Welcome to this special event within the History Heart Departmental Research Seminar,
an especially special pleasure to welcome to Oxford Professor Leonard Barkan,
whose class of 1943 university professor of comparative literature,
Princeton Professor Bachman, has taught at numerous universities, northwestern Michigan, NYU.
He's been an actor and a director, and he's a regular contributor to publications around the world in the USA and Italy,
including on the subject of food and wine. He's published numerous important and influential works which are known to many here,
perhaps most famously to date, unearthing the past archaeology and aesthetics in the making of Renaissance culture,
which won prises from the Modern Languages Association, the College Association and the American Comparative Literature Association.
His books also include The Gods Made Flesh, Metamorphosis and the Pursuit of Paganism.
And most recently and the work that we're here to celebrate tonight, which we have a please of a copy on the table.
His current work, Michelangelo A Life on Paper, which also provides the title of his thoughts this evening.
Please welcome Professor Bondman. Thank you.
As I said to Craig, I have a background in the theatre.
So when I see a Sell-Out crowd, my heart opens up, which I very rarely saw in the theatre.
So I'm glad I'm seen it in this other lesser career of mine.
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.
When I was five years old,
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,
but that my inability to draw pictures was so severe as to suggest slight mental retardation.
And many have concurred subsequent to decades when I was 14.
A very canny English teacher responding to some now forgotten question for me about poems and
pictures put into my hands a monumentally important book by Jean Hagstrom called The Sister Arts.
I believe at the time that I looked at the pictures, but I never read the text.
In fact, fifteen years later, Hagstrom hired me as his colleague at Northwestern.
But that's getting ahead of my plot.
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,
about an art collector who had gone blind and was forced to describe each
etching and engraving in his collection to a dealer who had come to buy them.
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.
So the old man's verbal descriptions were in fact all that was left of the collection.
And these textual strings got as my film went along.
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,
but more particularly in some sort of jagged and unstable relationship between them.
Like those old man's empty sheets that he so fulsomely describes.
For years I've been working on these relations, focussing as well on reciprocal connexions between antiquity and the Renaissance.
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.
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,
a shell game, an active invasion, an attempt to promote one discourse at the expense of another,
a particularly persistent skirmish in long running wars for cultural prestige amongst different aesthetic and intellectual enterprises.
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
makers of text and makers of pictures both to theorise and to practise their craft.
Now, Michelangelo entered into this realm of my interests.
It wasn't only indeed, not even largely because he was both a great artist and a great poet.
Of course, that is true.
Around the time I wrote Transforming Passion, which placed his drawings of Ganymede and Tity is at the centre of its argument,
I started looking at other Michelangelo drawings. I noticed, first of all, that many of these sheets of paper also contained writing.
Indeed, his writing. I also noticed that by and large, nobody else was paying much attention to this, despite a notable example.
While Charlotta this corpus.
Dizzy and sort of my favourite pictures just to prove that I own this monstrous thing, indespensible and supremely authoritative in many ways.
While he succeeds in documenting the my need details of each sheets pictorial contents,
only in rare cases do the entries include transcription or discussion of the text.
Take the case of this sheet in a Vatican codex of Michaelangelo's autograph work just to give you the amount,
a sense of the amount of scholarly production involved in Bertoni.
It is most of this huge double space spread that is devoted to this sheet, but it is entirely devoted to the visual sketches.
The words, though occupying a considerably larger space, are not even transcribed.
Things are not much different on the literary side into Noid Girot of these exhaustive edition of the poetic texts.
Still, the benchmark in the field, though desperately in need of replacement,
includes every possible variant in Michaelangelo's many verbal revisions, but relegates the presence of the adjacent sketches to these revisions.
To what? As you can see, the tiniest little footnote from Girardi's edition.
For instance, you would scarcely be aware that in that Michaelangelo's poetic lines to.
It's up to a more male contract, all Cuno, known as Sensa, is part of tequilla mode.
They only laugh daily, ingenuously. Billig what if in your name I have conceived somebody's image?
This never happens without death. Likewise, appearing with it, which makes my powers of art and intellect fade away.
You would never know from Girardi's that these lines are composed indeed directly on top of a drawing,
which is itself, of course, being made to fade away. Good.
In short, the whole question of Michelangelo writing and drawing in the same spaces seems to have suffered from a similar sort
of jagged and unstable relationship in the scholarly realm to that which these topics had occupied in my own life.
But there were surprises awaiting me in my attempt to disentangle and reorder all of this matter.
Subspace. Michelangelo. If I imagined that a work, say, like this sheet with beautiful poetic lines,
you give me only what I what you already have left over and ask from me what I do not have,
which are drawn in parallel to an exquisite, if faintly sketched need.
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.
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.
They both are based on Brueghel Fall of Icarus.
If I expected to work the same tricks that I have with paintings that actually contain words like Placenta's Arcadium,
Shepperd's or Rembrandts Belshazzar Feast. If indeed I thought that the less the dialogical milestones in the world in image tradition,
from paresis ars poetica to lessons lay-off go on would be of much use.
I was destined to be the longest sentence of the afternoon.
I was destined to be sadly disappointed. I realised in the course of my researches that all these interrelated expressions
of picture and were dependent on some sort of aesthetic premeditation.
Michaelangelo's pages, on the other hand, with all their multiple markings, tend to be documents in artistic practise.
The trance consequences of a creative moment mentality that spontaneously
expressed itself in an unregulated mixture of visual and verbal inscriptions.
They were best understood neither as essays in the tradition of cross medium
correspondence nor as milestones on the way to the production of end stage masterpieces.
Indeed, they were best deployed as a way, and I'm putting this in particular and deliberately provocative language to read Michaelangelo's mind.
And so the pick to replace this book turned into a psycho biography.
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.
But first, a brief introduction to the archive. Michelangelo was, of course, both an artist and a writer, though in the former role,
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.
So only 60 years after his death, credited to him and in his own hand.
We have circa 500 drawings, 500 letters and 300 poems, not to mention contracts, memos and the equivalent of laundry lists.
In every instance, there may be questions of attribution, though, for our purposes.
It's interesting to note that scholars tend to agree far more easily on the
authentication of his handwriting than on the authentication of his draughtsmanship.
Whatever the precise degree of authentication, all of these activities took place on paper,
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.
If there was a multiplicity of work on a single page, it may have been in part because of economy.
But it also is the case that some extremely trivial efforts of both picture and word are permitted by him to occupy paper.
Mere questions of materiality and price then cannot account for his practise.
So far, his writings on the drawings are concerned. Just to give you a statistical sense of the phenomenon.
About 25 percent of the drawings cohabit with text of some kind on the same sheet, and the proportion rises higher if one counts.
All the architectural drawings where words are often the logical and necessary adjunct to the image.
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.
And this proportion would be even higher if one were to consider all the fragmentary bits of text.
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.
Sometimes the texts and images situate themselves to.
Gather because Michaelangelo actually meant them to be related by the fundamental parallelisms of, say,
picture and caption, as in the case particularly intriguing to me of this extremely interesting drawing in which he,
the artist, writes three lists of foods and Trev's tortellini, fennel soup,
two breads for bread, six breads, etc., and sketches their visual equivalents next to them.
A more famous instance is this sheet of paper. You have to read.
You have to buy the book to know what I have to say about these. Are they?
These are the teasers, the trailer thing. Watch the incredible arguments on this sheet of paper.
Famously, a sheet devoted to painting the Sistine ceiling where he writes a poem ridiculing his own physical position while executing the work.
And next to it produces a caricature of the activity,
strangely presenting himself as a heroic nood and his sacred subject matter as a kind of infantile stick figure with these two images.
You've now seen virtually all the drawings,
and this will amount ultimately with the other basically the other two, one of which we look at in a moment,
something like two percent of the total in which this kind of straightforward caption picture relationship can be observed.
That's it for that. Beyond that one, a more complicated territory at the opposite extreme.
Let's say there are cases where it is the merest happenstance that words and pictures are on the same sheet.
Not for me, uninteresting for that reason, but nevertheless causally a happenstance.
Consider this beautiful drawing on the back of which probably early,
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,
or this resurrection drawing, which also houses bookkeeping, details themselves stretched amongst weird incongruities.
Cape arms, oxen, a jacket for an assistant. My father's funeral, things like that lumped together.
Don't go there sometimes in a similar but somewhat more deliberate thing.
He doodles on letters or writes letters on doodles here, and Michaelangelo plays with the address side of a letter.
Whereas here he writes his himself, writes a letter, an important one, in fact, on top of previous drawing.
Sometimes it's poetry that gets juxtaposed and interlaced with sketches in this direction.
We can read a line from Dante from this suicide count of the inferno while turned upside down.
What we can read is some of Michaelangelo's own verse efforts.
Sometimes there are messages for which drawing paper is used or drawing paper or vice versa, particularly in relation to his pupils and associates.
Here have patients, lovely constellation enough and here, draw, Antonio, draw, draw and don't waste time,
he says to a pupil who clearly has been wasting time or at least wasting chalk.
Given how terrible the drawings, the copies are next to the originals that Michelangelo has set for him,
sometimes the text stands in our family demonstrable relationship to a project that is the endpoint of the sketching,
as is as in this for the reading room of the Laurentian library, especially with architectural materials.
Whereas in other times the income drawings are so extreme that they seem to revert to a kind of a.
With pictorial pieces of their own, as in this subject, which is probably the Annunciation,
which includes a very pedestrian message about paying for a shipment of wood in the position where indeed,
traditionally the angel's met words are spelled out. And then there are the juiciest cases of all vul of randomness and incongruity,
but also with greater and lesser temptations toward some sort of large scale interpretation here,
including such phrases as our Maudet Dorsami Ocado Prego cannot do Rahmi Amico, Senor Alesandro Nobbys own.
It's this kind of page that suggests to me most directly the ways in which the composite of
word and image comes to represent a special kind of self-expression on the part of the artist.
I have no working hypothesis for putting organically together the meticulously rendered body parts,
the two profiles of possibly contrasting moods and the tiny little, almost invisible doodles.
Alongside these tantalising snippets of text about love, friendship and unidentified Alesandro and a bit of slightly mangled Petrarch,
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.
This page in the Louvre from about 15 to appears to include drawings from two different and concurrent projects for a sculptor, David.
The Bronze. Version long in the making and now long lost is imagined in toto.
On the left, while the marble version triumphantly completed in 54,
is represented by a sketch of its right arm in a radically different scale and presumably upside down in relation to the other drawing,
much could be said about the purely compositional relationship of the two drawings,
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.
My concern for the moment, however, is one of the pieces of writing on the page.
Davide Kollar froma Ayo Calarco. Michelangelo. David with his slingshot.
And I with my article, whatever that means.
Exactly, but generally translated properly as both in my book.
I spend quite a few pages considering what sort of bow this might be, how it might be like,
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
may itself derive from the biblical story about the confrontation between David and Goliath or between the Israelites and the Philistines.
Is Michelangelo the slender young David, up against the artistic establishment?
Is he the wielder of some Seftel almost musical weapon like David's David's other accoutrements,
as opposed to the kind of brute force represented by the Philistine?
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?
And what of the fact that uniquely in this version of the story, Goliath doesn't get represented at all,
whereas David becomes a giant for answers to these and other questions?
You can buy the book. What's important for today's argument, which is available at Blackwells?
How did this scam. I am told. I don't know why have that popped into my head, but there it is.
What is important for today's argument is that Michelangelo has drawn two Davids on this sheet and that whether previously,
concurrently or subsequently, he has first engaged in some complex introspection about his own stake in this piece of artistic production.
And second, he has composed a record of that introspection, whether for his own viewing or for that of others.
And third, he has sealed that communicative act by, say, in effect, signing his name, which,
as it happens, he is famous for not doing on virtually every finished artwork he ever produced.
What we have here, then, is a smoking gun for the proposition that Michaelangelo's sheets of paper were
sites where his meditations in relation to artistic practise express themselves.
What is extreme almost unique about this love sheet, and it goes with that nearly unique signature, is not just that Michelangelo was introspecting,
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.
If we're looking for the richest sort of auto revelations, however,
we may do better to catch him in the act when he is not quite so self-aware about the procedure.
The very beautiful drawings on both sides of this page have caused much dispute as to subject matter, purpose and date.
What can be said for certain is that they consist of three different groupings featuring the Madonna
that all of them show the influence of Leonardo and that whatever their precise destination,
if indeed they had a destination. And they may not have they probably date from the opening years of the 16th century.
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
that apparently make reference to the external outworn a future finished work on the Recto.
These Lorens seem merely functional,
and they're accompanied by a cryptic autographed notation that probably refers to some projected transfer of the design to another.
For the rectangle on the verso, however, is a representational part of the design itself,
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.
Suffice it to say that this sheet is to an unusual degree, geared toward a final product and particularly on the VAIR.
So here, that gives the drawing a special sort of monumentality, almost as though it were the final product, like a presentation drawing,
except it's 30 years before Michelangelo made any present or presentation drawings and that he did very few.
He did not leave the drawing in that form. However, sometime later he inscribed 24 lines of verse, an elegant script and without correction,
the first eight with a firmer hand and in slightly larger letters than the rest.
Beneath that, and presumably still later, he composed some alternative lines.
Not all of them decipherable the body of the.
As laid down in such a fashion that it's right. Edge finishes precisely at the point where the fictive marble slab begins.
Clearly, those 24 lines do not represent a working draught, as we often see on these sheets.
Rather, they are formally inscribed in this space on the page. Otherwise, obviously, the lines wouldn't all end at exactly the right place.
You can begin lines in a straight spot, but you cannot by accident, end them there.
Whatever the artist originally chose to represent here, say a Madonna who opens her cloak in the style of a misericordia or a current
tests to reveal or protect a Christ child who's absorbed in reading a book.
The whole thing inside some sort of marble frame, whatever it was.
The ensemble was subsequently expanded to include a lengthy piece of writing that, depending how you look at it,
may simply be adjacent to the pictorial sketch on the page and live on the page, as it were.
Or it may be imagined as actually inscribed in the space of the fictional monument itself.
Whatever the rabbit duck possibilities here, the content of the text bears close attention.
You have a face sweeter than grape must, and it looks like a snail seems to have passed across it.
It shines so much and it is more beautiful than a turnip teeth.
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.
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.
Not to say bizarre the relation between the drawing and verse making has become.
You have already noticed that an element of irony and self irony appears in some of these word image combinations,
like the list of foods and the painting of the Sistine ceiling, both of which in some sense are Jakobsson.
But here the incongruity in this case, not just between picture and word,
but also between sacred visual representation and verbal low comedy is at its most radical.
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.
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
predecessors since he patterned his poem with uncharacteristic fidelity after comic first by barely bertke,
yellow and notably Lordan. So they made Tichy in each of these cases.
The jokes depend on the intensity of the Speaker's engagement with the high literary tradition.
That is to say that careful reading of literature at the same time is the same speaker turns out to
have a preposterously earthbound field of reference with which to build his glorious erotic similitude.
But Michaelangelo's able to go. His call is comic predecessors one better because he is possessed of an additional instrument whereby loftiness
may be deflated with mockery to inscribe these ludicrous lines next to what is not only a Madonna and child,
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,
literally to the complex gap between the heroic and the prosaic.
From the point of view of self-revelation in the style of David with a slingshot and I with my boat.
Perhaps the most important thing is that this Protic move enables Michelangelo to step into the poetic persona in a new way.
When Lorenzo, they made Achee magnifico himself, who probably composed the poem in question but may not it, but was believed to have anyway.
When he composes the long Polyphemus like love monologue of the boorish Barberini.
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.
The alternative identity is a little closer to home, he concludes the formal verses with.
If it were possible for me to have blocks of stone, we understand.
I'm here to today make incredible things when he concludes with that.
In other words, he adds a clumsy boast about artistic accomplishment to all the poems, other awkward love language,
and on a sheet of paper that is probably for some considerable period of time represented the remains of some uncompleted project.
In effect, the pages become a sort of skewed mi's on a beam in which the maker of both picture and
word is outed as someone whose every ambition is doomed to laughable disappointment.
The idea of accomplishing Kosa incredibly remains in the realm of unpublished text and uncompleted statuary.
And the goal of self scrutiny and self representation is most decidedly achieved by placing these
visual and verbal marks in such curious proximity on the page one step further toward the unconscious.
The recto of yet another louvres sheet represents one of many relatively stable efforts at a fully.
Realised figure on paper, though, its central Apollo Belvedere, a style nude, has clearly been reworked.
And another classical figure added, But it's the vair, so that turns as it turns into a maelstrom of angel.
The work there began as a tracing of the rector's principal figure.
But beyond that point, all hell breaks loose.
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.
And in all four possible orientations of the page, with the tracing an upright position,
Michaelangelo drew a slave like figure with upraised arm produced and quick outline, as well as a likely hatch.
Will Pluto's head and you'll have to work your own.
Where's Waldo? And finding all of these as as I've had to do.
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.
He sketches a profile head and beneath it another possibly similar head, so faint that even its medium is difficult to determine.
It won't be visible in this form with the next turning.
We can see a Pluto complete to the ankles in ink outline its posture reminiscent of
the lock on younger son and virtually invisible in what is now the lower left corner.
A reclining figure, perhaps in the style of a river God.
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.
And of course, I do this in order. But we have no idea precisely in what order he originally produced it.
In one sense, and we are seeing a dizzying range of inventions,
while in another sense it is clear that many of these fragments are recurrent efforts to sketches sampling
a particular body parts torso arm profile had been appear on many other of the artist contemporary sheets.
Then in a third sense, whether we emphasise similarity or difference amongst these images,
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.
One man's feather hat that tickles another man's headdress. A face that nuzzles testicles in the midst of all this.
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.
The words appear in a quite elegant handwriting. Lot of dainty nordo over your food door.
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.
I was caught in hour by hour, burning for a count of twenty one years.
Death has untied. Nor have I ever felt such a weight. Nor do I believe that man and he breaks.
It is an almost verbatim rendering of Petrarch to be made to 271. One of the poems written after Louris death.
The sonnet goes on in a rather curious vein to announce the death of another woman whom the speaker loved.
But Michaelangelo breaks off just before the poem moves in that direction.
And its quotation is the more interesting because he's one mistake on leave in tune out of Dendle.
He writes for uneven Tuno in Taggerty in the original.
That one mistake brings the text in line with a different instance of Petrarch counting the years of his love in Remake 364.
Paradoxically, it is Michaelangelo's misquotation his as his pulling of one Petrarch poem into another that corroborates his deep familiarity,
as all the contemporary biographers attest with the Petrarch and Poetic Corpus.
The text itself, to be sure, is written in associated significance.
Even the very young Michaelangelo, it turns out, is highly conscious of time, ageing and death,
focussing as he does frequently on the later sonnets, the the immortal sonnets of ending this passing at approximately age thirty.
The artists could not possibly possess twenty one years worth of erotic memories, but maybe not anyway.
I couldn't, Petra. I even now have trouble.
Petrarch provides them vicariously. But what happens in this ventrilo causing transfer?
Everything on the page is a fragment when we repeatedly see truncated or disjointed
efforts at draughting body parts just to pick a bunch of instances where that happens,
we tend to conclude rightly that Michelangelo is facing challenges, aesthetic challenges, technical challenges,
psychological challenges or all of the above in regard to these pieces of representation.
The same goes for the textual fragment. Michelangelo plucks outlines from his reading memory undertakes to transcribe what he recollects,
misremembers, and then breaks off just short of completing the first stanza.
The slide from one poem to another via the borrowing of our DNA tells us that his memory is
creating its own filing system to flag a particular kind of passionately melancholy retrospection.
And in the process, eliding a crucial distinction in Petrarch between recovering from Laura's death because of a new love,
which is the case in one of these bone and recovering from her death. Because God wills it.
So which is the case?
And the other of these bones more revealing still is the truncation apparently in mid word in the lines that are otherwise so meticulously.
Remember, Michelangelo has stopped writing or his memory has failed him.
And after all, it's a poem about memory, precisely where Petrarch has made a rather surprising move.
Petrarch reviews the 21 year long bond No Deal of Loving Laura.
The death has now dissolved and he declares that he has never experienced such a heavy weight.
Nor, he says, does he believe that? Dot, dot, dot.
This is where Michaelangelo breaks off at this point.
Doubtless an astute, disinterested in new, critically trained reader noticing Daeso say Payzant on the tide and weight might find it quite a lot.
Quite logical that the statement, a belief that what he didn't believe with which the stanza ends,
is the proposition that man cannot die of grief, which is what Petrarch in fact, said Nakato to Donald Mortal.
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
a recovery that Petrarch will pursue precisely in the poem that McAllen's or mixes up with this one in the direction of serene,
heavenly acceptance. But when I read the three and a half lines that precede the dot, dot, dot,
particularly in relation to the hundreds of Petrarch and agonising lines that precede them,
I entertained an expect expectation, quite contrary to where Petrarch actually goes.
That is, I expect, the reader icepack the speaker to say that he will die of grief,
a conclusion that is encouraged by the syntactic parallelism between the two NAIT nor Klauss.
The first of which speaks to such Danti and suffering Linnaeus' to suppose
that the second will intensify rather than diminish this expression of pain.
Michaelangelo is stuck at this crossroads of possibilities,
which is actually a multiple crossroads not only before the question of whether one can recover from grief,
but also whether the inability to die of grief should be understood as a good thing or a bad thing.
Petrarch, for his part, complicates that question with an equally ambiguous recourse to a second beloved,
which leads him into the weird territory of suggesting that Louris death was a piece of good fortune,
since it trained him to have an easier time with the death of her successor and his affection.
Go. Go figure. You say New York. Michaelangelo can't go down that particular road.
He is unable to pursue Petrarch and role playing so far as to hypothesise a second beloved or even at this point a first.
But he is able to move forward from this verbal rupture in a manner that Petrarch did not have at his disposal.
As in many other cases, I hesitate to declaim the precise temporal or causal relation between words and images,
though here the ink does look quite similar. But however, these two sets of markings managed to find themselves in proximity and the
interrupted Petrarch lines next to the Wingard Moreno angel right below them,
barely visible. Take my word for it seem to converge on questions of death, love in the hereafter.
It's a decidedly jagged connexion, of course. Once again, hardly a case of what Victoria Police's.
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.
Biography a couple of decades later.
And Michaelangelo's career, though dates are rarely certain when writing poetry began to occupy him as much or at any rate,
as intensely as the making of visual art. He works on a set of tests rhema verses that reveal, in fact,
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.
He has at this time had the real experience of the death of a loved one, perhaps his brother vulnerable.
And now he ventures on precisely the territory that lay beyond his reach.
When he copy Dreamy 271 Taupo dolore Whirlpool's to comp Aviva, excessive pain makes me still survive and live.
And from that point, his language turns yet more Petrarch and cruel.
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.
And not only did they deprive me of your memory.
Once again, the ellipsis, even though he seems to be composing something like a fair copy one more time,
he breaks off in the middle of a heavily charged. Tactic unit, there is no version of this version of the text.
And so we cannot guess what else crude Talpiot thought they inspired,
thought they might maybe they might do to him, besides not only the deprived of memory,
but what else they might do to him, besides, indeed, by creating the double oxymoronic subject, a cruel mercy and merciless grace.
Michaelangelo has further complicated the question that was left hanging in the
Petrarch transcription as to whether this extra consequence of brief was going to be a
positive one or a negative word that we were hearing in some territory of deep inward
uncertainty is confirmed by the fact that this isn't the only ellipsis on the sheet.
We've been looking at the side that is Dennis designated as the Recto, but previously on the verse.
So he's made a much rougher attempt at at the same poem where the same feelings.
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
bodies of water were it not that his tears had filled them up again with liquid.
This is why he may not be the greatest boat ever lived.
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.
But then he gets bogged down with a conceit about the individual who falls in love, Keesey,
Marmora, and therefore meets death with pleasure or perhaps does not meet death with pleasure.
And again, he crosses out precisely on this question of pleasure or not pleasure.
And he goes to various cancelled possibilities. And they are followed by something much clearer,
presumably designed to replace the cosy lava Allante Hospital of Pain on Keyport, all called DTA make Tonto Qatar.
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.
At which point yet again, the writing breaks off. By this time, there should not be a surprise.
It is the clearest and most straightforward account of what has evidently been a great anguish for Michaelangelo,
namely the possibility that he actually enjoys suffering,
that in other words, he might indeed benefit from the death of someone he loves, as Petrarch had for different reasons.
Curiously proposed in his own situation. But what is interesting is the glimpse into Michaelangelo's unspoken mental state is the break itself.
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.
But here, the nature of that relation is clearer. He does not finish the thought that Tom Toccata introduces.
Instead of revealing quantum toccata,
he chooses to distance himself from the experience of writing and reading with what appears to be the same pen and the same ink.
And, of course, the same right hand. He composes a portrait of his own left hand with which which he has laid down sharply,
bent at the wrist on or near the other half of the partially empty page.
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.
The index finger slightly truncated by the final word. Points to that troublesome love of suffering right there with Kafka.
Michelangelo has in effect recreated the sign of the man accused.
The picture of the pointing finger that had for centuries in both manuscript and print given special emphasis to the written word.
But the kind of emphasis that mere words themselves could not provide in this case,
the image arises in the silence, blankets the space and delivers what the text cannot itself deliver,
cannot bring itself to deliver a self-portrait which but for the necessary imperfection of being a left rather than the right hand,
would stand as pictorial metonymy for that inward capacity, which makes both images and words.
But it remains in mathematical terms and an irrational relation.
There is no hand handey ratio here, no.
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,
or even between the fictive statue of the Madonna and the auto referential burlesque that mocks any ambition to produce such a work.
It is fundamentally the income answerability of language and picture that counts as his deepest, most generative force.
So if there is so much enigma here, how is it and by what means do I believe I can read Michaelangelo's mind?
We have just to anchor ourselves in data, a particular historical individual with some 500 of his personal letters,
hundreds of records in his handwriting, and almost as many first person poems to biographies written by close associates of his.
A sizeable number of excellent contracts, numerous transcriptions of his conversation, as usual,
not reliable, and at least a thousand letters to him, more documents in which he is mentioned.
Michelangelo is, I would venture to say, the most extensively archived early modern European who is not a king, pope or saint.
It's not only the volume of the documentation, but also the nature of the written record as regards Renaissance personhood.
The fact is that from almost the earliest moments we can trace,
Michelangelo was fixated on himself and quite conscious of his work as auto referential.
And he possessed a kind of megalomania that not only caused him to see the external world as a projection of himself,
but also inspired his contemporaries to partake of that vision.
And so I take it is possible to whittle away at the methodological boundaries between biography and over.
In effect, I take permission from Vasari, amongst others, to consider the life itself as a work of art,
with the caveat that the life of the artist is not so much a narrative constructed from many sources and
given a Realogy status against which the artistic production can be made to perform its imaginative work.
Rather, the life of the artist is best embodied as a sheaf of papers which, however, public its ultimate diffusion.
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,
simply, supremely self-referential and filled with all the forms of expression and repression that are characteristic of internal life.
I choose to consider them as Michaelangelo's waking dreams. The records of his unconscious.
And to cite another relevant Freudian formulation, the psychopathology of his everyday life.
But as I reflect on my own practise, I realised that I do privilege a certain subset of this archive.
If Michelangelo proved to have been a radically restless maker of Marx on papers, we can see in these amongst hundreds of examples,
it ought to be made clear that sometimes, in fact, he broke off words with other words,
and of course, sometimes he broke off pictures with other pictures. Why then?
Or so I would ask if I were writing a nasty review of my own book.
So the anomalous presence of the Petrarch lines be any more revealing than the anomalous juxtapositions on the same sheet that are merely pictorial?
Well, despite all my disclaimers, it appears that my project turns out to have its own investment in pictorial wasis and all those
other assertions about a poem being a speaking picture and a picture being a silent poet.
I suppose that is because in this whole field of fissure and fragmentation,
I find the increments or ability of language and picture to be Michaelangelo's deepest, most generative enigma.
And I embrace wholeheartedly the metaphor that his great biographer, J.
A Simmons, used when he called Michelangelo's drawings the hieroglyphs of his mind.
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.
The video graphic metaphor of Simmons captures for me everything about the inextricable city of text and image,
about the dream of an expressive system that might be picture and word at once,
and about the ultimate undecipherable ability of the invisible spaces of inspiration where they are conjoined.
If it turns out I'm turning my own pages like Stefan Zweig's hapless blind collector.
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.
Thank you.