Michelangelo's Poetry and the Non-Finito

Thesis:

Michelangelo's Poetry and the Non-Finito

Through his poetry, Michelangelo reveals his notion of the non-finito and his idea of beauty that outlasts his life.

Two themes: eternal beauty & the unfinished

Why poetry?

Reveals the private self

Particulars of his experience

models Dante and Petrarch

Sonnet, 1538-44

Sonnet. Date unknown. For Vittoria Colonna

1532. For Tommaso Cavalieri

Not even the best of artists has any conception

that a single marble block does not contain

within its excess, and that is only attained

by the hand that obeys the intellect.

If my rough hammer gives a human face

To this or that of all hard blocks that wait,

It is another smith makes me create,

Controlling each my motion, each my pace.

But that high hammer beyond stars and space

Makes self, and others, with each stroke, more great

And bright; and since the first must generate

All hammers, that gives life to all, always.

And since the most effective is that blow

Which falls from the highest in the smithy, mine

Shall fall no more-my hammer having flown.

Now here am I, unskilled, and do not know

How to go on, unless the smith divine

Teaches me how, who am on earth alone.

Platonic idea of Concetto

Only with fire can the smith shape iron

from his conception into fine, dear work;

neither, without fire, can any artist

refine and bring gold to it's highest state,

nor can the unique pheonix be revived

unless first burned. And so, if I die burning,

I hope to rise again brighter among those

whom death augments and time no longer hurts.

I'm fortunate that the fire of which I speak

still finds a place within me, to renew me,

since already I'm almost numbered among the dead;

or, since by its nature it ascends to heaven,

to its own element, if I should be transformed

into fire, how could it not bear me up with it?

"'conception' to preserve its double connotation of both ideation and gestation." (Saslow 34)

Madrigal. 1542-44

Madrigal. 1538-44. For Vittoria Colonna

Two quatrains, ca. 1545

unfinished sonnet

After many years of seeking and many attempts,

the wise artist only attains a living image

faithful to his fine conception,

in hard and alpine stone, when he's near death;

for at novel and lofty things

one arrives late, and then lasts but a short time.

Likewise, if nature, straying,

from one face to another, and from age to age,

has reached the peak of beauty,

feeds my great desire with a strange food;

and I can't decide or say,

having seen your face, which is greater, the hurt or the joy:

the end of the universe, or my great pleasure.

Sonnet. 1538-44. For Vittoria Colonna

Those whose taste is whole and sound draw much delight

from works of the first art, which reproduces for us

the faces and gestures of the human body

in wax, clay, or stone, with limbs even more alive.

If harsh, coarse, and offensive time should then

disfigure, or break, or dismember it completely,

the beauty that once existed is remembered,

and preserves our vain pleasure for a better place.

Sonnet. 1545-56. Vittoria Colonna

Just as, by taking away, lady, one puts

into hard and alpine stone

a figure that's alive

and that grows larger wherever the stone decreases,

so too are any good deeds

of the soul that still trembles

concealed by the excess mass of its own flesh,

which forms a husk that's coarse and crude and hard.

You alone can still take them out

from within my outer shell,

for I haven't the will or strength within myself.

How can it be, Lady, as one can see

from long experience, that the live image

sculpted in hard alpine stone lasts longer

than its maker, whom the years return to ashes?

The cause bows down and yields to the effect,

from which it's clear that nature's defeated by art;

and I know, for I prove it true in beautiful sculpture,

that time and death can't keep their threat to work.

Therefore, I can give both of us long life

in any medium, whether colors of stone,

by depicting each of these faces of ours;

so that a thousand years after our departure

may be seen how lovely you were, and how wretched I,

and how, in loving you, I was no fool.

If the portion that's divine has well conceived

the face and gestures of someone, then through that

double power, and with a short-lived, lowly model,

he can give life to stone, which is beyond craft's power.

And it's no different with the roughest sketch:

before one's eager hand takes up the brush,

he checks and reworks the most beautiful and clever

of his learned ideas, and lays out his subjects.

It's the same with me: at birth I was a model

of little worth, to be reborn through you,

noble and worthy lady, as a noble and perfect thing.

If your grace builds up what I lack, and files down

my excess, what penitence should be fierce ardor

expect, if it is to chastise and teach me?