Episode 31: Michelangelo idealinthewest.com /episode-31-michelangelo Stream audio In the next episodes, we will look at several artists of the Renaissance whose work reflects the principles of “Idealism,” although it was often expressed in Christian iconography. (The changing attitudes of the Church toward “Platonism” is a whole subject in itself, one that I will take on in the future.) It is easy to see the appeal of Idealism to artists: it provides an embrace of beauty not typically found in religions, and elevates it to a status as inherent in the Good. Seeking beauty, which is what an artist does, is therefore seeking the divine, although many artists are content to stop far short of it. And like anything else, the creation of art can become a tool of the ego, used to bring attention to the artist, rather than the existence of beauty itself. But this was never the case with Michelangelo, about whom Emerson said: “He was not a citizen of any country ; he belonged to the human race ; he was a brother and a friend to all who acknowledge the beauty that beams in universal nature, and who seek by labor and self-denial to approach its source in perfect goodness.” Michelangelo would no doubt be totally indifferent to Emerson’s essay–or this one–since his concern was never with his own reputation, but only with how he could better express the beauty of spirit he saw in nature, and especially in the human form. All his life he was a student of how the soul was expressed through the body (his motto in late life was “Ancora imparo,” “I still learn”) which earned him the right to be a spiritual teacher first, an artist second.
Michelangelo Buonarotti, 1475-1564
An advantage in featuring prose writers as proponents of the Ideal is that they can tell you, explicitly, that they are Idealists. With poets, as we’ve seen with Shakespeare, we may have to infer it, and with painters or sculptors the connection can become further hidden. In the person of Michelangelo, we have the case of a visual artist who also wrote poetry, so the link becomes more evident. As John Symonds says in the introduction to his translation of Michelangelo’s sonnets,
Nothing is more clear than that Michael Angelo worshipped beauty in the Platonic spirit, passing beyond its personal and specific manifestations to the universal and impersonal. This thought is repeated over and over again in his poetry; and if we bear in mind that he habitually regarded the loveliness of man or woman as a sign and symbol of eternal and immutable beauty, we shall feel it of less importance who it was that prompted him to this or that poetic utterance.¹
(I think this is also all that needs to be said on the distraction of his sexual orientation.) We know that Michelangelo was exposed to Plato by the best. As Linda Murray points out,
The young Michelangelo seems to have impressed Lorenzo (de Medici) since, as both Condivi and Vasari record, he took him into his household and brought him up with his own two sons, so that Michelangelo had the advantage of at least two years of surroundings which included the humanist Poliziano, tutor to Lorenzo’s children. The foundations of his Neoplatonism and classical interests 1/4