Michelangelo's Last Judgement: The Renaissance Responses.

Bernadine Barnes, (Discovery Series, 5.) Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1998.8 color pls. + 70 b/w pls. + xix + 171 pp. $45. ISBN: 0-520-20549-9.

Bernadine Barnes argues in this problematic book that Michelangelo's Last Judgment is best understood in terms of his audience - well-educated and conservative clergy who were sophisticated in the period's visual and poetic traditions, theories, and debates.

The author usefully outlines Last Judgment iconography and the evolution of Michelangelo's design to show how his fresco conforms to or differs from previous representations. Michelangelo intended differences to be noticed, she asserts, to provoke contemplation of the work's meaning - Barnes's book being a case in point. Further, the artist offered a dazzling display of muscular, foreshortened, and animated nudes to appeal to an audience grounded in the theories of decorum and elevated style. These theories would expect exceptional artifice to express the beauty and splendor of such a majestic subject. In his depiction of Charon and Minos Michelangelo also expected his viewers to recognize his rejection of Petrarch's graceful and sweet lyric style in favor of Dante's forceful and difficult epic style appropriate for a Last Judgment.

In a helpful chapter on Michelangelo's critics Barnes contends that it was not heretical Protestant ideas, as some critics have argued, but Michelangelo's demanding Dantesque terribilita, his inventive breaks with iconographical traditions, and his (to many, erotic) nudes for which he was attacked by Counter-Reformation critics who increasingly demanded of artists visual clarity, scriptural accuracy, and chaste decorum.

Barnes claims reception theory as her principal method. But she gives little evidence of an in-depth study of Michelangelo's audience, and it remains largely monolithic and ideal. Consciously or not Barnes offers up old fashioned iconography privileging visual quotations and texts. Thus, for Christ Michelangelo quotes the Apollo Belvedere to cast him as the Sun of Justice and to recall that a temple of Apollo once stood near St. Peter's. Fine. I can also accept that he expected St. Bartholomew to summon up Marsyas and Dante's Paradiso 1.13-21. But, if for the Virgin Michelangelo quoted the Crouching Venus to emphasize her beauty and love, did he simultaneously quote a Coronation tapestry woven for Paul III to evoke the chapel's dedication as well as visually invert his own Eve in the Expulsion on the ceiling to suggest her purity? Did Michelangelo conceive of Minos as an inversion of God in the Separation of Light and Dark to elicit his sterility as well as intend him (along with the demon over his right shoulder) to remind the viewer of Isaiah in the ceiling in order somehow to signal the prophecy in Isaiah 13:9-11? Would the wings attached to Charon's boat have invoked for any viewer Dante's metaphor of sinners drawn to hell like a falcon called by its master in Inferno 3.117? Could anyone other than a text-bound iconographer like Barnes forego the visual evidence to imagine that the wings are not really attached to the boat after all but to the demon just below them on the shore? And then convince herself that the soul straddling the gunnel is actually climbing on the back of this demon to join another soul who "is already astride him" (115)? And finally conclude that this trio would recall Inferno 17.85-93, when Dante and Virgil climbed on (wingless!) Geryon to be carried from the seventh to the eighth circle of hell?

Barnes imposes meaning piecemeal onto the fresco from any available outside source, a method that occasionally produces useful suggestions, but more often than not observations that are either irrelevant to Michelangelo's particular interpretation, implausible, or totally fanciful. She rejects a careful and consistent look at the entire work's internal evidence - the composition and grouping of figures, and their postures, movements, and expressions - explicitly denying that such a close analysis is even possible: "[Michelangelo's] extremely ornate figures were not comprehensible through empathy; one could not simply imagine oneself in the given pose to understand the meaning behind it" (93).

But a sustained empathetic reading is certainly possible as my book (with contributions by Fabrizio Mancinelli and Gianluigi Colalucci) Michelangelo. The Last Judgment. A Glorious Restoration (New York: Abrams, 1997) attempts to demonstrate. While Barnes and I agree on some points, for the most part we appear to be discussing different works.

LOREN PARTRIDGE University of California at Berkeley