The Religious Symbolism of Michelangelo: The Sistine Ceiling. .

Edgar Wind. The Religious Symbolism of Michelangelo: The Sistine Ceiling.

Ed. Elizabeth Sears. Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2000. lii + 240 pp. + 193 b/w pls. index. illus. bibl. $99. ISBN: 0-19-817-429-2.

We are indebted to Elizabeth Sears, who has labored mightily and shrewdly to fashion an important book on the Sistine ceiling from Edgar Wind's writings, published and unpublished alike. The present work stands as a worthy companion volume to the author's classic, Pagan Mysteries in the Italian Renaissance. A learned exegesis of the theology of the Sistine ceiling, Wind's volume on Michelangelo is also an extensive discussion of the intellectual milieu in which the artist was formed. The fruit of immense erudition, Wind's book is grounded in a deep knowledge of the philosophical and theological literature of the Italian Renaissance. A cursory glance at the bibliography of Wind's primary sources will attest to the scope of his learning.

The appearance of this book is timely, since the social, economic, and political history of Renaissance art has recently eclipsed the intellectual history of art, and it is therefore necessary to reaffirm the importance of the history of ideas, theological, philosophical, and poetical, to which Renaissance art is wed. Presenting Michelangelo's decoration in relation to the theology of Savonarola and his followers, Wind's book also dwells on the influences of Polixiano and the Neoplatonists, Ficino and Pico, upon Michelangelo's thought.

A generation ago our understanding of Michelangelo's art in particular and of Renaissance art in general was dominated by Neoplatonism. There followed a sharp reaction to this approach, a reaction that was not altogether unwarranted, since the Neoplatonic picture of the Renaissance, stiffened into caricature, came to be overstated. Now the pendulum has swung so fully away from the philosophical to the social and economic that some scholars labor under the illusion that knowing about the patron of a work of art or about what the patron paid for the work explains everything. It is surely time for a more balanced approach, and in such a synthesis Wind's contribution can play a vital role.

Like the iconographical method of his teacher, Panofsky, the approach of Wind has been subjected to intense criticism in recent years as scholars have exposed the limits of iconography--the limits of attempting to match images with texts, as if images were the mere illustration of texts. The same problem also infects the study of Renaissance art theory when it is often suggested or implied that images are the equivalence of theoretical texts, which they are nor. Wind was himself not unaware of such problems, and he addressed them in a previously unpublished early draft of the introduction to his Pagan Mysteries, which Sears has wisely included in appendix b in the section entitled "Picture and Text."

Although trying to understand art by applying to it the knowledge of texts is fraught with difficulty and is imperfect, this approach is surely preferable to recent attempts in some quarters to reduce art historical explanation to the rhetoric of the interpreter, an approach which has been a convenient excuse for intellectual laziness and the abandonment of the pursuit of historical understanding. Wind's approach prompts us to grasp distinctive features of Michelangelo's art. Even if, for example, the great prophets and sibyls of the Sistine ceiling do not correspond in detail to the writings of the prophetic Savonarola or his followers, we can nevertheless fruitfully ponder the prominence of Michelangelo's colossal seers in the Sistine ceiling in relation to Savonarola's prophetic voice. Similarly, reflection upon the allegory of the Sistine ceiling in relation to the theology of the Neoplatonists can lead to suggestive analogies between texts and images, analogies that do not reduce the ceiling to the illu stration of specific texts.

Ultimately, Wind's general interpretation of the Sistine ceiling is based on a sound understanding of the Christological allegory of the ceiling, which is informed by the conventions of Christian theology. Used with extreme caution, his iconographical approach is a useful tool of exegesis, but we should remain cognizant of the fact that this method is only a step toward the apprehension of the meaning of the Sistine ceiling. The crucial step of interpretation that follows iconography is that of describing the work of art itself, describing what one sees in the image. Such description requires a literary artifice worthy of the art it approaches, an artifice all too rare in the writing of art history.