Dissertation on Michelangelo's Night, 2021

My first encounter with Michelangelo’s sculpture of Night came with mixed feelings, questions, and a forceful need for clarification on her a-typical mysterious appearance. Rather than explaining the sculpture, hasty internet research led to more confusion and intrigue. The vast amount of conflicting interpretations of Night is the very reason that sparked my desire to discuss it; to present what the sculpture meant for Michelangelo and his contemporaries when completed and placed in its current location. The Night is one of four sculptures as allegories of the four times of the day. Together, the sculptural ensemble of the Times of Day was designed by Michelangelo to decorate the funerary chapel in the New Sacristy of San Lorenzo in Florence that was to be dedicated to four members of the Medici family. In light of the sculpture’s interconnectedness with its surroundings, the first chapter will clarify the meanings, functions, and thought processes behind the design of standing and unexecuted components in the New Sacristy of San Lorenzo. With the background knowledge foregrounded in the first chapter, the second one will address why the Night is often misunderstood by grounding the analysis on visual and primary textual evidence. By doing so, I aim to provide a more accurate understanding of the Night’s intended contemporary meanings and functions.

2018

This paper focuses on a terracotta relief by Benedetto da Maiano called "The Martyrdom of Franciscan Friars" (1481). Commissioned by Florentine banker Pietro Mellini, the panel served as a preliminary sketch for the subsequent marble rendition. Together with five other sections, this work is revered as one of the pivotal pieces adorning the Basilica di Santa Croce in Florence. By looking at the conditions that framed the creation of the work, I will try to present the relief's engagement with the notion of time and temporality as a highly complex and ambiguous territory. Starting with the work's involvement in the religious and political discourses of its era, alongside the intricate messages embedded within its iconography, I discuss the various degrees to which thinking of Renaissance art does not need to obey the traditional linear model of a one-way storytelling narrative which solely recounts historical events to a contemporary observer. As I propose, pieces like Da Maiano's panel exhibit a certain "hesitation" when it comes to being located in time. Instead, with works such as this, the notion of time is deferred, at times accelerated, and construed through its own autonomous trajectories.

Art History, 2006

When Michelangelo set foot in Rome for the first time at the age of twenty-one in the summer of 1496, he was still a relatively unknown artist. He carried letters of introduction from Lorenzo di Pierfrancesco de' Medici, cousin of Lorenzo the Magnificent, in whose sculpture garden he had studied several years before. 1 His trip was linked to events surrounding the sale there months earlier of his nowlost Sleeping Cupid sculpture as a genuine antique to the wealthy and powerful Cardinal Raffaele Riario (1461-1521). 2 When the sculpture was discovered to be modern, Riario considered the work less valuable and put it back on the market. Nevertheless, his interest was sufficiently piqued for him to discover the young sculptor's identity, finance his visit to Rome, and immediately to set him to work on a large-scale commission. 3 This was the marble Bacchus, which Michelangelo carved in just one year's time (plate 1.1). 4 Michelangelo would have considered this first Roman commission a crucial one for establishing his reputation as a sculptor. Rome, by the second half of the Quattrocento, had become an increasingly important destination for artists as the patronage of the popes and other high-ranking churchmen gained momentum. Not only had a number of Florentine painters, including Michelangelo's teacher Ghirlandaio, been among the ranks of artists from central Italy to have bolstered their reputations by participating in prestigious artistic projects in Rome, 5 the city held promise for major sculptural commissions as well. When Michelangelo arrived, another Florentine, Antonio del Pollaiuolo, was at work on the bronze tomb of Innocent VIII. Pollaiuolo had already completed the tomb of Sixtus IV under the patronage of the pope's nephew Cardinal Giuliano della Rovere, who was also Raffaele Riario's older cousin. 6 Yet Michelangelo's charge to create a lifesize, freestanding, nude sculpture of an Olympian god was an unusual one for an artist at the time. 7 It was also a rare type of commission for a cardinal to sponsor. Cardinals' patronage in the papal city had traditionally been, and continued to be, Christian and devotional in nature. Yet cardinals were the foremost collectors of antique sculpture in Rome. By the mid-1490 s Cardinal Della Rovere's collection included the famous rediscovered Apollo (later the Apollo Belvedere), which he

When Michelangelo abandoned Florence in 1534, never to return, he left his most famous sculptural complex, the new sacristy of san Lorenzo, in a state of complete disarray ). 1 ever since the mid-sixteenth century, artists and scholars alike have been trying to make sense out of the marble figures and their setting. When we ponder the conflicting interpretations of these works, we often overlook a fundamental methodological problem: what type of meaning can we find in an unfinished ensemble? Given that Michelangelo and his collaborators completed only a third of the statues planned for the new sacristy, and even fewer of the reliefs and paintings, we can never establish how the artist envisioned finishing many key features, nor what he or his patrons wanted them to convey. More importantly, the artist himself never had a detailed comprehensive plan. over the fifteen years that Michelangelo worked on the chapel, he changed his mind repeatedly, and often radically, on the overall layout and details large and small. according to Giorgio Vasari, in his Life of Michelangelo, first published in 1550, the sculptor set up the statues of the Medici dukes- ) in their niches on the side walls of the chapel. 2 this otherwise undocumented account seems unlikely. as many scholars have noticed, the feet of both statues protrude from their niches, and the back wall behind Lorenzo's left foot is hollowed out in a way most uncharacteristic for Michelangelo. We know for sure that the artist last saw his celebrated sculptures representing the four times of day lying unfinished on the floor of the new sacristy.

In this text the author proposes a hypothesis on the identification of the sketch appearing high up on the right of the sheet CB 44A, which for Charles de Tolnay is a block of marble. This idea is promising, but rather than a single block of stone, the line quickly drawn by Michelangelo appears to be the outline of a mountain that depicts a seated figure whose head tilts forward. It is well known that Michelangelo dreamt of sculpting one of the mountains in the Carrara quarries into a colossal statue. If this is the case the profile drawn on CB 44A would be the only surviving graphic document of this legendary project.

When the lost classical sculpture Laocoön and His Sons -lauded as representing the very highest ideal of art -was dug up in 1506 with limbs missing, the authorities in Rome set about restoring it to how they imagined it once to look. Monique Webber explores how it was in reproductive prints that this vision was contested, offering a challenge to the mainstream interpretation of Antiquity.

2006

In: Proceedings of the XVith Intrnational Congress of Classical Arachaeology, ed. by C. Mattusch, Common Ground Archaeology, Art Science and Humanities, 2006, pp. 252 255.