The Pennsylvania State University The Graduate School Department of Art History PERFORMING NOBILITY. POVERTY, ART, AND LEGACY: MICHELANGELO’S QUEST FOR GLORIA A Thesis in Art History by Margaret Anne Neeley 2008 Margaret Anne Neeley Submitted in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Master of Arts December 2008 The thesis of Margaret Anne Neeley was reviewed and approved* by the following: Brian Curran Associate Professor of Art History Graduate Officer, Department of Art History Thesis Advisor Charlotte M. Houghton Associate Professor of Art History Craig Zabel Associate Professor of Art History Head of the Department of Art History *Signatures are on file in the Graduate School iii ABSTRACT Although Michelangelo is probably the most written about artist in the field of art history, little has been said about the impact on his career of his origins in a noble family. The implication is that scholars believe that his nobility had little bearing on his artistic career. I shall argue the contrary: Michelangelo’s nobility had a profound impact on his career. Michelangelo came not simply from a noble family, but from one that had lost its wealth, and, therefore, its relevance among the Florentine patriciate. In this paper, I will discuss how this condition caused a crisis of identity in the Florentines who suffered from it, and resulted in a characteristic raison d’être specific to these individuals. In doing so, I will detail the ways in which Michelangelo was affected by this condition. From this exploration, I conclude that one of Michelangelo’s primary goals throughout his life was to restore his family’s prior status within Florence’s patriciate, and that Michelangelo saw his career and used it as a means to this end. In the process of building these arguments, I reconsider some major themes central to previous analysis of Michelangelo: his poverty and attitude toward money, and his biography (especially as seen through Condivi’s account), in addition to his artistic accomplishments. By considering Michelangelo in these terms, I propose a view of an artist deeply involved in a quest not only to fulfill an aesthetic vision, but, by securing a reputation for artistic brilliance, to restore his family and his own estate to its historical position within Florence’s upper echelons. iv TABLE OF CONTENTS LIST OF FIGURES .................................................................................................................v ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS.....................................................................................................vi Introduction..............................................................................................................................1 Chapter 1 The Noble Origins of the Buonarroti Family and their Descent into the Poveri Vergognosi .......................................................................................................................16 Chapter 2 Poverty as Performance..........................................................................................25 Chapter 3 Biography as Performance .....................................................................................64 Chapter 4 Art as Gloria...........................................................................................................90 Conclusion ...............................................................................................................................106 Bibliography ............................................................................................................................109 Appendix..................................................................................................................................117 v LIST OF FIGURES Figure 3-1: Michelangelo Buonarroti, Battle of the Centaurs, 1492. Marble, 8.5 x 88cm. Casa Buonarroti, Florence. Reprinted from de Tolnay, “The Historic and Artistic Personality of Michelangelo,” in The Complete Works of Michelangelo, 1965, plate 4........................................................................................................................................117 Figure 3-2: Giulio Bonasone, Michelangelo Buonarroti, 1546. Copperplate print, 23.7 x 18.3cm. British Museum, London. Reprinted from Buonarroti, The Letters of Michelangelo, trans. Ramsden 1963, vol. 2, plate 7.. ......................................................118 Figure 4-1: Signature––a detail from Michelangelo’s Vatican Pietà. Reprinted from Baldini, “Sculpture,” chap. 2 in The Complete Work of Michelangelo, 1965, plate 19...119 Figure 4-2: Michelangelo Buonarroti, Vatican Pietà, 1497–1499. Marble, 174 x 195cm. Saint Peter’s Basilica, Vatican City. Reprinted from Baldini, “Sculpture,” chap. 2 in The Complete Works of Michelangelo, 1965, plate 18.. ..................................................120 vi ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS To Professors Brian Curran and Charlotte Houghton, I thank you for your support and guidance throughout this project. You both have taught me valuable lessons through which I have become a more able and careful scholar. To Michael St. Clair and the Babcock Galleries; the friends, family, and colleagues of Francis E. Hyslop; and Dean Gunalan Nadarajan; I thank you for awarding me with monies from, respectively, the Babcock Galleries Endowed Fund in Art History, the Francis E. Hyslop Memorial Graduate Fellowship, and the Penn State College of Arts and Architecture Graduate Student Travel Grant. Funds from these endowments allowed me to conduct research for this thesis in Florence. Thus, I was able to get a step closer to my subject and benefit from a cultural experience afforded to few people. To Nicola McCarthy, I thank you for editing this thesis. To my parents, William and Andrena Neeley—my best friends—words can never describe how much you mean to me; I thank you for always making me believe that I can accomplish anything, and that nothing is out of my reach. And to my grandmother, Margaret Neeley: although fate took you away before I was old enough to remember you, my parents tell me that I have developed your personality and interests. It is through our mutual love of art that I feel connected to you. And, it is through my work as an art historian that I hope to honor your memory and can only imagine to match your intellect and your sophistication; I dedicate this thesis to you. Introduction Michelangelo (1474–1564) is probably the most written about artist in the field of art history; thousands of publications have been dedicated to his personality and oeuvre. Except for William Wallace and Rab Hatfield who both began publishing on the topic during the first two years of the millennium, almost nothing has been written about his identity as a nobleman. Those academicians who have addressed his nobility have done so only in passing, typically in biographies about the artist for the purpose of introducing his origins, as John Addington Symonds did in The Life of Michelangelo Buonarroti (1928).1 Michelangelo descended from a noble family, but its position had been compromised, so it existed on the shamed margins of the nobility at the time of his birth. This background and the lack of more sustained research into the 1 John Addington Symonds, The Life of Michelangelo (New York, Modern Library, 1928), 1–3. Symonds devotes only two pages out of 544 to Michelangelo’s nobility. He uses this history to provide background information about Michelangelo family before he discusses Michelangelo’s birth and childhood. This history, in other words, serves no agenda in Symonds’s biography. He begins the biography: “The Buonarroti Simoni, to whom Michelangelo belonged, were a Florentine family of ancient burgher nobility. Their arms appear to have been originally ‘azure two bends or.’ To this coat was added ‘a label of four points gules inclosing three fleur-de lys or.’ That augmentation, adopted from the shields of Charles of Anjou, occurs upon the scutcheons of many Guelf houses and cities.” To this Symonds adds a few comments about the alliance Michelangelo made with the Count of Canossa to claim that they share part of their lineage, and a brief account of a couple of the positions Michelangelo’s ancestors held in the Florentine government. 2 impact this position had on his oeuvre suggests that art historians have found little reason to think that such facts are relevant to understanding his artistic achievements. Instead, his background as a member of a family that had experienced a humiliating drop in social status is taken as an unremarkable fact of his origin. It is subsequently ignored as having had little bearing on his sense of artistic purpose and artistic production. The following comment by Charles de Tolnay represents this prevailing outlook: It is significant, however, that young Michelangelo did not feel bound to class prejudices, as is shown by the fact that he chose his art as his vocation against the wishes of his father and uncle, who regarded it as unworthy of the prestige of their house. Michelangelo on the other hand seems to have been proud of it, so that for a long time he signed his letters ‘Michelangelo scultore.’ He did not care for social conventions, since he liked to be with artisans, stonecutters, and lowly artists; that is, lower-class people.2 Tolnay acknowledges Michelangelo’s patrician origins and recognizes that his artistic career deviated from an acceptable career choice for a Florentine patrician, but he assumes that Michelangelo chose this path, in part, because