Michelangelo Buonarroti. [Rhymes and Letters]. Edited by Antonio Corsaro and Giorgio Masi.

Translation by Francesco Mazzaferro
CLICK HERE FOR ITALIAN VERSION

Michelangelo Buonarroti
Rime e lettere
[Rhymes and Letters]
Edited by Antonio Corsaro and Giorgio Masi

Milan, Bompiani, Classsics of european literature, 2016 (but 2017)

Review by Giovanni Mazzaferro

Non ha l'ottimo artista alcun concetto...

In spring 1547, Benedetto Varchi publicly held (at a distance of one week the one from the other) two lessons at the Florence Academy. The Torrentino publishing house printed the two speeches later on in Florence in 1549. The second lesson, on the comparison between arts, and in particular between painting and sculpture, was so well known that it became the essential reference point of all art literature on the topic. The first, however, had much less fortune. It was dedicated to a sonnet by Michelangelo, which we can find in this book on p. 206. Varchi, in reality, only mentioned the first quatrain, quoted below:

Non ha l’ottimo artista alcun concetto

ch’un marmo solo in sé non circonscriva

col suo soverchio, e solo a quello arriva

la man che ubbidisce all’intelletto

The greatest artist does not have any concept

Which a single piece of marble does not itself contain

Within its excess, though only

A hand that obeys the intellect can discover it.

[translation by Christopher Ryan]

This is probably Michelangelo's most famous poem (in the history of literature, it was one of the very first one in which the term 'artista' – artist took the place of the word 'artefice' – creator in generic sense). While Varchi interpreted it according to Aristotelian principles, in later centuries it was seen as an emanation of exquisitely neo-Platonic principles, emphasizing the substantial synonymy between "concetto - concept" and "idea": each marble contains by itself an idea of otherworldly beauty that only a hand obedient to reason can achieve. It was a principle perfectly suited to what Michelangelo pointed out on other occasions, namely that sculpture proceeds from 'getting away', removing the superfluous and freeing the concept, the idea, the essential.

That Michelangelo was also a poet is a circumstance which was abundantly known to his contemporaries. However, the artist probably never thought to publish his poems, stressing in many occasions their amateur nature in his notes: in particular in 1546, when his friends Luigi del Riccio and Donato Giannotti were seemingly thinking about a printed edition of the Rhymes, he wrote the former, a little begging and a little threatening him: (“Please impede that printing and let burn those [poems] that have already been printed”). The first real collection of Michelangelo's poems was produced only in 1623, thanks to his great-nephew, Michelangelo the Younger, and was the result of an intense activity of text transcription, combined with a 'selection' and 'simplification’ that made it no doubt arbitrary.

The great fortune of Michelangelo’s Rhymes materialised as from the nineteenth century, and went hand in hand with the artistic re-appreciation of the work of the same, for centuries traditionally put into the background in comparison to Raphael and Correggio. Today, in bookstores, you can find editions of Rhymes of all types and for all budgets; however, in reality, the last critical edition of Michelangelo’s corpus was released in 1960, and edited by Enzo Noè Girardi. In fact, partly as a result of the progress of studies, the need for a new version was felt acute. It has now been published by Bompiani publishers and curated by Antonio Corsaro and Giorgio Masi, Italian scholars of great renown. I have no background in Italian literature studies, but I feel that the Corsaro-Masi edition is excellent; it is complete, functional, clear, as much as the complexity of the events of Buonarroti’s Rhymes may ever allow. Neither the choice of paper’s quality used for publication (an extremely light one, similar to those editions of the Bible you may find and browse in the drawers of hotel rooms) seems to me in itself wrong. It allows to handle easily a volume of 1500 pages and to compress the cost for the reader.

Michelangelo, Pietà, Vatican City, 1497-1499, San Peter's Basilica
Source: Stanislav Traykov via Wikimedia Commons

But at this point, I would like to leave the floor to the two curators, displaying the text of the strip:

"For the first time, Michelangelo's poetic work is published in a critical edition including a new arrangement of the poems (with an increase in the number of compositions) and, above all, a rich integral comment (which aims to clarify several unclear points and proposes, in many cases, unreleased readings). The result is a rich and detailed picture, a capillary focus on the literary side of the intertwining between art and poetry, aesthetics and thought. Michelangelo’s poetry, in fact, is at the same time poetry of things and concepts; it arises from deep and shared reflections, it is tinged now of irony, now of concern; pride and exaltation are alternated with sense of loss. The range of themes and genres practiced along for about fifty years is broad. In a sign of a singular charm, the verses convey an extraordinary sensibility for art and beauty, but also unparalleled feelings of love and deep ties to the history and the political events of the time: they are a faithful reflection of the equally complex, multifaceted, and very original thought he had on his art. His contemporaries confirmed it, from Francesco Berni to Benedetto Varchi and Giorgio Vasari. Along the nearly sixty years separating us from the last critical edition of Michelangelo's Rhymes, scholars elaborate new interpretations, with often crucial contributions to fully understand the lyrics of the great artist, and indicated several times the need to review the overall structure of the corpus. That is why it was urgent to propose a new edition, a new comment and, in the same volume, even to include the complete collection of letters written by Michelangelo, in order to enable the reader to follow closely all the biographical and intellectual developments of this crucial figure of world art history". 

Michelangelo, David, 1501-1504, Florence, Accademia Gallery
Fonte: Jörg Bittner Unna via Wikimedia Commons

More Rhymes than Letters

The last sentence of the above text makes clear an important aspect: the title is 'Rhymes and Letters', but in fact the Letters have here simply a functional role to the Rhymes. This does absolutely not imply to belittle their importance (there are 511 texts, edited by Antonio Corsaro). It simply indicates their dependence on the 'editio maior' of the correspondence (a publishing endeavour which occupied, as publishing houses, first Sansoni and then Paola Barocchi’s S.P.E.S., from 1965 to 2005. Direct and indirect correspondence are also freely available on the internet on the website of the Memofonte Foundation). The letters were crucial, not only because they allowed to better understand the context of production of some poems, but because very often the rhymes were written at the bottom or on the back of the paper and therefore provided a handwritten version, helping to solve problems of dating that otherwise would prove insurmountable.

What I mean to say, very simply, is that - while the authors argued, legitimately, that this edition was “a radically new proposal under the ecdotic profile compared to Girardi’s clichés” (p. CXXXIV), i.e. compared to 1960 critical edition of the Rhymes, the same cannot be said - and in fact they did not say - with reference to the Letters.

A radically new edition

In what respect would this be a radically new edition? Antonio Corsaro clarified: the work "is offering a new system of the Rhymes, which calls for a finally smooth and reasonable sequence of the works both for specialists and professionals and for a wider audience" (p. CXXXIV). In this case, I think it is important to dwell on questions of method. Faced with an amazing mass of poetic materials often witnessed in different versions, the most serious weakness which the curators contested to Girardi was that he wanted to read Michelangelo’s poetry according to an 'evolutionary' path: he always tried to find 'the final lesson' (or, if you prefer, the most accomplished one) of the texts, when it is clear that one of the main aspects of Buonarroti’s Rhymes was their variety. A variety that was not only embodied in the use of the most varied metric tools and literary registers, ranging from Petrarchism to the Florentine comic tradition, but which led the author also to work on alternative solutions for their compositions, without a precise hierarchical order. Girardi would have then performed a by itself arbitrary operation, setting (for example) a hierarchy among texts united by the presence of a small number of common rhymes, putting only one in the text and placing all the other versions in the apparatuses. Corsaro and Masi instead decided to abandon a strict chronological setting of the poems, or, better, to mitigate it in this way: first, they identified the "sets of author", or the rhyme groups which, although not intended for publication - as I already mentioned, Michelangelo denied this possibility - have the characteristic of having been definitely collated with each other either by the artist or his friends and associates. We are talking, specifically, of the so-called Silloge (anthology), consisting of 89 poems, and the 50 Epitaphs for Cecchino Bracci. All remaining works were divided by subject matter, between Lyrical and Amorous Rhymes (93 compositions), Comic, Occasional and Correspondence Rhymes (14) and Spiritual and Religious Rhymes (17). A chronological order was followed only within these three latter categories.

Michelangelo - Prisoners. The Awakening Slave, Florence, Accademia Gallery
Source: Umberto Baldini, Michelangelo scultore, Rizzoli, Milan, 1973 via Wikimedia Commons

Michelangelo - Prisoners. The Atlas Slave, Florence, Accademia Gallery
Source: Umberto Baldini, Michelangelo scultore, Rizzoli, Milan, 1973 via Wikimedia Commons

Fragments and sketches

  

As easily guessed, the choice by Corsaro and Masi, namely that of 'making explicit' with equal dignity different versions of partially identical compositions led to increasing the total number of compositions. It should also be added that the choice accommodated well a particularly thorny issue in Michelangelo’s poetry, i.e. the one of fragments and sketches. Just dealing with these fragments, there would obviously be a very strong temptation to establish a parallel between unfinished art production and unfinished poetry by Buonarroti. The real question is to understand what should be understood as non-finite (so as sketch or fragment) or catalogued as an independent poetic unity. Girardi’s choice was to consider as fragments all those passages that, in isolation, expressed a meaningful concept, relegating all the rest to the apparatuses. The thus identified fragments were inserted in the above mentioned chronological order and, in fact, raised to the rank of poems. The orientation of Corsaro and Masi was instead quite different: "a fragment is such even when it expresses a concept, if however the metric design that presides over it turns out to be not accomplished. The only criterion for distinguishing a fragment from a complete poem is therefore the metric one" (p. CXXXVII).

This is not a mere technicality. As explained by the editors: "By its own nature, Michelangelo’s poetry oriented itself to non-completeness, and the original artefacts show with any clarity not only the quantity but also the quality of a compositional mode – that, in fact, of the fragment - that must be considered like the others. To select among those fragments those which, ‘to the limit’, could be read as complete poems means to orient the reading in a questionable direction. Conversely, to collect in series the whole fragmentary evidence of the poet, making them autonomous, where possible, from false apparatuses, permits not to deprive the corpus of sometimes significant pieces, giving them equal dignity compared to complete pieces" (p. CXXXVIII). To the fragments is therefore dedicated an autonomous section of the collection (in total, they are 90 pieces).

Summing up, therefore, the corpus of Michelangelo’s Rhymes is here divided into six sets: a) Silloge (anthology); b) Epitaphs for Cecchino Bracci; c) Lyrical and Amorous Rhymes; d) Comic, Occasional and Correspondence Rhymes; c) Spiritual and Religious Rhymes; f) Fragments and sketches. All of this looks more complicated than it is. Also (and especially) thanks to a system of notes and a critical apparatus, which are truly out of the ordinary, to move between a composition and the other is easy and intuitive, once one has entered into the mechanism; I dare say, it is even fun. There is no doubt that the choices by Corsaro and Masi have been appropriate. 

Michelangelo, Moses, 1513-1515, Rome, Church of San Pietro in Vincoli
Source: Jörg Bittner Unna via Wikimedia Commons

Features of Michelangelo’s Rhymes

Were there recurring features in Michelangelo rhymes? Earlier I spoke of their variety, perhaps a term a bit generic; in fact, it is not used by the curators, who prefer to mention one set of poems tending to diffraction and differentiation, both because written during fifty years, and because they were realised through a series of uneven metrics solutions. Of course, it is possible to single out themes which are dear to the artist, such as love, death, and the relationship with the sculpture. In reality, however, any attempt to connect Michelangelo with certain issues (such as, for example, religious interests that would indicate sympathy for the Reform) collided with the verses. An interpretation may be that provided by Francesco Berni already in 1537, in a poem which was even printed. In the poem, addressed to Sebastiano del Piombo, Berni praised Michelangelo and, by comparing Buonarroti’s poetry with that of others, argued that "[he] says things and you say words" (p. 278) . What Berni argued is that the poetry of Michelangelo did not indulge in technical formalism, but expressed concepts, talked about things, and transferred messages. The editors, in this regard, clarify: "In the lyric creation [...] Michelangelo appears quite clearly concentrated in the exaltation of the strength of the concept rather than the adaptation of the latter to an ideal expressive clarity" (p. XII). In this effort, one should also remark the presence of unclear, obscure, and difficult elements, which was noted as to be a common theme in the Rhymes: "In this light, the pursuit of darkness and abnormity is not an end in itself, but is tended to emphasize the idea " (idem). That said, I feel that a statement made a bit earlier in the introduction was perhaps undue - and really, I think this is the only criticism one can move to this excellent issue of Michelangelo’s poetry: "If therefore the poem performed a substantially inverse path with respect to the artistic - sculptural creation - like Michelangelo himself explains it (not from the surface to the centre, gradually eliminating the superfluous, but from the centre to the surface, giving flesh to a skeleton), then one would be right to suppose a subordination of the formal features to the substantial one" (idem): the comparison between sculpture, proceeding through 'getting away', and poetry, developing through 'building up' is in my view certainly fascinating. However - I dare to say - is not a characteristic aspect of Michelangelo, but a mechanical fact, a technical procedure about poetry that one could mention (in my opinion) about any author (including Dante, Marino or D'Annunzio, just to mention a few names randomly); however, it does not mean that all poets preferred contents to formal aspects. It is therefore not a 'mechanic' act which can explain, in my view, why Michelangelo’s poetry turned around both ‘concepts’ and ‘things’.

Michelangelo, Tomb of Lorenzo di Piero de' Medici with Dusk and Dawn, 1525-1534, Florence, Medici Chapels, New Sacristy
Source: Umberto Baldini, Michelangelo scultore, Rizzoli, Milano, 1973 via Wikimedia Commons

The Silloge

While in the event of amorous, comic and religious Rhymes the subdivision seems clear enough to lead straight to reading them, I feel the need to clarify some aspects regarding the Silloge (anthology) and the Epitaphs for Cecchino Bracci, so as to explain their nature.

The Silloge is not a Canzoniere; in other words, it it not an organic collection of texts, or "a set of texts whose sequencing the author, in person, takes care with great attention of, thus attributing to it importance and meaning" (p. 885). It is, rather, a six-handed work, which involved, in addition to Michelangelo, the friends Luigi del Riccio and Donato Giannotti. The poems (89 in all) are witnessed by three different manuscripts, none of which contains them all. However, a unique numbering appears in the relevant portions; it has been identified as being added by Luigi del Riccio. There are – in other words – three manuscripts with overlapping subsets; in these overlapping parts the poems show the exact same number, as assigned by del Riccio. It seems clear that, since end 1539 until 1546, the year of del Riccio's death, the three exchanged Michelangelo’s rhymes in a tangle of revisions and transcripts. Del Riccio, in essence, received the artist's poems, transcribed them and sent them back to Michelangelo; the latter added margin notes that sometimes were variants, and on other occasions had very different nature from the final review of the compositions. "What is clear from Michelangelo’s documents and the cited manuscripts is [...] that the text selection, the choice of their sequencing (with a total absence of common narrative, and no logical law in their disposition) and the choice between homologous texts were all implemented by others [note of the editor: del Riccio or Giannotti, precisely], at the express delegation by the author [...]. The correction and rewriting of individual texts took place in collaboration, with an endorsement also witnessed by autograph variants affixed by Michelangelo" (p. 885). That the revision by Michelangelo was not targeted to publication is witnessed - as mentioned – by the absence of any indication on the organization of the poems and the request/threat facing precisely del Riccio in 1546 (a few months before his death ) to 'burn off the print out' of the Rhymes. You may think that Buonarroti thought of a simple collection of handwritten verses to be distributed to his closest friends, while del Riccio had gone further, thinking of a printed edition. The annotations marked in several occasions by Buonarroti did nothing but confirm this feeling: Michelangelo taunted on his own skill as a poet. Moreover, the production of Rhymes was linked to the sending of food by the recipients: there were poems written in gratitude for having received trouts, ducks, or olives (we would have to discuss whether this was a rhetorical device or a real fact).

The majority of the poems was about love, but the inspiration was not unique, "because it appears declined in significantly different ways: from traditional Petrarch-like lyrics to Platonic-Laurentian ones to the ‘Dantesque’ texts for Vittoria-Beatrice" (p. 886). We must not forget a small number of Rhymes about politics, which resulted essentially in the presentation of texts against the Medici family, directed in particular against Cosimo I de' Medici. 

Michelangelo, Bandini Pietà, 1547-1555, Florence, Museo dell'Opera del Duomo
Source: Sailko (Francesco Bini) via Wikimedia Commons 

Michelangelo, Bandini Pietà, 1547-1555, Florence, Museo dell'Opera del Duomo
Source: Sailko (Francesco Bini) via Wikimedia Commons

Epitaphs for Cecchino Bracci

Epitaphs are, of course, poems written on the occasion of someone's death: in this case, it was the young (fifteen or sixteen year-old) Cecchino Bracci, beloved (probably not only in the Platonic sense) grandchild of Luigi del Riccio (we are in 1544). We do not even know if Michelangelo knew him and - no doubt – it is striking that the sending of 50 epitaphs was still accompanied by the usual thanks for the food received by his friend. When Cecchino died, del Riccio planned to publish a series of poems written, not only by Michelangelo, in his honour. This was not followed up, but the manuscript tradition of work was demonstrated by several examples, showing that there was still a text circulation. The number of compositions made by Michelangelo for Cecchino appears abnormal; and this raises immediately a question: did Buonarroti want to give a demonstration of lyrical virtuosity (and in that case we should certainly say that the epitaphs did not belong to the poetry of 'things' or 'concepts' we mentioned earlier) or was there anything more? The editors settled the question by certainly certifying his virtuoso efforts as artist / poet, but claimed that on this occasion that Michelangelo "gave proof of his unique creative abilities: one linked to ideas, concepts (again, the "things" before the "words") produced in a long number in a "significant sequence" (p. 1057). In essence, Michelangelo’s virtuosity would not play on the formal aspect of variety, but on the contents and the concepts he proposed on the subject of the death of a young boy.

Michelangelo, Rondanini Pietà, Milan, Castello Sforzesco
Source: Paolo da Reggio via Wikimedia Commons

Summary

To testify the richness of the work, please find enclosed the summary of the book: 

• Introduction by Giorgio Masi and Antonio Corsaro
• Biographical note by Antonio Corsaro
• Shortenings
• Bibliographical note
• Note to the text of the Rhymes by Antonio Corsaro
• The present edition by Antonio Corsaro
• Philological apparatus of the Rhymes by Antonio Corsaro
• Table of the metrics of the Rhymes by Giorgio Masi
• Correspondence tables with the Girardi edition
• Note to the text of the Letters by Antonio Corsaro
• Pictures

• Texts of the Rhymes edited by Antonio Corsaro
• Introductory note by Giorgio Masi
• Texts of the Letters by Antonio Corsaro
• Note to the texts of the Rhymes by Giorgio Masi
• Note to the texts of Letters by Antonio Corsaro
• Index of first lines
• Index of the names of the text of the Rhymes and Letters
• Index of the names of paratexts
• Biographies of the curators