Product Description
Michelangelo is best known for great artistic achievements such as the Sistine ceiling, the David, the Piet, and the dome of St. Peter's. Yet throughout his seventy-five year career, he was engaged in another artistic act that until now has been largely overlooked: he not only filled hundreds of sheets of paper with exquisite drawings, sketches, and doodles, but also, on fully a third of these sheets, composed his own words. Here we can read the artist's marginal notes to his most enduring masterpieces; workaday memos to assistants and pupils; poetry and letters; and achingly personal expressions of ambition and despair surely meant for nobody's eyes but his own. Michelangelo: A Life on Paper is the first book to examine this intriguing interplay of words and images, providing insight into his life and work as never before.
This sumptuous volume brings together more than two hundred stunning, museum-quality reproductions of Michelangelo's most private papers, many in color. Accompanying them is Leonard Barkan's vivid narrative, which explains the important role the written word played in the artist's monumental public output. What emerges is a wealth of startling juxtapositions: perfectly inscribed sonnets and tantalizing fragments, such as "Have patience, love me, sufficient consolation"; careful notations listing money spent for chickens, oxen, and funeral rites for the artist's father; a beautiful drawing of a Madonna and child next to a mock love poem that begins, "You have a face sweeter than boiled grape juice, and a snail seems to have passed over it." Magnificently illustrated and superbly detailed, this book provides a rare and intimate look at how Michelangelo's artistic genius expressed itself in words as well as pictures.
Product Details - Amazon Sales Rank: #79857 in Books
- Published on: 2010-11-22
- Original language: English
- Number of items: 1
- Binding: Hardcover
- 352 pages
Editorial Reviews From the Inside Flap
"Leonard Barkan has discovered and explored the many dimensions of Michelangelo's life on paper, that is, those sheets on which the artist juxtaposed text and image, sublime pictorial and poetic ideas with the most quotidian concerns, graphic notions of the imagination alongside mundane shopping lists. Analyzing the shifting dynamics of mise-en-page, of ellipsis and parataxis, of private and public expression, Barkan draws a rich portrait of the man; this is a portrait all the more convincing for its recognition of tension and conflict resolvable not in the life but only within the world of the paper."--David Rosand, Columbia University "Open this book and sit down at Michelangelo's worktable, where writing and art-making happen one on top of the other. Writing surfaces continually invite doodles, while stunning feats of draftsmanship meet an unrelenting stream of bills, letters, poems, and inside jokes. In the congenial company of a preeminent critic of the art and literature of the Renaissance, we follow the careers of sheets of paper marked up, handed off to assistants, corrected, then revisited years later, then sent off--or, more often, filed away in Michelangelo's scrupulous archive. From the midst of this productive chaos, Leonard Barkan counsels us to abandon the dream of a congruent collaboration of word and image, pointing the way instead to a concrete and strangely familiar poetics of intersection and interruption."--Alexander Nagel, New York University "Barkan's book challenges the vast body of studies on Michelangelo with a strikingly new and revealing perspective. In his analysis of surviving sheets that contain writings relating to the artist's adjacent figural and architectural studies, Barkan illuminates Michelangelo's career as an artist, his psychological and spiritual evolution, his social and professional relationships, and the creation of poems for which he was equally celebrated in his time. His interpretations are consistently perceptive and informed by a command of both the art-historical and literary corpus of scholarship."--James S. Ackerman, author of The Architecture of Michelangelo "Leonard Barkan's evocative Michelangelo: A Life on Paper limns the mysteries of expression in the so-called hieroglyphs of Michelangelo and traces, with Barkan's characteristic brilliance, how word and image overlay, interplay, consort, and ultimately compose the solitary artist's signature language. An astute reading of interior life and outer symbol, methodologically sound, and deeply empathetic, Michelangelo: A Life on Paper is an illuminating analysis of the relation of art and life and where we might go to find it."--Brenda Wineapple, author of White Heat: The Friendship of Emily Dickinson and Thomas Wentworth Higginson Michelangelo: A Life on Paper manages to capture the restless movement of the great artist's quicksilver mind. It takes us deep into Michelangelo's creative process, a place where public and private, sacredness and carnality, grandeur and pettiness, vast ambition and self-tormenting doubts are all tangled together. Barkan seems to possess, as if vividly inscribed in his own memory, the hundreds of sheets of paper on which Michelangelo set down his sketches and poems. By sharply focusing on the complex relation on these sheets between words and images, this remarkable book chronicles what Barkan calls the artist's lifelong acts of 'personal refashioning.'"--Stephen Greenblatt, Harvard University "In the excitement of what amounts to a paper chase--poems, drawings, and a wilderness of scribbling--Barkan reaches ever deeper into the Michelangelo arcanum; what had seemed entanglement is by patient sifting discovered to be a solution, the problem proved: 'Mortal flesh made God.'"--Richard Howard, series editor of the Lockert Library of Poetry in Translation and author of Inner Voices: Selected Poems, 1963-2003 "Barkan's careful, empathetic investigation reveals a mind of ceaseless experimentation, clustered with fragments, memories, allusions, desires in which the dialogue of writing and drawing reveals the creative paradoxes and mysteries of Michelangelo's genius, what Barkan calls 'the psychopathologies of his everyday life.' Superbly researched, exquisitely illustrated, and scintillatingly written, this book changes our understanding of the most colossal master of the Renaissance."--Jas Elsner, University of Oxford "In a series of elegant, often provocative essays covering the entire arc of Michelangelo's visual signing, Barkan's analytic perspective elicits new connections and new levels of significance that have eluded his predecessors. Thanks to Barkan, future students of Michelangelo's graphic work will have to look and think harder."--Irving Lavin, professor emeritus, Institute for Advanced Study "This is a brilliant book. Barkan is an accomplished scholar of Renaissance literature and poetry, and a person completely conversant and adept in analyzing and discussing visual imagery. The manner in which he deftly moves between writing and drawing, between word and image, is breathtaking. An exhilarating study."--William E. Wallace, author of Michelangelo: The Complete Sculpture, Painting, Architecture "This is a most significant topic by a scholar at the top of his game. Barkan has altered many of my own settled understandings of the artist. This book is an important contribution to Renaissance studies, and a stimulating and fresh approach to Michelangelo scholarship. Like the drawings and inscriptions it analyzes, it must be savored over multiple visits."--Larry Silver, author of Marketing Maximilian: The Visual Ideology of a Holy Roman Emperor
About the Author
Leonard Barkan is the Class of 1943 University Professor of Comparative Literature at Princeton University. His books include "Unearthing the Past: Archaeology and Aesthetics in the Making of Renaissance Culture"; "The Gods Made Flesh: Metamorphosis and the Pursuit of Paganism;" and "Satyr Square: A Year, a Life in Rome".
Customer Reviews Most helpful customer reviews
5 of 5 people found the following review helpful.
Michelangelo
By J. William Mees
This is a remarkable text: good for research, easy to read, good insight into the man, his work, his poetry, his thinking. Reproductions are clear. A good text for the neophyte, as well as the professional.
2 of 2 people found the following review helpful.
The master's life on paper
By San Francisco Book Review
Biographies and studies of Michelangelo focus on the work that he produced, whether it is the Sistine Chapel or David. Biographies focus on those major works, and the events surrounding the great master when he was creating them. Few, if any, focus on the written legacy he left behind. Thousands of pages of written material have survived, from memos to assistants, to grocery lists, letters to old friends and prospective clients, to poetry and sonnets. These sheets provide a rich resource to examine the life, and mind, of Michelangelo.
In this work, Leonard Barkan focuses on what was written on these sheets of paper, how they were used, and more. Barkan examines these papers and assembles them to help piece together the life of Michelangelo. The book is an excellent resource for students and scholars who want to study the life of Michelangelo, but not from the point of view of his creations. It is a more holistic view of Michelangelo. Barkan is at his best in Chapter 7; this is clearly the chapter he wanted to write, it is witty and full of insights into the mind of Michelangelo. Chapter 1 is unneeded and is out of place; it is awkward and does not move his argument along.
Reviewed by Kevin Winter
0 of 0 people found the following review helpful.
A brilliant performance
By Alexander S. Gourlay
Leonard Barkan is himself a modern Renaissance man, deeply learned in poetry and art, a careful translator, and a graceful writer -- the perfect person to guide English speakers through the visual/verbal art of Michelangelo's personal papers: notes, letters, and memoranda. Coming at these pages from many different angles, Barkan ingeniously elucidates the tantalizing relationships between picture and word. This is a dazzling work of scholarship, handsomely presented, gloriously illustrated.
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