Le varianti della poesia di Michelangelo: scrivere by Ida Campeggiani (review)

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296-300 (Review) Published by Johns Hopkins University Press DOI: https://doi.org/10.

1 Le varianti della poesia di Michelangelo: scrivere by Ida Campeggiani (review) Francesco Brenna MLN, Volume 131, Number 1, January 2016 (Italian Issue), pp (Review) Published by Johns Hopkins University Press DOI: For additional information about this article Accessed 7 Feb :28 GMT

2 296 reviews of earthly love and worldly ambition as well as advocating an ascent to God. Such a religious profession of repentance mirrors a bitter biographical experience. Indeed, after rising to the rank of Monsignore and then archbishop, and acting as a papal nuncio in Venice in 1544, Della Casa s aspirations of becoming a cardinal were shattered in 1549 with the death of his powerful protector Pope Paul III. As a result of his withdrawal from public life, he chose to impart a spiritual direction and evolution to his poems redeploying the Petrarchan model and expressing his tormented quest for a spiritual path. Della Casa s poems undoubtedly remain one of the most original works of European Petrarchism and Carrai s accomplished piece of scholarship now allows readers to fully appreciate their superb style and anguished conflict. Durham University Francesco Venturi Ida Campeggiani. Le varianti della poesia di Michelangelo: scrivere per via di porre. Lucca: Maria Pacini Fazzi, Morgana pages. ISBN This book is the first monograph dedicated to the study of the variants of Michelangelo s Rime. The topic has never before been addressed in such a comprehensive way although Campeggiani obviously includes only selected examples in her work. Very few studies were available (for example C. Vecce s Petrarca, Vittoria, Michelangelo, and chapter II.3 of Girardi s Studi su Michelangelo scrittore), and Claudio Scarpati, in his 2003 article on Michelangelo s canzoniere, still pointed out the lack of a systematic study on such an issue. 1 The author is well aware of the position of her work in the field of the critica delle varianti, from Contini onwards. While, she states, a variant was usually evaluated against a system, that is the alleged norm of a specific author s writing, in the case of Michelangelo we have no such stable system, but an universo estroso, fatto di parzialità che nascono l una dall altra (135). We do not have the composition s final stage, but an accumulation of possibilities that must all be considered within the analysis of a poem in order to illuminate its obscurity or that are all marked by a continua pienezza di significato (101). Campeggiani goes so far as to suggest the inadequacy of the term variante to describe such a complex textual situation (7 8) and criticizes Girardi s choice in adopting a criterio meccanico to choose among the variants (9). 1 Carlo Vecce, Petrarca, Vittoria, Michelangelo. Note di commento a testi e varianti di Vittoria Colonna e Michelangelo, Studi e problemi di critica testuale 44 (1992): , OPAR, Web, 13 Dec Enzo Noè Girardi, Studi su Michelangelo scrittore (Firenze: Olschki, 1974) The chapter is Le Varianti e il linguaggio di Michelagnolo poeta. Claudio Scarpati, Michelangelo poeta dal Canzoniere alle rime spirituali, Aevum 77.3 (2003): , Jstor, Web, 26 Oct

3 M L N 297 Thus, variante assumes a wide spectrum of meanings in this book. Campeggiani analyses not only variants in the strictest sense of the word (varianti indecise and multiple writings of a same text in chapter 1 and 2), but also texts constructed from fragments (chapter 1 and 3), composite forms comprising notes, letters, drawings, and postscripts that gravitate around a poem (chapter 4), texts that originate from the same moment of inspiration and that diverge later, forming a diptych of opposite poems (chapter 5), and finally variations on a theme based on the same source (chapter 7). In chapter 1, Campeggiani examines the variants of poems 84, 231, and 197 in order to show how Michelangelo improved his poems through his corrections; the author also suggests that 37 and 38 are appunti di un unico discorso poetico, later employed in the genesis of 42. Her observations are certainly interesting, although, as she admits, they do not offer a solution to the problem of the editorial treatment of these poems. Likewise, at the end of the chapter, questions relevant to the status of Michelangelo s poems with respect to the non finito and the ways in which we can recepire la volontà dell autore, cerebrale e compiaciuta, mentre stenta a scindere una forma dalla fase in cui tutto è ancora possibile (41), remain unanswered. What might at first seem like a failing of the work however, is not only the natural outcome of the analysis of such unstable materials, but also a strength. Campeggiani does not try to force a specific conclusion, but rather offers deep insights into the complex textual situation of Michelangelo s poems. In the same chapter we find an interesting analysis of the variants and the comments added to the poems that Luigi del Riccio asked Michelangelo to compose on the occasion of Cecchino dei Bracci s death. Campeggiani interprets Michelangelo s insertion of rather lowly and ironic comments, together with the request addressed to Luigi that he choose among the different variants, as strong evidence of Michelangelo s self-irony, playfulness, and his awareness of his status as a poet: in questa disinvoltura nel porsi sopra i propri versi... si può avvertire il forte interesse teorico che Michelangelo aveva per fare il letterato (23). In chapter 2, the author finds a Ficinian theme in 55. She argues that this theme reappears in the multiple drafts of the later sonnet 76, where the source is also in dialogue with a Dantean intertext. The same process is observed for 8 and 146. Campeggiani not only matches the sources that Michelangelo employed to the various compositional stages of a text, but also identifies different texts as drafts or antecedents: thus, the analysis of the variants pertains not only to the different drafts of one single text, but also to the recognition of different texts as variants themselves and of a group of texts as variation of a theme (or of an image, etc.) taken from one or more sources. This approach is very productive and borrows from the field of cognitive poetics (the author quotes Alberto Casadei s Poetiche della creatività in a few instances 2 ), in order to uncover Michelangelo s possible intentions and to identify what drove him to multiple corrections, rewritings, drafts: 2 Alberto Casadei, Poetiche della creatività (Milano: B. Mondadori, 2011).

4 298 reviews Michelangelo s is a forma mentis that, in the writing process, explores different possibilities per via di porre, rather than reducing them per via di togliere until the last, perfect stage. The final intention of the author would thus correspond to this undetermined, unfinished stage. Such a textual situation reminds one, among other poets, of Emily Dickinson. According to Sharon Cameron, Dickinson refused to choose how her poems (which she never published) should have been read by inserting non-resolved variants and also, as Cameron argues, by making the individual poems variants of each other. 3 Other motivations for Michelangelo s corrections that Campeggiani detects in this chapter are the progressive petrarchizzazione of the form and a lessening of the autobiographical element in his verse. Chapter 3 is dedicated to the so-called Stanze dei giganti (68) and to the ottave of poem 67. By combining the study of the variants with different texts and intertextual elements, Campeggiani suggests that 67 and 68 must be read as anti-medicean (against Alessandro) and anti-clerical (against pope Clement VII) texts. She then identifies the motif of the giant in other poems, both with comic implications (in 246 and 247) and, again, political meanings (in 85). Michelangelo s particular writing process per via di porre is examined in chapter 4 in relation to the production of poems, variants, notes, and drawings as angolature poste attorno a un unica metafora (12). In chapter 5, Campeggiani examines the cases of two contrasting texts that stemmed from the same moment of inspiration. She is right in emphasizing how compelling the instances are in which both versions are numbered and included in the canzoniere. Her hypotheses are either that copyists and editors were familiar with Michelangelo s way of thinking and composing and wanted it to be transferred into the canzoniere, or that Michelangelo himself was aware of his own inclination toward contrast and doubleness. Chapter 6 focuses on the poems of the canzoniere. On the basis of a note sent by Michelangelo to Luigi del Ricco, Campeggiani infers the destination Michelangelo had in mind for the canzoniere they were preparing: he would likely have considered the possibility of the circulation of his poems, but not of their printing. The author then establishes a fascinating link between Michelangelo s practice of sending poems with variants to copyists and editors and the practice, examined by Leonard Barkan, of leaving blank spaces in his drawings so that his students could replicate them. 4 Campeggiani suggests that Michelangelo, for his drawings as well as for his unfinished poems, stesse esercitando la sua creatività in pubblico (201). Chapter 7 identifies sets of texts that constitute a variation on themes taken from either Dante or Petrarch. This study allows Campeggiani to show that, in his uses of the sources, Michelangelo looked first of all for content, rather than for formal features for res, rather than for verba. This chapter also contains a number of compelling insights regarding Michelangelo s reflections 3 Sharon Cameron, Choosing not Choosing (Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1992). 4 Leonard Barkan, Michelangelo. A Life on Paper (Princeton, NJ-Oxford: Princeton UP, 2011). See Chapter 6, Private in Public,

5 M L N 299 on art in his poems. Campeggiani pinpoints how Michelangelo s conception of art is different from Platonic tradition which interprets art as third-level imitation. Instead, Campeggiani sees parallels with Aristotelian poetics. As a transition from potentiality to actuality art becomes not an imitation of divine things, but a divine thing itself. Campeggiani stresses the distance from the Neo-Platonic theories of the circle of Lorenzo il Magnifico, and she argues that Michelangelo already reaches the manierismo by giving an ontological priority to the artistic object. This observation links well with the material in chapter 7, where Campeggiani compares T. S. Eliot s fragments and Michelangelo s unfinished multiple variations on different sources, although she eventually highlights the differences between their poetic outputs. It is obviously true that intorno al Buonarroti non vi è ancora un età disgregata (234); however, Michelangelo s anticipation of the mannerism as described by Campeggiani herself can be considered a glimpse of the crisis and the drastic changes that occurred in the seventeenth century: the loss of man s centrality in the universe, the breaking of the new science, and the retirement of arts into their own realm. Campeggiani s examination of the variants has the merit not only of addressing textual and editorial problems and investigating the motivation behind Michelangelo s corrective action, but also of fruitfully dialoguing with and casting a new light on the most important and still unresolved issues concerning the rime, namely their destination, the story of their circulation, Michelangelo s actual intention to compose a canzoniere, and the obscurity of a number of poems. She makes excellent use of a variety of materials different critical editions of Michelangelo s poems, critical contributions on philological issues, manuscripts, letters, notes, comments and postscripts, sources that Michelangelo used. This combination proves to be productive and offers many compelling insights. At the same time, she refrains from offering forced, stable conclusions to the textual situation of the rime. Both the analysis of the topic and the review of previous literature in the field are detailed and exhaustive. It would have been interesting to have a reference, among the observations on the non-finito and on Michelangelo s poetic self-awareness, to Paul Barolsky s studies on Michelangelo s construction of his artistic persona. 5 In the same way, the remarks on 239 in chapter 7, where Campeggiani examines how Michelangelo s use of the verb inclinare recalls Ficino s, might have been usefully compared to Giancarlo Maiorino s argument in his article In Search of the True Form. 6 In Ficino, in fact, and, Campeggiani argues, in Michelangelo as well, inclinare, when used in combination with anima, refers to the passage of the soul to a lower status as it embraces and gives a form to the matter. Maiorino quotes the same Ficinian source and claims that, in Ficino as well as in Michelangelo s poems, one can read 5 Paul Barolsky, The Faun in the Garden: Michelangelo and the Poetic Origins of Italian Renaissance Art (University Park, PA: the Pennsylvania State UP, 1994). 6 Giancarlo Maiorino, In Search of the True Form. Michelangelo s Power of Expression and the Aesthetic Lure of the Non-finito, Rivista di studi italiani 1 (1983):

6 300 reviews this as the affirmation of the superiority of the matter. The matter, potentially infinite non finita is superior to its determined form, when it is modeled by a soul or by the activity of the sculptor, which limits it to a single shape. This is certainly not an argument-based book. Campeggiani nevertheless does reach certain conclusions, especially as she detects the motivations behind Michelangelo s production of variants. These findings could have been pinpointed more effectively by providing a conclusive chapter or by basing the organization of the chapters on the results of the study (Michelangelo s motivations, for example) rather than on its premises (the kind of variants). A possible further development of this study, which often includes different kinds of material that gravitate around a poem, would be the analysis of the poems in relation to the letters of Michelangelo that sometimes conveyed them in the first place. This would be particularly interesting from the point of view suggested by Claudio Scarpati in his article on the canzoniere. Scarpati claims that spazi di umanità di stendono dietro i testi della lirica cinquecentesca, quando la scrittura poetica nasceva in continuità con la più profonda relazione epistolare (611) another remarkable similarity with Dickinson s corpus. 7 In conclusion, this is a book definitely worth reading not only to enter into Michelangelo s mind as he composed and corrected his poems, but also to discover the most up-to-date findings on a number of textual and exegetical issues pertaining to Michelangelo s Rime. The Johns Hopkins University FRANCESCO BRENNA 7 See for example Jerome McGann, Emily Dickinson s Visible Language, The Emily Dickinson Journal 2.2 (1993), rpt. in Emily Dickinson. A Collection of Critical Essays, ed. Judith Farr (Upper Saddle River, NJ: Prentience Hall, 1996).

"Bronzino. Cambridge University Press Bronzino: Renaissance Painter as Poet Deborah Parker Frontmatter More information

Bronzino. Cambridge University Press Bronzino: Renaissance Painter as Poet Deborah Parker Frontmatter More information "Bronzino Bronzino's stature as one of the great painters of the Florentine Renaissance has long been recognized. By contrast, his literary achievements as a poet have been neglected. This is the first