Michelangelo: The Tom Of Finland Of The Renaissance

[poliphilo]

Ugly building, the Sistine Chapel; really just a shoe box with paintings on the inside. As for Michelangelo, was there ever an artist who got so far on so little? He couldn't do landscape, he wasn't interested in light or texture, he had no grasp of perspective. All he was good at was bodies- and, when it comes down to it, only one kind of body- male, fit and bulging with muscles. Even his (very few) women have muscles. Even God does. Look at the Creation of Adam again with eyes unprejudiced by art history. What do you see? Two Schwarzeneggers touching fingertips.

Michelangelo exposes what was really going on in the Counter-Reformation. These paintings aren't calm assertions of an historic faith. They've been spooked by Luther. They flail, they flaunt, they over-assert, they panic. My God has a bigger dick than yours. Also they're in denial. It never ceases to amuse me that a Church that stigmatizes same-sex relationships should elect its supreme leader in a room full of eroticized male nudes.

Comments

[artkouros.livejournal.com]

What I like about the Adam and God painting is that the fingers seem poised to deliver a spark - long before we made any connection between electricity and life.

[poliphilo.livejournal.com]

Great painting...... but silly :)

[cmcmck.livejournal.com]

I wonder if they have the same eroticised male nudes in the private suite the Vatican apparently owns on one of Rome's gay clubs?

All this Baroque and rollery helps to remind me how much I love mediaeval art and the Romanesque!

[poliphilo.livejournal.com]

Me too. Medieval art has a "spirituality" that is largely absent from the Renaissance and the Baroque. St Peter's in Rome is a very worldly building- all that ungiving marble, all that gold leaf.

[cmcmck.livejournal.com]

I'd far sooner spend several hours in the Palazzo Publico in Siena with the Lorenzetti's cycle of good and bad government.

It just never palls!

[poliphilo.livejournal.com]

That's a lovely painting.

[cmcmck.livejournal.com]

I've spent time with those paintings on half a dozen occasions and I find something new every time!

Now if they'd given the ceiling contract to Benozzo Gozzoli.........................

[algabal.livejournal.com]

Oh my god, the muscularity has always bothered me too. It just seems a tad...vulgar? I agree, it's almost a form of beefcake.

[poliphilo.livejournal.com]

We've been taught to regard Michelangelo as the very pinnacle of the Western Art tradition and we don't question it, but recently I've begun to wonder...

[poliphilo.livejournal.com]

The Church is a profoundly silly organization...