Michelangelo Buonarroti, The Erythraean Sibyl (detail), 1509. Cappella Sistina, Vatican.

Michelangelo and the Knowing Self

A complex figure inhabiting a complicated historical moment, Michelangelo was many things: a creator of visionary religious art in a time of spiritual tumult and devotional change; a practitioner of human dissection in a society that believed anatomization had spiritual implications for both practitioner and society; a religious man beset by homoerotic yearnings in an age of apocalyptic fervor; a love poet whose wayfaring speaker expressed the impossible desire for both carnal satisfaction and divine union; a witty Florentine, heir to a rich tradition of burlesque verse and popular songs, who enjoyed entertaining himself and others through the crafting and sharing of jocular word and image. Whether engaged in an artistic, architectural, or engineering project or immersed in composing poetry, Michelangelo wed religious and philosophical reflection to empirical practice and inquiry. 

Throughout his life and career, Michelangelo studied knowing subjects from physiological and psychological perspectives, himself included. This book examines that project. A study of consciousness, or the knowing self, and its representations in Michelangelo and interrogations by him, this monograph comprises four central chapters that continue my earlier work on Michelangelo by expanding beyond the religious and theological to encompass the philosophical and the phenomenological. Exploring Michelangelo’s textual and visual production and his understanding of the self and the world through the prism of a specifically Christian phenomenology, this study offers a nuanced analysis of Michelangelo’s worldview, production, and praxes.

The first chapter, “Self Before the World: Perceiving and Knowing,” centers on the eye and the brain in Michelangelo’s work and thought. The poet-artist explored the eye from both a physiological and a psychological perspective. This chapter demonstrates that for him the organs of vision constituted a gateway to the intellect-soul, the eyes were a means by which individuals and objects touched, and the mind was their place of encounter and negotiation.

Chapter two, “Self in the World: Being and Becoming,” examines key meditations on truth by Michelangelo in verse and prose and explores the subtle connections the poet-artist assumed and interrogated between microcosm and macrocosm and between humans and the source of their being. Through a close reading of selected allegorical octaves from his lyric corpus and of personal, philosophical, and geometrical reflections from his notes, this chapter situates Michelangelo’s meditations on truth in the context of his contemporary poetic and artistic production and in relation to his personal and professional investments. 

“Self Beyond the World: Appearing and Disappearing” attends to revelation, or modes of otherworldly appearing, in the life and works of Michelangelo. From descriptions of the deceased and of the divine, through appeals, invocations, and prayers to them, the transcendent is variously imagined and expressed in his works. Considering darkness as a divine phenomenon possessing positive value (and not merely the absence or opposite of light and a symbol of sin or evil), this third chapter examines lyric reflections and visual evocations of divine mystery and otherworldly encounter in Michelangelo from theological and philosophical perspectives.

The fourth chapter, “Self as World: Wisdom and Immanence,” centers on the female figure of Divine Wisdom and her presence in the world. Tied to concepts of both nature and the sacred feminine, Divine Wisdom has been variously conceived as a person, principle, attribute and/or emanation, and has long been central to discussions and debates about creation, revelation, and redemption in the Christian tradition. This chapter identifies and analyzes representations of her as both figure and (pneumatic) phenomenon in Michelangelo’s textual and visual production, from the Sistine Chapel ceiling to his rare lyric descriptions of nature.