History, origins, recovery : Michelangelo and the politics of art

Abstract

My dissertation considers the origins of High Renaissance art as a response to the volatile political and cultural change that marked the years around 1500 in Florence. It serves to bridge a diaspora that marks High Renaissance studies as a whole since the days of Heinrich Wölfflin, one that separated stylistic change from political, social and religious change. The book takes the works that Michelangelo produced for the Florentine Republic between 1501 and 1506 as a case study in an artist’s engagement with art’s political function. That function had become a topic of debate by the late fifteenth century, witnessed by a decline of artistic commissions and the burning of existing works of art. That debate was part of an organized campaign to reverse Florentine culture in the eighteen years after the expulsion of the Medici in 1494 – also the years in which older scholarship locates the origins of High Renaissance art. In works like the David, the Doni Tondo, the Saint Matthew, and the Cascina Cartoon Michelangelo found creative solutions in response to the issues of “history,” the “origins” of creativity and the “recovery” of older systems of representation – solutions that made the balance of political meaning shift from the what to the how of representation.