Title: "Donna bella e crudele" : Michelangelo's Divine Heads in Light of the Rime
Abstract: Between the mid 1520s and 1533, Michelangelo executed a group of drawings conceived as gifts for Gherardo Perini and, in particular, Tommaso Cavalieri. Praising their exceptional craftsmanship, Giorgio Vasari refers to these drawings as (teste divine). In this essay, the author focuses only on three of these drawings (the so-called Cleopatra and Zenobia in Florence and the Ideal head in the British Museum, London), more specifically on those representing full-size heads or busts of beautiful women characterized by strange hair dresses and hairdos and by unusual pieces of armor. By stressing the links between lyrical motifs developed by Michelangelo in his love poems (Rime) and visual motifs present in these drawings, the author seeks to offer a new interpretation of Michelangelo's heads. The essay intends to demonstrate that Michelangelo's imagery of the donna bella e crudele relies on a late fifteenth-century Florentine tradition to which numerous artists had contributed: from Piero di Cosimo to Botticelli and Verrocchio. Interpreting Michelangelo's lyrical output as an unaccomplished para-biographical trajectory modeled on Petrarch's Canzoniere, the author also clarifies in which ways Michelangelo's lyric poetry differs from previous and contemporary examples, and how the figure of the donna bella e crudele is replaced (in Michelangelo's final years) by a contemplation of Christ's divine body.
Publication Year: 2017
Publication Date: 2017-10-01
Language: en
Type: article
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