Michelangelo's Painting: Selected Essays

by Leo Steinberg, Alexander Nagel (Introduction), Sheila Schwartz (Editor)

Leo Steinberg was one of the most original art historians of the twentieth century, known for taking interpretive risks that challenged the profession by overturning reigning orthodoxies. In essays and lectures ranging from old masters to contemporary art, he combined scholarly erudition with an eloquent prose that illuminated his subject and a credo that privileged the visual evidence of the image over the literature written about it. His writings, sometimes provocative and controversial, remain vital and influential reading.

For half a century, Steinberg delved into Michelangelo’s work, revealing the symbolic structures underlying the artist’s highly charged idiom. This volume of essays and unpublished lectures elucidates many of Michelangelo’s paintings, from frescoes in the Sistine Chapel to the Conversion of St. Paul and the Crucifixion of St. Peter , the artist’s lesser-known works in the Vatican’s Pauline Chapel; also included is a study of the relationship of the Doni Madonna to Leonardo.

Steinberg’s perceptions evolved from long, hard looking. Almost everything he wrote included passages of old-fashioned formal analysis, but always put into the service of interpretation. He understood that Michelangelo’s rendering of figures, as well as their gestures and interrelations, conveys an emblematic significance masquerading under the guise of naturalism. Michelangelo pushed Renaissance naturalism into the furthest reaches of metaphor, using the language of the body to express fundamental Christian tenets once expressible only by poets and preachers.

Michelangelo’s Painting is the second volume in a series that presents Steinberg’s writings, selected and edited by his longtime associate Sheila Schwartz.
 

Genres: Art

432 pages, Hardcover

Published December 31, 2019

About the author

Leo Steinberg, born in Moscow, Russia, was an American art critic and art historian and a naturalized citizen of the U.S.

Though an important 20th-century art critic, Leo Steinberg was also a historian and scholar, particularly of the works of Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci, and other Italian Renaissance artists. He had a particular interest in the depiction of Christ in art, but this caused controversy and debate. He was also a recognized authority in the field of modern art criticism and produced important work on Pablo Picasso, Jasper Johns and Willem de Kooning. Because he had experience as a historian, his work on contemporary artists could place them in historical context. One of his most significant essays was Contemporary Art and the Plight of its Public, which appeared in March 1962 in Harper's Magazine.

Steinberg took a less-than-formal approach to criticism, sometimes using a first-person narrative in his essays, which personalized the experience of art for readers. In many of his writings, he expressed his love for art's ability not only to reflect life but also to become it and commented, "Anything anybody can do, painting does better." He believed that the difference between modern painting and that of the Old Masters was the viewer's subjective experience of that artwork. He also believed that Abstract Expressionist action painters, such as Pollock, were more concerned with creating good art than with merely expressing a personal identity on canvas, a point of view contrary to that held by Harold Rosenberg, another American art critic of Steinberg's era.

Reviews

[Kristján Hannesson]

As Steinberg himself says, he has a life long obsession with Michelangelo, especially his paintings. His readings are kind of heroic, arguing points that require a bit of indulgence in the reader, but he makes that up by being constantly entertaining. If his readings do not always convince entirely, they are always instructive, because a whole swath of theology and history is mustered to shore up Steinberg's symbolic interpretations.