Leo Steinberg was one of the most original and daring art historians
of the twentieth century, known for taking interpretative risks that
challenged the profession by overturning reigning orthodoxies. In
essays and lectures that ranged 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 works,
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 This volume of essays and unpublished lectures
explicates many of Michelangelo’s most celebrated sculptures,
applying principles gleaned from long, hard looking. Almost everything
Steinberg wrote included passages of old-fashioned formal analysis,
but here put to 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
and its actions to express fundamental Christian tenets once
expressible only by poets and preachers—or, as Steinberg put it, in
Michelangelo’s art, “anatomy becomes theology.”
Michelangelo’s Sculpture is the first in a series of volumes of
Steinberg’s selected writings and unpublished lectures, edited by
his longtime associate Sheila Schwartz. The volume also includes a
book review debunking psychoanalytic interpretation of the master’s
work, a light-hearted look at Michelangelo and the medical profession
and, finally, the shortest piece Steinberg ever published.
Les mer
Produktdetaljer
ISBN
9780226482606
Publisert
2022
Utgiver
Vendor
University of Chicago Press
Språk
Product language
Engelsk
Format
Product format
Digital bok
Forfatter