at this time had the real experience of the death of a loved one, perhaps his brother vulnerable. 340 00:35:33,380 --> 00:35:37,760 And now he ventures on precisely the territory that lay beyond his reach. 341 00:35:37,760 --> 00:35:46,880 When he copy Dreamy 271 Taupo dolore Whirlpool's to comp Aviva, excessive pain makes me still survive and live. 342 00:35:46,880 --> 00:35:51,710 And from that point, his language turns yet more Petrarch and cruel. 343 00:35:51,710 --> 00:36:01,340 I've just read the English cruel mercy and merciless grace left me alive and cut you off from me, breaking but not extinguishing our bond. 344 00:36:01,340 --> 00:36:06,320 And not only did they deprive me of your memory. 345 00:36:06,320 --> 00:36:12,680 Once again, the ellipsis, even though he seems to be composing something like a fair copy one more time, 346 00:36:12,680 --> 00:36:18,820 he breaks off in the middle of a heavily charged. Tactic unit, there is no version of this version of the text. 347 00:36:18,820 --> 00:36:21,670 And so we cannot guess what else crude Talpiot thought they inspired, 348 00:36:21,670 --> 00:36:27,310 thought they might maybe they might do to him, besides not only the deprived of memory, 349 00:36:27,310 --> 00:36:34,750 but what else they might do to him, besides, indeed, by creating the double oxymoronic subject, a cruel mercy and merciless grace. 350 00:36:34,750 --> 00:36:38,320 Michaelangelo has further complicated the question that was left hanging in the 351 00:36:38,320 --> 00:36:43,600 Petrarch transcription as to whether this extra consequence of brief was going to be a 352 00:36:43,600 --> 00:36:48,670 positive one or a negative word that we were hearing in some territory of deep inward 353 00:36:48,670 --> 00:36:53,770 uncertainty is confirmed by the fact that this isn't the only ellipsis on the sheet. 354 00:36:53,770 --> 00:36:58,630 We've been looking at the side that is Dennis designated as the Recto, but previously on the verse. 355 00:36:58,630 --> 00:37:04,570 So he's made a much rougher attempt at at the same poem where the same feelings. 356 00:37:04,570 --> 00:37:13,300 It begins, as does the later version, with an extravagant, pathetic fallacy about the way his size so speedy would have dried up the world's 357 00:37:13,300 --> 00:37:17,740 bodies of water were it not that his tears had filled them up again with liquid. 358 00:37:17,740 --> 00:37:20,560 This is why he may not be the greatest boat ever lived. 359 00:37:20,560 --> 00:37:27,730 But but there are a lot of people he sort of based part of inventing that he has a lot to answer for, and that kind of concerns me. 360 00:37:27,730 --> 00:37:32,740 But then he gets bogged down with a conceit about the individual who falls in love, Keesey, 361 00:37:32,740 --> 00:37:37,930 Marmora, and therefore meets death with pleasure or perhaps does not meet death with pleasure. 362 00:37:37,930 --> 00:37:42,320 And again, he crosses out precisely on this question of pleasure or not pleasure. 363 00:37:42,320 --> 00:37:47,020 And he goes to various cancelled possibilities. And they are followed by something much clearer, 364 00:37:47,020 --> 00:37:55,960 presumably designed to replace the cosy lava Allante Hospital of Pain on Keyport, all called DTA make Tonto Qatar. 365 00:37:55,960 --> 00:38:03,280 And there it is again. So the violent and bitter pain that I feel in my heart on your account is to me so dear. 366 00:38:03,280 --> 00:38:08,440 At which point yet again, the writing breaks off. By this time, there should not be a surprise. 367 00:38:08,440 --> 00:38:14,170 It is the clearest and most straightforward account of what has evidently been a great anguish for Michaelangelo, 368 00:38:14,170 --> 00:38:17,800 namely the possibility that he actually enjoys suffering, 369 00:38:17,800 --> 00:38:23,890 that in other words, he might indeed benefit from the death of someone he loves, as Petrarch had for different reasons. 370 00:38:23,890 --> 00:38:32,350 Curiously proposed in his own situation. But what is interesting is the glimpse into Michaelangelo's unspoken mental state is the break itself. 371 00:38:32,350 --> 00:38:39,850 It's difficult in the case of the petrol Pomi looked at a few moments ago to be sure about the relation between the writing and the image making. 372 00:38:39,850 --> 00:38:46,690 But here, the nature of that relation is clearer. He does not finish the thought that Tom Toccata introduces. 373 00:38:46,690 --> 00:38:49,300 Instead of revealing quantum toccata, 374 00:38:49,300 --> 00:38:56,440 he chooses to distance himself from the experience of writing and reading with what appears to be the same pen and the same ink. 375 00:38:56,440 --> 00:39:04,900 And, of course, the same right hand. He composes a portrait of his own left hand with which which he has laid down sharply, 376 00:39:04,900 --> 00:39:09,520 bent at the wrist on or near the other half of the partially empty page. 377 00:39:09,520 --> 00:39:18,100 And that page does look empty because we're seeing the writing from the other side. But that that part of the pages and that side is is empty. 378 00:39:18,100 --> 00:39:26,940 The index finger slightly truncated by the final word. Points to that troublesome love of suffering right there with Kafka. 379 00:39:26,940 --> 00:39:31,180 Michelangelo has in effect recreated the sign of the man accused. 380 00:39:31,180 --> 00:39:37,840 The picture of the pointing finger that had for centuries in both manuscript and print given special emphasis to the written word. 381 00:39:37,840 --> 00:39:43,510 But the kind of emphasis that mere words themselves could not provide in this case, 382 00:39:43,510 --> 00:39:50,290 the image arises in the silence, blankets the space and delivers what the text cannot itself deliver, 383 00:39:50,290 --> 00:39:57,310 cannot bring itself to deliver a self-portrait which but for the necessary imperfection of being a left rather than the right hand, 384 00:39:57,310 --> 00:40:03,790 would stand as pictorial metonymy for that inward capacity, which makes both images and words. 385 00:40:03,790 --> 00:40:07,900 But it remains in mathematical terms and an irrational relation. 386 00:40:07,900 --> 00:40:10,480 There is no hand handey ratio here, no. 387 00:40:10,480 --> 00:40:19,480 That can map the transit between prices and picked her up as between, say, the bread, wine and fish and their pictorial equivalents on the menu page, 388 00:40:19,480 --> 00:40:27,130 or even between the fictive statue of the Madonna and the auto referential burlesque that mocks any ambition to produce such a work. 389 00:40:27,130 --> 00:40:34,450 It is fundamentally the income answerability of language and picture that counts as his deepest, most generative force. 390 00:40:34,450 --> 00:40:42,250 So if there is so much enigma here, how is it and by what means do I believe I can read Michaelangelo's mind? 391 00:40:42,250 --> 00:40:48,820 We have just to anchor ourselves in data, a particular historical individual with some 500 of his personal letters, 392 00:40:48,820 --> 00:40:55,870 hundreds of records in his handwriting, and almost as many first person poems to biographies written by close associates of his. 393 00:40:55,870 --> 00:41:01,870 A sizeable number of excellent contracts, numerous transcriptions of his conversation, as usual, 394 00:41:01,870 --> 00:41:07,320 not reliable, and at least a thousand letters to him, more documents in which he is mentioned. 395 00:41:07,320 --> 00:41:15,230 Michelangelo is, I would venture to say, the most extensively archived early modern European who is not a king, pope or saint. 396 00:41:15,230 --> 00:41:21,560 It's not only the volume of the documentation, but also the nature of the written record as regards Renaissance personhood. 397 00:41:21,560 --> 00:41:24,680 The fact is that from almost the earliest moments we can trace, 398 00:41:24,680 --> 00:41:30,330 Michelangelo was fixated on himself and quite conscious of his work as auto referential. 399 00:41:30,330 --> 00:41:37,310 And he possessed a kind of megalomania that not only caused him to see the external world as a projection of himself, 400 00:41:37,310 --> 00:41:41,090 but also inspired his contemporaries to partake of that vision. 401 00:41:41,090 --> 00:41:47,420 And so I take it is possible to whittle away at the methodological boundaries between biography and over. 402 00:41:47,420 --> 00:41:53,440 In effect, I take permission from Vasari, amongst others, to consider the life itself as a work of art, 403 00:41:53,440 --> 00:41:59,270 with the caveat that the life of the artist is not so much a narrative constructed from many sources and 404 00:41:59,270 --> 00:42:05,600 given a Realogy status against which the artistic production can be made to perform its imaginative work. 405 00:42:05,600 --> 00:42:13,250 Rather, the life of the artist is best embodied as a sheaf of papers which, however, public its ultimate diffusion. 406 00:42:13,250 --> 00:42:21,380 And after all, the very fact that we have these sheets speaks to their public diffusion, turns out to have been born for the most part as private, 407 00:42:21,380 --> 00:42:30,320 simply, supremely self-referential and filled with all the forms of expression and repression that are characteristic of internal life. 408 00:42:30,320 --> 00:42:35,510 I choose to consider them as Michaelangelo's waking dreams. The records of his unconscious. 409 00:42:35,510 --> 00:42:41,990 And to cite another relevant Freudian formulation, the psychopathology of his everyday life. 410 00:42:41,990 --> 00:42:48,680 But as I reflect on my own practise, I realised that I do privilege a certain subset of this archive. 411 00:42:48,680 --> 00:43:00,260 If Michelangelo proved to have been a radically restless maker of Marx on papers, we can see in these amongst hundreds of examples, 412 00:43:00,260 --> 00:43:06,560 it ought to be made clear that sometimes, in fact, he broke off words with other words, 413 00:43:06,560 --> 00:43:11,360 and of course, sometimes he broke off pictures with other pictures. Why then? 414 00:43:11,360 --> 00:43:15,650 Or so I would ask if I were writing a nasty review of my own book. 415 00:43:15,650 --> 00:43:26,210 So the anomalous presence of the Petrarch lines be any more revealing than the anomalous juxtapositions on the same sheet that are merely pictorial? 416 00:43:26,210 --> 00:43:34,490 Well, despite all my disclaimers, it appears that my project turns out to have its own investment in pictorial wasis and all those 417 00:43:34,490 --> 00:43:39,440 other assertions about a poem being a speaking picture and a picture being a silent poet. 418 00:43:39,440 --> 00:43:44,120 I suppose that is because in this whole field of fissure and fragmentation, 419 00:43:44,120 --> 00:43:51,130 I find the increments or ability of language and picture to be Michaelangelo's deepest, most generative enigma. 420 00:43:51,130 --> 00:43:54,660 And I embrace wholeheartedly the metaphor that his great biographer, J. 421 00:43:54,660 --> 00:44:00,590 A Simmons, used when he called Michelangelo's drawings the hieroglyphs of his mind. 422 00:44:00,590 --> 00:44:08,150 I'm not certain that Simmons was referring to the words on the pictures or the words as pictures, but whatever he had in mind. 423 00:44:08,150 --> 00:44:15,410 The video graphic metaphor of Simmons captures for me everything about the inextricable city of text and image, 424 00:44:15,410 --> 00:44:20,010 about the dream of an expressive system that might be picture and word at once, 425 00:44:20,010 --> 00:44:27,140 and about the ultimate undecipherable ability of the invisible spaces of inspiration where they are conjoined. 426 00:44:27,140 --> 00:44:34,490 If it turns out I'm turning my own pages like Stefan Zweig's hapless blind collector. 427 00:44:34,490 --> 00:44:44,720 It's because I am still trying to put together the visible and the linguistic, and I'm still faltering in the unbridgeable gap between them. 428 00:44:44,720 --> 00:44:58,370 Thank you.