Details

Autor(en) / Beteiligte

• Arkin, Moshe

Titel

"I Fly, Though Lacking Feathers, with Your Wings": Why Are Michelangelo's Angels Wingless?

Ist Teil von

• PSYART (Gainesville, Fla.), 2016, Vol.20, p.24-48

Ort / Verlag

Gainesville: University of Florida

Erscheinungsjahr

2016

Link zum Volltext

Quelle

Electronic Journals Library - Freely accessible e-journals

Beschreibungen/Notizen

• Applying these principles, Schapiro has shown, for example, that the rendition of Anne and Mary as young women of the same age in Leonardo's Saint Anne, the Virgin and Child was not the artist's invention but an image that was rather common at the end of the fifteenth century, with a long iconographical tradition. [...]there are no grounds to assume that this painting was based on Leonardo's personal experience (i.e., his childhood memories of two mothers-the natural mother and the stepmother) as proposed by Freud. In his essay "From Aby Warburg to E. H. Gombrich: A Problem of Method" he criticizes Saxl's analysis of Dürer's drawings and his attempt to draw conclusions regarding the development of Dürer's Lutheran ideas based on these drawings.6 Ginzburg regards Saxl's work as a typical case of methodological circularity, namely, that the interpreter of the work of art perceives what he has already learned about the artist by other means. Following from this methodological criticism, a work of art should first be analyzed on its own merits and only later consider and integrate additional external evidence into the full picture.7 In establishing all the methodological requirements for a valid attempt to provide a biographical explanation for an iconographical quandary-namely, the originality of imagery, robust documentation, and non-circularity-one would encounter great difficulty in finding an example of Renaissance art suitable for such an analysis. [...]among the few Renaissance artists who also portrayed angels flying or hovering without wings, Michelangelo was the only artist who consistently rendered his angels without wings (the single exception will be discussed shortly).11 The work that was notoriously subject to fierce censure for the lack of wings on Michelangelo's angels was the Last Judgment in the Sistine Chapel (1534-42; Fig. 9).