Michelangelo, Drawing, and the Subject of ArtJoost Keizer

On January 1, 1521, Albrecht Drer recorded in his diary, "Ihave done a good Veronica in oil, worth twelve guilders. Igave it to Erancisco, the agent in Portugal. I then paintedanother Veronica in oil, better than the first, and gave it tothe agent Brandan in Portugal."' On the face of it, Drer'snote constituted simply the bookkeeping of an artist traffick-ing in international imagery, fixing price, quantity, quality,medium, and destination. Yet for Hans Belting, writing in1990, Drer's seemingly formulaic notation revealed a wholeculture in transition, a culture well on its way to becomingmodern while at the same time not completely divorced froma traditional understanding of the image.^ Drer's paintingsof Veronica still belonged to that venerated tradition of theicon. Veronica had captured the first and "true" image ofChrist, the "vera icon" imprinted without human hands onthe sweat cloth (sudarium) Veronica had offered Christ. Thesudarium legitimized the Christian icon.'^ After the fall ofConstantinople in 1204, the clothor at least a version ofitwas brought to Rome, where it served as the most impor-tant indulgenced image in the Christian world. By about1500, the vera icon had become the best-known and mostauthoritative of all images, stamped on badges, copied inpaintings, and endlessly replicated in prints. At one point allpictures of Christ sought their origins in that single proto-type, an image made without human hands. Drer's imagesof Veronica, on the other hand, did not simply point to thevera icon in Romeor some copy of itthey also insisted onDrer's authorship. Eor Belting, these pictures were held upas art (Kunst), the one painting having surpassed the other inits execution and therefore fetching a better price. Eranciscoand Brandan received a "Drer" as well as a "Veronica."

Such a double conception of the image. Belting argued,first arose in Italy, a region Drer had visited twice. Drer wasimpressed by the cult of art he found in Venice. In a letter tohis friend Willibald Pirckheimer on December 7, 1506, hereported that everyone he had met there was "very knowl-edgeable about the art of painting.""* Drer, according toBelting, was thereby positioned between two cultures, the onestill adhering to an idea of the image that privileged subjectmatter over the name of the painter and the other, arising inItaly, slowly shifting emphasis away from subject matterproper to adopt art theory as its primary subject of represen-tation. "The material image," Belting explained, "dissolvesitself in an image about artistic conception, which is justifiedby the artist's imagination and is addressed to that of thebeholder." About 1500, the subject of Italian art could well becalled Disegno, Concetto, or Idea.^

Art's path to becoming modern is often seen as its slowemancipation from the Christian cult.'' Preachers had indeeda lot to say about the divorce of art from religion in the yearsaround 1500. Take, for instance, a sermon by the Dominicanfriar Girolamo Savonarola, preached in Florence in February

1498, in which the monk ranted against the understanding ofpictures as deposits of specific artistic personae, the "mod-ern" picture Belting saw arising at the time. Savonarola di-rected his criticism against the aphorism "Every painterpaints himself" The dictum had been current in Florencesince the 1470s, and for Savonarola it epitomized a deeply feltretreat from the Christian cult value of pictures toward a cultof art and artists. The subject of religious images, the friarcomplained, was now not so much the figure (Christ, a saint,a prophet) represented in or through the painting but theartist responsible for the painting.^

Savonarola's words arrogate a unique place for art in earlymodern society, which showed no signs of a more widespreadculture of unbelief.^ No claims for a comparable seculariza-tion process could, for example, be made at the time fortexts, which were simply divided between secular and reli-gious writing. Nobody was pointing to an erosion of religioussubject matter in religious texts. In fact, Savonarola lamentedthe fact that non-Christian texts, like Livy's Histories, werediscussed in an allegorical way, a mode of interpretation thathe thought should be exclusively reserved for the Bible. Bythe end of the fifteenth century, the interpretation of textsand pictures moved in opposite directions, the first elaborat-ing on allegory, the second getting rid of it. This movementsuggests an extensive hollowing out of subject matter inpictures, not just in religious images, at the time.

The model proposed by Belting privileges the religiousartwork as a site of modernization over the secular artwork.Because secular artworksthat is, works with a nonreligioussubject matternever stood in the service of Christian reli-gion to begin with. Belting and others imply, they lack thecapacity to reform or to emancipate, exactly the capacity thatart historians identify as the motivating force for the mod-ernization of art. Still, the exclusive position of art in earlymodern society that preachers like Savonarola appear topoint to also indicates that any artworknot just religiousimagescould be emancipated from its duty to simply illus-trate subject matter. This became a problem only in therealm of religious art, which is why preachers singled outthose pictures for criticism. If, as Belting maintains, the mod-ern institution of art arose from the capacity of art to fore-ground art theory as a subject of representation, then there isno reason to disqualify the contribution of secular painting.Belting, for instance, mentions Leon Battista Alberti's Depictura, written in 1435, as a foundational text for the theo-retical preoccupation of Italian art and its steady moderniza-tion.*" Alberti located his "modern" conception of art insecular painting. The historia, that "great work of the painter,"was a large work for public displayhardly similar to therelatively small cult images Belting talks aboutand the ex-amples of historiae Alberti mentioned were of nonreligious

MICHELANGELO. DRAWING, AND THE SUBJECT OF ART

stibject matter: the Calumny of Apelles and an ancient reliefof the Carrying of the Dead Meleager."

The contribution of early sixteenth-century secular imag-ery to the modern conception of art is exemplified by Mi-chelangelo's Battle of Casena cartoon (1504). This artwork,which had a substantial impact, did away with traditionalcontent and took instead the making of art as its subject.Scholarship on the cartoon is marked by an interpretativedilemma, an ironic sense of indecision that seems to mirrorthe double culture of art that Belting recognized in the sameperiod. For some, the work still adheres to a traditionalunderstanding of subject matter: an image of battle, thesubject of which can be located in text and the objective ofwhich is to incite contemporary Florentines to defend theircity as heroically as the story "illustrated" by Michelangelo.Others, instead, deny the work any kind of social relevance.They define subject matter as nothing more than a pretextfor the artist to paint the "Michelangelesque" nude. There is,however, another way to interpret it. While the cartoon evi-dences an erosion of iconography, the work's thematizing ofits own making never asserted the pure autonomy that for-malist scholars have granted it. Informed by a culture ofhistorical revision, Michelangelo's Casena cartoon served asan argument in favor of the social and political centrality ofa new institution of art, one that looks decidedly modern.Whereas in the eyes of Belting, religious art's withdrawalfrom conventional subject matter resulted in its disengage-ment from (Christian) society, the model offered here grantsthe secular work of art a new social responsibility exactlybecause of its denial of iconography.

The Subject of HistorySometime in the fall of 1504, for the first and last time in acareer spanning more than seven decades, Michelangelo wascommissioned to paint a moment from history. The Signoria(a group of eight citizens headed by the gonfaloniere v/hich ranthe daily business of the government) asked the artist, previ-ously occupied with biblical and antique subject matter, topaint the Florentine victory over Pisa, fought near the villageof Cascina, eight miles to the southeast of the harbor city, onJuly 26, 1364. The fresco was destined for the Sala del GranConsiglio, a giant space built behind the Palazzo della Signo-ria (the Florentine town hall) between 1494 and 1498. Theroom was constructed in response to an important politicalevent: the expulsion of the Medici family from Florence onNovember 9, 1494. The Medici had de facto ruled overFlorence for sixty years, and their expulsion marked a water-shed in Florentine politics and culture. The structure ofgovernment that replaced the Medici until the family's returnin 1512 was called the Governo Popolare, the "government ofthe people," at whose constitutional heart was placed theGran Consiglio, or Great Council, in whose meeting placeMichelangelo was to paint his mural. Consisting of threethousand men who discussed and voted on proposals madeby the Signoria, the council replaced a Medici politics ofselection and privilege to become what one contemporarycalled "the soul of the Governo Popolare," that "foundationof liberty."'"^ Inscriptions announced the hall's politicalcreed, and initial attempts at decoration pictured an atmo-sphere of political replacement and defacement.'' Objects

appropriated from the expelled Medici family were displayedas trophies of war, including some of the most expensiveitems of Lorenzo de' Medici's collection of antiquities. Thealtarpiece that once adorned the private chapel at thePalazzo Medici now stood on an altar at the Sala del GranConsiglio. It was in this charged political atmosphere thatMichelangelo's fresco was commissioned. A year before,Leonardo da Vinci had been called on to paint the Florentinevictory over the Milanese at Anghiari in 1441 for the sameroom. Leonardo's and Michelangelo's frescoes would havebeen paired on the west wall of the room.''' Leonardobegan his fresco in 1505 but left it unfinished; Michelan-gelo never started to paint. He produced only a prepara-tory cartoon, which was torn to shreds in the course of thesixteenth century by artists eager to copy the figures con-tained in it.'^ A painted grisaille copy of the whole cartoonwas commissioned from Aristotile da Sangallo by GiorgioVasari in 1542 to preserve Michelangelo's by then famouscomposition (Fig. 1)."'

It is difficult to think of a more political commission thanthe one for Michelangelo's and Leonardo's battle pieces,especially Michelangelo's.'^ War was at the heart of the pol-itics of the Governo Popolare at the time. The Florentineswere fighting a cosdy battle against Pisa, which had reclaimedits independence in 1494 in the wake of the dramatic politicalevents that had also led to the expulsion of the Medici. Thewar was draining the city of almost all its tax revenues; it wasthe subject of daily discussion during government assembliesthat met in the Sala del Gran Consiglio.'" A historical batdecould have served as a model for current military politics,which is how most historians interpret Michelangelo's car-toon.

These interpretations, despite the solidity of the relationbetween art and politics that they map out, favor the view-point of reconstruction too much and care too little aboutthe structure of Michelangelo's composidon. Political consid-eradon of Michelangelo's cartoon often departs from whatthe cartoon could have beena finished paindng whose onlyduty was to communicate polidcal propagandaemploying atoo narrow iconological method that makes meaning primar-ily reside in a body of text Michelangelo purportedly soughtto illustrate. Scholars often deduce meaning from what thecartoon never was and what, it can be argued, Michelangelodecided early on his work should not become.

The faithful copy of Michelangelo's cartoon by da Sangalloshows nineteen men, drawn in various poses and larger thanlife.''^ Most of them are nude. Naked men climb out of a poolof water just visible on the lower border of the composition;others try to dress, hastily, apparently in the face of approach-ing danger. The source of that threat is not figured in thepainted copy, and it is not at all clear if it ever featured in thecartoon. There is a drawing in the Bddsh Museum, London,that shows the main group of the bathers and includes somemen on horses in the upper left corner, in the directionwhere the man on the left is pointing (Fig. 2). The back-ground of the London copy looks awkwardly detached fromthe foreground. The nude men form the primary work; thesoldiers in the background register as added material, per-haps to make sense of the pointing figures in the cartoon, as,we will see, another copyist would do.""

306 B U L L E T I N S E P T E M B E R 2 0 1 1 V O L U M E X C I I I N U M B E R .S

1 Aristotile da Sangallo, aUi-i .MKhrlaiigt-lo, I he Battle ofCasaiia, iM.^, ictiipera on panel, 34'/ X 50% in. (87.7 X 129 cm).Holkham Hall, Norfolk (artwork in the public domain; photograph provided by Viscount Coke and Trustees of the HolkhamEstate)

2 After Michelangelo, The Battle ofCascina, late 16th century, pen audbrown ink over black chalk on paper,18 X 35 in. (45.8 X 89 cm). TheBritish Museum, London (artwork inthe public domain; photograph theTrustees of the British Museum)

Backgrouud details remaiu mere oruaments pushed to themargius of the compositiou. But what is marginal in Michel-angelo's work was central in the text he purportedly "illus-trated." The Battle of Cascina was preserved in at least twoextensive historical descriptions: Filippo Villani's fourteenth-century Crnica and Leonardo Bruni's Historiae florentine po-puli, published in 1442 and translated into Italian by DonatoAcciauolo in 1492. A copy of Acciauolo's translation was keptin the quarters of the gonfaloniere Piero Soderini, the head ofthe Signoria at the time of the commission. It has been

convincingly argued that Soderiui was largely responsible forthe commission and that it is therefore likely that Soderinigave Michelangelo access to Bruni's, and not Villani's, text.^'

Bruni's pages tell of the tremendous heat that day, whenFlorentine soldiers were doing little more than waiting. TheFlorentine captain, Galeotto Malatesta, had fallen ill. A smallgroup of Pisaus would sometimes show up at camp, pretend-ing to attack, at first causing some confusiou among theFlorentine soldiers, btit after a while they stopped noticing.Most of the Florentine soldiers had fallen asleep in their

MICHELANGELO. DRAWING. AND THE SUBJECT OF ART 307

tents; others decided to refresh themselves in the rivernearby. Now the Pisans, aware of the Florentines' low guard,started the onslaught. They attacked the side of the Floren-tine camp where the forces from Arezzo were stadonedabad decision, it turned out, for, unlike their bathing andsleeping Florentine companions, the Aretines were alert.They checked the first onset and prevented the Florentinearmy from suffering a humiliating defeat. The sound of battlefinally drove the rest of the (Florentine) soldiers to arms. Andin the end, the Pisans were safely pushed back within theircity walls, surrounded, but not defeated. Neglecting the coreof Bruni's account, which tells of the battle properof mil-itary tactics and the movement of troopsMichelangelochose to depict what was in fact nothing more than a subor-dinate clause in the Hstorae: "The heat was tremendous, anda large part of the soldiery was unarmed or lying down intheir tents or bathing in the river that flowed nearby."'^ ^There is no mention in Bruni ofthose same soldiers climbingout of the river at the sound of battle. He just wrote that the"clamor rose the rest to arms." The grand narrative sweep ofBruni's history is set aside in Michelangelo's collection ofmen portrayed in the most quoddian of actions, putting ontrousers and stockings with an almost perversely absorbedattention. It is difficult to imagine a representation of warfurther removed from tradition than Michelangelo's. UnlikePaolo Uccello's Battles of San Romano of 1432 and Leonardo'scontemporaneous Battle of Anghiari (which survives only incopies), Michelangelo's cartoon is oblivious to battle.

Michelangelo's digressions into mundane details couldhardly count as the stuff of history, at least not according tothe standards of depictions of history and history writing asthey were being formulated at the time. In history wridng,historia could consist of either meaningful acts of histoiy (resgestae) or the narration of those acts.'^ ^ For instance, in hisActius of 1495, the Neapolitan humanist Giovanni Pontano,following Cicero, defined history as the narradon of "thingsdone [which] usually consist of the stuff of war." The narra-tion of past wars, Pontano continues, serves to supply thepresent with models of civic virtue.'^ '* In that strict sense of theword, Leonardo's Battle of Anghiari qualifies better as a historiathan Michelangelo's representation. Leonardo was given aniconographie program, which maps out the fullness of historywith overwhelming precision. It details a progression in timefrom the moment the commander addresses his troops priorto the battle, to the battle itself, ending with a triumphalmarch. He was to include numerous contemporary figures,their positions meticulously described, the number of sol-diers arduously plotted out, and the articulation of the ter-rain at Anghiari given its proper due.^

Yet it may be Michelangelo's refusal to present a model ofcivic virtue, as proposed by Pontano, that shows his resistanceto the contemporary models of writing and representinghistory. The battle fell short of embodying a glorious momentin Florentine military history, and it is not difficult to read aloss of civic virtue on the part of the Florentines into Bruni'spages. Bruni recounts that after having barely survived thePisan onslaught, the soldiers from Florence started to rebelagainst their officers. The men depicted in Michelangelo'swork could barely register as role models for civic virtue, save,of course, for the men from Arezzo. Bruni's emphasis on

Aretine military virtue is perhaps not surprising in the con-text of a book by a notable citizen of Arezzo, but, perhapsmore relevant, by Michelangelo's dme the Aretines wereconsidered the enemies of Florence, not its allies. In revoltagainst the Florentines, the Aretines added more militaryconcerns to the already overextended Florentine govern-ment. The Aredne rebellion was frequendy discussed in gov-ernment meetings. The city's second chancellor, NiccoloMachiavelli, even dedicated a whole treatise to its forcefulsuppression, published a year before Michelangelo receivedhis commission.^^ Other, more glorious victories over Pisawere available to the Florentines at the time, such as thevictory of 1406, narrated at length in Bruni's Historiae, whichsecured the subjection of Pisa to Florence for almost ninetyyears. At least from the perspective of 1504, the Cascinavictory would have read as a minor instance in a range of farmore successful military campaigns against the harbor city inthe fifteenth century.^^

Earlier scholarship did not need such justification to de-clare subject matter as mere aporia. Scholars have oftentaken a formalist approach to the Casena cartoon. Manygranted Michelangelo unprecedented artistic leeway. SydneyFreedberg, for instance, wrote of "a constraint of the subjectof the artist's interests and will," and Cecil Gould, in the onlymonograph on the cartoon, guessed that Michelangelo hadthe last word in determining subject matter.^ ** Their interpre-tations ultimately serve to announce the Cascina cartoon aslittle more than a testament to Michelangelo's artistic free-dom, from even the constraints of iconography dictated byhis patron. Michelangelo, the argument goes, turned onthose few words in Bruni merely to produce the "Michelan-gelesque nude" that met with such an enthusiastic responsethroughout Europe in the sixteenth century. To be sure,Michelangelo's cartoon somehow pointed to the future; itspeculiar composition generated a copious copying industrynaturally following from the claims Michelangelo was makingin the cartoon. But Michelangelo could not turn toward thefuture of reception until he had reordered art's past. Michel-angelo's reconsideration of the subject of art began as adismantling of art's former dependence on text.

HistoriaNineteen men have rarely shown such resistance to formingan integrated whole. Organized in three overlapping planes,they stand isolated from one another, actors unaware of theplot they are acting out. The man in the first row at leftreaching for the water, apparently to rescue a drowningcompanion, for example, is badly placed: hands begging forhelp appear farther downstream. At right, a bearded mantries to put on his stockings, with great difficulty pullingfabric over what we imagine to be wet skin. Like the manstanding in the background, concentrating on his attempt toclose that last button of his garb, he is oblivious to the chaossurrounding him. And in instances where contact is on theverge of being established, Michelangelo refuses to carry itthrough. In the middle of the composition, a man turns tothe back row in an effort to connect with the soldier behindhim, but the latter is too absorbed in winding a cloth aroundhis head to answer his companion's gaze.

It is not enough to say that the cartoon tells a story of

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3 Michelangelo, Study for the Battle ofCascina, 1504-5, metal point andblack chalk on paper, 9% X 14% in.(23.9 X 36.5 cm). Galleria degli Uffizi,Florence (artwork in the publicdomain; photograph Soprinten-denza Spciale per il PatrimonioStorico Artistico ed Etnoantropologicoe per il Polo Museale della Citt diFirenze)

military chaos. Michelangelo's studied fragmentation of sto-rytelling breaks down what was arguably the most esteemedmodel of representation at the time: the historia as it wasdeveloped by Leon Battista Alberti. Althotigh conforming informat to Alberti's definition of the historiaa large work fora public space {publicum opus) that included multiple fig-uresMichelangelo's cartoon completely stibverts the narra-tive consistency that Alberti had made a hallmark of thehistoria. Michelangelo's figures simply do not "fit togetherto represent and explain the historia."^'^ More precisely, it isthe dependence of art on text to which Alberti subscribedthat Michelangelo resisted. Alberti defined painting almostpurely as a vehicle of textual transmission. If Michael Baxan-dall was right and Alberti modeled his concept of composi-tion on the Ciceronian periodic sentence, then painting isnot only based on words, it can also easily be translated backinto verbal form.'^' The notion of historia dissolves the distinc-tion between text and image altogether. Grounded in text,painting could well do without manual execution. Literaryinvention, Alberti said, "can give pleasure even by itself andwithout pictorial representation."''^ Historia, then, effectivelyshifts attention away from the how of representation to thewhat, from painting proper to the textual subject matter itpurports to illustrate.'*'' The words of the writer becomeinterchangeable with the lines and colors of the painter,grammar with the structure of art, and the training of theartist with that of the schoolboy learning to write.'''* "I look ata good painting," Alberti confides to us in his De re aedica-toria (1485), "with as much pleasure as I take in reading agood story [historia]. Both are the work of painters: onepaints with words, the other tells the story with his brush."''''Breaking down the Albertian concordance between text andimage, Michelangelo insisted on art's own dynamic, on itsinner logic: on how art related to its history and tradition ofmaking.

Michelangelo's emancipation from textual narrative, bothas an a priori assumption of art making and a means of

describing artworks, developed in the course of his work onthe cartoon. A comparison between a preliminary composi-tional drawing at the Galleria degli Uffizi in Florence with theSangallo copy (Figs. 3, 1) illuminates Michelangelo's abstrac-tion from narrative and shows how he raised the artisticprocess as a proper subject of representation.'' Take, forinstance, the seated figure turning away from us in the centerof the cartoon, so studiously avoiding contact with the stoop)-ing man. In Michelangelo's earliest drawing he looks at theman behind him, a gesture reciprocated by that man, turningin response to his seated comrade. In the cartoon, however,the turning figure faces a man wrapping a ttirban around hishead, avoiding contact, and the bending soldier is now foundstaring at the water, leaving his erstwhile companion as noth-ing more than an isolated figure study. The isolation ofMichelangelo's figures results from the process by whichMichelangelo made art and his willingness to keep that pro-cess visible. After having finished the stage of outlining thegeneral composition with stylus and chalk, of which the Uffizisheet is an example, Michelangelo began drawing the indi-vidual figures from life on separate sheets, placing his modelsin poses similar to those he had outlined in the composi-tional study. Two of these are seen in a sheet kept in theTeylers Museum in Haarlem. Its life drawings in black chalkare preliminary to the running figure at the far right of thecomposition and the naked figure visible behind him (Figs. 4,5). They were certainly drawn after Michelangelo had out-lined the whole composition; parts that would have beeninvisible on the cartoon, such as the running man's lower leftleg and the other's left arm, were left undrawn or only faintlyindicated with chalk. At the moment of reintegrating theseseparate figure studies into the composition, the figures re-tained some of the individual status they had acquired in thedesign stage of drawing after life. Disconnected and sepa-rated, they pose unaware of the others, as a model would haveonce done in Michelangelo's workshop. The contours of thefigures, both in the preparatory drawings and in the cartoon.

MICHELANGELO, DRAWING, AND THE SUBJECT OF ART 399

T\ '

\\

4 Michelangelo, sttidy lor Tlie BiUlk of Cascina, 1504-5, blackchalk and lead white on paper, 15y8 X lO'/s in. (40.4 X25.8 cm). Teylers Museum, Haarlem (artwork in the publicdomain; photograph provided by Art Resource, NY)

are thickened, as if to emphasize their self-containedness.The cartoon might best be characterized as an assembly ofisolated figure drawings. '^^

Drawing asMtich of what I have argued above and what will follow belowrests on the premise that Michelangelo's cartoona drawing,and therefore traditionally belonging to the preparatorystage of artwas somehow finished, its disintegrated compo-sition not just the result of its status as a work in process. Thatpremise needs to be buttressed.

This is what we know about the genesis of the cartoon.Michelangelo started working on it in the late summer of1504, not in the Sala del Gran Consiglio but in a provisionalworkshop allocated to him by the Signoria at the Dyers'Hospital of S. Onofrio, which was located a stone's throwfrom his father's house.'^ ** The cartoon was true to the size ofthe planned fresco, whose dimensions would have been twen-ty-three by fifty-nine feet.^^ Michelangelo's figures were oncedescribed as over-life-size."*" It was finished by February 1505,

5 Michelangelo, study for The Battle of Cascina, 1504-5, blackchalk and lead white on paper, 15% X SV in. (40.4 X22.5 cm). Teylers Museum, Haarlem (artwork in the publicdomain; photograph provided by AJ t Resource, NY)

when Michelangelo received his fitial payment; a few dayslater, he left for Rome.*' Michelangelo briefly returned toFlorence in May 1506, but there is no evidence that hepursued the commission further at this point.'''^ Michelangelonever started painting.

A crucial step was taken sometime before the end of Au-gust 1505, whetT the cartoon was transported to the Sala delGran Consiglio in the artist's absence. A document of Atigtist31 registers payments for three little slats (panchoncelli) thatwere used to "put the cartoon by Michelangelo up on thehallatoio," a location in the Sala del Gran Consiglio.'''^ Al-though the term ballatoio could be rendered as "gallery" or"balcony," it was also sometimes employed to indicate anelevation or podivim. Francesco Saechetti, for instance, calledthe wooden elevations around the altar of the Annunciation

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in SS. Anntinziata hallaloi.*'^ Siuce there was no balcony in theSala del Gran Consiglio, the ballatoio almost certainly refers tothe podium where the council of the Dodici Buonomini (agrotip of twelve elected men that the Signoria was required toconsult before making government decisions) sat duringmeetings, or perhaps a structure built on top of that; this wasindeed the podium ahove which, Nicolai Rubinstein has dem-onstrated, Michelangelo's fresco would have heen located.''"''Installed there, the cartoon was no longer simply a workingmodel the artist would use as the basis of the fresco; it literallysat in the place of the fresco.

Michelangelo's cartoon remained in the Sala del GranConsiglio until the room was dismantled after the GovernoPopolare fell in 1512. Suhstitutiug for the painting that wasnever begun, for seven years the cartoon therefore served apermanent function formerly reserved for painting alone. Inthis capacity, Michelangelo's work lasted longer than Leonar-do's, which was eventually replaced by the (unfinished) paint-ing. Leonardo's cartoon must have left the room at least by1510, when Francesco Alhertini, the Florentine priest andwriter of guidebooks, saw it in the Sala del Papa at S. MariaNovella, which Leonardo had used as a provisional work-shop.**^ It is even possible that Leonardo's cartoon, unlikeMichelangelo's, never left his workshop.

Cartoons and drawings had previously been considered aspreparatory media, to be discarded or at best kept for futureprojects in the workshop the moment the painting was done.However, circumstantial evidence suggests that Michelaugelonever planned to use his cartoon as a means of transferringhis design to the wall, a procedure that entailed pricking thecontours of the figures and therefore the destruction of thedrawing. Carmen Bambach has demonstrated that Michelan-gelo's Cascina cartoon and Leonardo's cartoon for the Battleof Anghiari were the first ben finito cartoons to have beeuproduced, that is, cartoons that were not used for physicallytransmitting the design onto the wall."*^ Alheit initially func-tioning as a model for the composition, ben finito cartoonswere primarily appreciated as self-sufficient works of art.Later in the sixteenth century, they were avidly collected.'**Bambach showed that a so-called substitute cartoou wouldhave been used for the actual transfer of the composition tothe wall. In fact, she establishes that Leonardo produced sucha second cartoon at the moment he started painting on thewall in 1505. Michelangelo never made a second cartoon,because he never began painting.

Substituting for the missing painting, Michelangelo's worknever posed for a painting. In his description of the work,Albertini employed the term disegni, which can be translatedas either "drawings" or "designs." It might be that Albertinichose the plural disegni iustead of the single disegno because acartoon consisted of many sheets of paper (he employed theplural, too, for Leonardo's cartoon at S. Maria Novella), or,more likely, that Michelangelo (in common with Leonardo)employed different drawing techniques in it, as reported byVasari. Importantly, Albertini did not use an iconographiedesignation for the work. What mattered to him was the factthat the composition consisted of drawings for Michelange-lo's cartoon, either emphasizing the medium of drawing orthe process of making (design). Apparently, Michelangelo'scartoon registered more naturally in its capacity as medium

than as iconography. Tellingly, Albertini denoted Leonardo'sunfinished painting in the same room with an iconographiedesignation, "horses."

The Cascina cartoon claims an unprecedented autonomyfor drawing, and drawing that is not just carefully polishedhut that also consciously shows the traces of its manufacture.Vasari recorded that the Cascina cartoon contained "manygroups of figures drawn in different ways, some outlined incharcoal, others sketched with a few strokes, some shadedgradually and heightened with lead white."''^ Insisting on thespecificity of its medium, never pretending to look like paint-ing, Michelangelo's cartoon at the same time managed topose for a completed work, a role previously reserved forpainting and sculpture alone. In 1587, the art theoreticianGiovanni Armenini wrote of cartoons like Michelangelo'sthat "one can say that such is the same work [as painting],except for the colors, and that is why one sees these alwaysbeing made with complete industry and study."*" Wheu Mi-chelaugelo's patrons decided to put the cartoon in the placereserved for the painting, they revealed a very early appreci-ation for the meditmi of drawing. What they appreciatedwere Michelangelo's sketchlike strokes, the different drawingtechniques that Vasari described, all indicative of the work'slack of finish. This was a giant leap. The sixteenth century isfull of criticism of works of art that were not finished, oftenunderstood as lacking effort and therefore severely under-mining the artist's work ethic.*'

All this is certainly not to say that Michelangelo neverintended to put paint to wall, nor that his patrons asked himto stop working the moment he finished his cartoon. At thesame time, the Florentine government was quite ready toaccept a cartoon as a finished work of art, otherwise it simplywould not have been installed in place of the missing frescoat a moment when there was no reason to think Michelangelowas not going to return to Florence to start painting. BeforeMichelangelo received his commi.ssion, Leonardo da Vincihad already been given the option to design only a cartoon.''^What stands out abotit the decision of Michelangelo's pa-trons to substitute the cartoou for the missing fresco is that itwas not just a matter of convenience, made because thecartoou was at hand and looked like a painting. The cartoonitselfin its disconnectedness, its refusal to illustrate, its em-phasis on process and makingalready marked a departurefrom Michelaugelo's origiual brief to "illustrate" a story ofwar and victory. Looking at it, it is as if we stand in Michel-angelo's workshop.

Not History but a Theory of HistoryIn place of telling a story of war and turning to the illustratiouof written history, Michelangelo's cartoon advanced the mak-ing of art itself as a subject of representation. In the mediumof drawing, meaning resides foremost in stj^ le, expressed withthe pen or stylus.'''^ Pliny had spoken of the drawn line assomething without representational responsibility except foritself in discussing a drawing by Protogenes and Apelles. Hemaintained that it disclosed "nothing save lines which eludedsight, and among the numerous works by excellent masters itwas like a blank. "'''* Nothing declares itself further removedfrom traditional stibject matter than the drawn linethat is,as long as the artist does not aim with these lines at the kind

MICHELANGELO, DRAWING, AND THE SUBJECT OE ART

of finish for which most Renaissance painting is famous. Inleaving his work at a point before the drawing and design hadreached this kind of finish, much less going on to painting it,Michelatigelo made it possible to see in this composition thepromise of a theory of a mode of making turned itito a theoryof artistic productiona theory accounting for the history ofart from the Egyptians to the sixteenth century.'''' In Italianthe word for drawing (disegno) also means design. Disegno hasa long and intricate history in the Renaissance, for it came toconnote not just any design but a certain sense of judgmentand order, a sense that at some point came to be consideredtypically Elorentine.

Disegno is manifest both physically, in drawing, and men-tally, in design. Ontologically more grounded than any othermeditim, drawing precedes painting, sculpture, and architec-ture. Disegno is invention still unconcerned with iconography.Abotit the time Michelangelo was working on his cartoon,Leonardo da Vinci was experiinetiting with multifiguregroups on paper. A sheet of his (now at Windsor Castle)began as a drawing of Leda, drawn iti chalk. Leda's body thenbecame the body of the Virgin, to which the artist addedSaint Anne, Saint John the Baptist, and the Lamb. That movewas a breakthrough in narrative possibilities. Leonardo tooka pen in hand and rettuned once more to where he started,turning the Virgin into Leda again, adding Leda's babiescoming out of their eggs to her left, and transforming thefigure of Christ into a baby resting in her right hand.'^ *'Caught up in what drawingthe purely visual and nontex-tualhad to offer, Leonardo set aside the difference be-tween mythological mother and the mother of Christ. En-tirely unrelated in stibject matter. Leda and Anne findaffiliation in Leonardo's exercise in narrative. Years later, in1533, Michelangelo's friend Sebastiano del Piombo recom-mended that the artist take a drawing of Ganymedeclearlyreferring to the finished drawing Michelangelo had justmade for Tommaso Cavalieriand ttirn it into a Saint Johnof the Apocalypse by simply adding a halo.^^

Sixteenth-centtiry writers often used Michelangelo as theultimate demonstration and model of disegno. Eor some, likeVincenzo Danti, Michelangelo's art constituted "nothingother than a treatise."'''* An informed reader might thinkimmediately of that famous sixteenth-century discotirse thatmakes disegno mediate between the polarizing qualities ofintellect and hand, between idea and execution, ultimatelyannouncing their complete resolution in disegno. Yet thisdiscourse and its theoretical reflections postdated Michelan-gelo's cartoon by several decades. Earlier theorists of disegnounderstood the term differently, more as a model structuririgthe history of art than one attempting to explain the relationbetween hand and mind. In the fifteenth century, LorenzoGhiberti had already equated painting and sculpture withpractice and drawing {disegno) with theory. Since "theory[terica] is the origin and ftrndament of every art," he wrote,the artist "should be an expert in the theory of the aforesaidart, that is, disegno."^^ Instead of considering disegno as some-thing that mediates between mind and hand, Ghiberti vm-derstood disegno as a theory of the historical foundations ofart. Drawing had guided the history of art since its earliestbeginnings. Representation originated, Ghiberti had learnedfrom Pliny, when the Egyptian artist Philocles began tracing

the shadow of man, an act he defined as "the principle[principio] and first origin" of the arts. Philocles "gave prin-ciples [principi] to drawing [disegno], and to that most distin-guished theory [that is, drawing]."*'" The word principio iscrucial to Ghiberti's understanding of disegno's historicalfunction. It can mean both "principle" and "beginning."Drawing at once stands at the beginning of art's history andwill structure history's course as its principle of order. "Whendisegno has a beginning [principio],'' Agnolo Bronzino de-clared in the sixteenth century, "there occurred in this casewhat happened to many other things, to a little beginning[principio] things were added and things grew with the dura-tion of time."*

The historical claims attributed to the drawn line madedrawing easily applicable to a history of artistic origins. Manyfifteenth-century writers, for instance, contended that theorigin of Florentine painting cotrld be pinned down to thatone historical moment when Cirnabue discovered Giottodrawing some sheep in the hills north of Florence.''^ At thesame time, drawing begins to lose its ties to a single historicalmoment when it also structures the microhistory of any indi-vidual artist's practice. All Elorentine painters and sculptors(or goldsmiths or woodcarvers) started their profession withthe art of drawing, which inattgtirated them into the princi-ples of their profession, as Giotto did by drawing animals inthe Etrurian hills.''^ Drawing was what artists continued to dofor the rest of their lives. Every new painting, sculpture, orbuilding originated on paper. The historical path by whichart had arrived in the present was reenacted daily in theworkshop of the Florentine artist.

Born from that one historical moment when Philoclestraced the shadow of man, and reborn ad infinitum into thefuture of art making, disegno was not itself subject to historicaltime. Disegno never dimmed and never grew old. It was alwaysthere. Disegno served as the agent of historical developmentbut is not history itself. It prodticed the objects of history butnever posed as a finished historical product, at least not untilMichelangelo lay bare its principles in the fall of 1504. Draw-ing persisted as a pervasive force throughout history, as anunderground stream, a fountain, Petrarch said, from whichhistorical artists tapped their inventions.'''' This was exacdywhat Ghiberti meant when he declared that disegno "unitesthe causes of both the sculptor and the painter" and that''disegno is the fundament and theory of these two arts."'''' Andthis is also why Ghiberti found nothing remarkable about thefact that no drawings survived from the draftsmen he lauded.For him, drawing existed somewhere otitside historical time,posing as various invisible origins, never as one historicalbeginning. It was only when Vasari began his Libro de' disegni,a collection of drawings by important Italian artists, sometimebetween 1550 and 1568 that we first find an interest in thehistory of drawings as historical artifacts. Btrt even here aclear historical perspective on the medium is lacking: Vasarivenerated the earliest drawing in the Libro because hethought it had been produced by Cimabue, but it was laterfound that the drawing was made about a century afterCimabue's death.''''

A desire to uncover the historical foundation of art waswhat probably drove Michelangelo to fashion a compositionof nude men. If drawing offered one way to lay bare history's

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6 Marcaiitoiiio Rainiondi, alter Michelangelo, Man Climbingonto a Riverbank, 1508, engraving, 8V X 5'/i in. (20.5 X13.4 cm). The British Museum, London (artwork in the publicdomain; photograph the Trustees of the British Museum)

principio, then the male nude provided another. Like draw-ing, the male nude was grounded more deeply both in timeand in design than the dressed male. A consciousness of itsroots in time developed because the oldest works of artknown to the Renaissance were nude Roman sculptures; themale nude's importance in design derived from the fact thatevery artist trained himself through nude drawing and everynew commission started from that practice, even when theproject asked for dressed figures. "Just as for a clothed fig-ure," Alberti wrote, "we first have to draw the naked bodybeneath and then cover it with clothes."''^ At the initial stageof design, Benvenuto Cellini declared in the mid-sixteenthcentury, "one always makes nudes [ignudi] and only laterdresses them."^ The sheer number of nude studies thatsurvive from Renaissance workshops, usually of apprenticesand almost always gendered male, shows how profoundlyAlberti's words were ingrained in the practice of Florentineworkshops, from which perspective Cellini was clearly writ-ing.'

Yet rather than dressing his figures as Alberti and everyonebefore had suggested, Michelangelo stopped short before the

end of design, leaving the process of design visible. Thepanicking male nudes trying to dress stand in as figures forthe dressing of art itself in the course of making a painting. Inrepresenting the act of dressing, Michelangelo left that pro-cess visible. The Casena cartoon presents itself as the un-dressed history of art making, as the principle of art and arthistory stripped bare in nineteen naked men.

RelicsMichelangelo's work does not attach to a single moment. Asa drav^^ng, it is a work reaching deep into the strticture oftime while simultaneously finding its fulfillment not in Mi-chelangelo's moment btit in the future of reception. Artistsgathered to draw after Michelangelo's figtnes when the car-toon was on display in the Sala del Gran Consiglio, probablyalready from the summer of 1505 onward.'^ ** Vasari famouslybaptized the work "a school for craftsmen."" Cellini latercalled it "a school for all the world."^^ Modern art historyregularly locates it at the origins of Florentine Mannerism.'^''

Of all the drawings after the cartoon that survive, only twoshow the composition as a whole: the one produced by daSangallo, on commission by Vasari, and the version at theBritish Musetim, which adds the aforementioned back-ground figures. All other artists consistently copied isolatedfigures or sometimes figure groups. Paying little attention tothe cartoon's compositional structure, their drawings andprints contrasted sharply with those after Leonardo's car-toon, which consistently reproduce the narrative structure ofthe work.'^ '* Michelangelo's narrative can, for instance, beseen to break up in the hands of the young Raphael, who,already in 1506-7, focused on the turning figure in thecenter of the composition and the seated man next to him.^^Uninterested in the way in which Michelangelo's figuresmight enact their movements in the service of narrative,Raphael capitalized on the educational potential of theirunprecedented and ambitious poses. Somewhat later, Marc-antonio Raimondi prodticed two prints that again isolateindividual figtires from any possible narrative logic. The first,datable to 1508, portrays the naked man climbing ashore atthe extreme left (Fig. 6); the second, dated 1510, includes thefigure pointing to the left and the one reaching for the water(Fig. 7). The addition of the two figures in the later printradically distances it from Michelangelo's narrative. In theabsence of water, or better, in the absence of the work'siconographie index, the gesture of the figure that bendstoward the river is drained of any narrative meaning. InMichelangelo's cartoon the figure's reaching toward the rivercould still be explained as giving a hand to a fellow soldierswimming under the surface, but in Raimondi's print hereaches at a hand sticking out of a rock. The print furtherenhances the status of the figures as excerpts by projectingthem against a background taken from a print by Lucas vanLeyden, which not only displaces Michelangelo's figures fromCascina to locate them in a northern landscape but alsostiggests that the only place where these figures ought toreside is in the world of art.^''

On the rocks of his 1508 print, Raimondi inscribed"I[N]V[ENIT] MI[CHAEL] A[N]G[ELO] FL[ORENTINUS]." It is thefirst print to use the term "invenit" in the history of print-making, advertising Michelangelo's invention without includ-

MICHELANGELO. DRAWING. AND THE SUBJECT OF ART 3 J 3

ing the name of the printmaker.^' In his later, more famousprints after Raphael, Raimondi similarly used the "invenit"clause, but those prints differ from the ones after Michelan-gelo in two fundamental ways. First, they copy Raphael'sentire composition and identify both the fresco's subjectmatter and location.'** Second, they are reproduced not afterthe frescoes themselves but after Raphael's preparatory stud-ies.'^ In his copies after Michelangelo, Raimondi neitherregistered the original site of Michelangelo's cartoon norexplained its iconography, although the prints were, as willbecome apparent below, made directly after the cartoon andnot from Michelangelo's preparatory drawings. It was there-fore not so much the changing nature of the print mediumper se as it was the specific qualities of Michelangelo's workthat made Raimondi decide to adopt a different practicewhen approaching the different artists. Raimondi treatedMichelangelo's work exactly as what it was: a design. HisCascina copies might then be better compared with theprints he made after those drawings Raphael created with noother intention than to turn them into prints, such as theMassacre of the Innocents. Still, in contrast to Raphael's prac-tice, Michelangelo's cartoon presented a lasting prototype forcopying, permanently on display as a model of inventionuntil it finally disintegrated in the hands of its copyists.

Michelangelo's biographer Ascanio Condivi wrote in 1553that pieces of the cartoon were diligently preserved "as asacred thing."' Condivi's words mark a Benjaminian shift inthe appreciation of artworks, from a cult of religion to a cultof beauty, wherein the veneration of base material comes tobe inscribed with the language of the sacred.^' This is abroader version of the secularization process, no longer con-fined to an erosion of the Christian cult in favor of a cult ofart, but a more encompassing shift in the artwork's referen-tial responsibility from traditional subject matter^WalterBenjamin mentions Venustoward an appreciation of basematerial and artifice. (Renaissance artists and scholars wereindeed remarkably oblivious to the subject matter of thestatues they unearthed.**^) Condivi's employment of a lan-guage formerly belonging to the culture of the relic marks anawareness of that shift in referentiality. Pieces of the cartoonwere considered relics ("come cosa sacra") of a once com-plete whole, like pieces of a saint's body, scattered all over theworld. The physical disintegration of Michelangelo's work,torn to shreds about 1540, did little to diminish its exem-plary status. As the cartoon was already a collection of unin-tegrated figure studies, its physical disintegration recapitu-lated Michelangelo's breaking down of the artwork's capacityto tell stories other than about itself.

Raimondi's first print after the cartoon dramatizes thetrajectory of the cartoon implicated in Condivi's words, awayfrom the documentation of subject matter toward the regis-tration of the process of art makinga world of intricatelines, varying poses, different techniques, of authorship, andthe work's becoming. The print with the climbing figurereverses a tradition of reproducing artworks in prints that wasonly half a century old. Farly in the histoiy of printing,woodcuts already reproduced other works of art.**' A Germanwoodcut from the 1480s, but going back to a much earlierprint, shows an image of the crticified Christ surrounded bythe coats of arms of the Bavarian monastery of Tegernsee.

7 Marcantonio Raimondi, after Michelangelo, The Climbers,1510, engraving, ll'/s X 8'/2 in. (28.2 X 21.5 cm). The BritishMuseum, London (artwork in the public domain; photograph the Trustees of the British Museum)

The arms indicate not only the place of the woodcut's originsbut alsoor, perhaps, exclusivelythe place of the image itis replicating.** The monastery boasted two miraculous cru-cifixes, before one of which Emperor Heinrich II had alleg-edly knelt.** It is, however, doubtful that the woodcut repli-cates the exact physical appearance of the "original." Earlyreproductive prints, David Areford pointed out, claimed toreplicate authoritative prototypes without looking like thatprototype.**' Rather than transcribing the physical propertiesof the originalits stylistic peculiarities, frames, inscriptions,and the likeearly prints reproduce the miraculous efficacyof the saint depicted by the original. That efficacy rested lessin what the image looked like than in what it depicted. Raimon-di's print, produced at the moment when an emphasis oninvention came to replace a model of replication, (re) turnsto replication in order to document the physical properties ofan artwork with unprecedented precision. Never had theexact contours, lines, and poses mattered so much to thereproducing engraver. Note, for instance, the difference be-tween Raimondi's print and an engraving by the Germanartist Israhel Meckenem, published between 1495 and 1500and usually considered the first, faithful copy of an artwork inprint. Meckenem's print reproduces the famotis Byzantineimage of the Imago pietatis in the church of S. Croce in Rome.A long inscription on the print insists on the exactness of the

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8 Raphael, School of Athens, detail, 1509-10, fresco, width atbase 25 ft. 3 in. (7.7 m). Vatican Museums, Vatican City(artwork in the public domain; photograph provided by ArtResource, NY)

reproduction: "This image is counterfeited in the mannerand likeness [ad instar et smltudnem] of that first ImagoPetats in the church of Santa Croce in the City of Rome,which the most saintly Pope Gregory the Great had paintedin the way it appeared to him in a vision revealed to him fromabove."' Despite this claim to being a true likeness of animage, Meckenem's print updates the archaic style of theprototype. The body of Christ is naturalized, his shouldersmade less broad and boxlike, his body endowed with volumeand a more naturalistic anatomy than seen in the body of theicon. The print, in fact, looks more like an image of Christthan of the icon; it is closer to the prototype of the picture itpurports to duplicate than to that picture. The "style" inwhich Saint Gregory had painted the icon did not matter toMeckenem as Michelangelo's manner mattered to Raimondi.

The prints after Michelangelo's cartoon replace a cultureof reproduction concerned more with subject matter thanwith the exact physical properties of the original. They ap-propriate and radicalize the culture of replicating an icon.

language and all, after they shift the reproductive responsi-bility of the copy from traditional iconography to artifice andauthorship. "Secularization" is not so much its driving forceas it is a consequence of a larger process of stripping artworksaway from their proper subject matter.

What Michelangelo propagated in the cartoon was morethan a cult of authorship. The male nudes climbing out ofthe water and getting dressed do not establish a rhymingbetween authorship and work.^ ** These nudes do not arguefor the "Michelangelesque male nude." To be sure, it wasMichelangelo who was responsible for the work and, surely, itwas Michelangelo's name that was connected with the car-toon in at least one engraving and in several written sources.The cartoon, however, constituted an effort to formulate anencompassing "theory" of picture making, one that could dowithout authorship altogether as long as it adhered to thenotion of disegnothe "author" of the history of art. In otherwords, Michelangelo's cartoon anticipates not the biogra-phies in Vasari's Vite but the prefaces. The prefaces to theLives theorize the underlying and binding force of individualaccomplishments. They are less concerned with the author-ship of individual artists than with the underlying structuresdetermining the course of the history of art. Vasari theorizedin the prefaces that individual artists were subjected to ahistorical force much bigger and more encompassing thanthe sum of individual creators.^ For Michelangelo, as itwould later be for Vasari, that force was disegno.

What Counted as Art History at the Time?By 1510, Michelangelo's figures had reached such canonicalstatus that quoting them in the margins of fresco cyclesbecame something of a common practice among the artists ofwhat Vasari called the maniera moderna, the generation imme-diately following Michelangelo. Raphael reproduced the sol-dier carrying fabric and a lance on the extreme right of thecartoon in reverse as the running figure at the extreme left ofhis School of Athens (Fig. 8).^" Andrea del Sarto mirrored theman lying in the lower right corner of Michelangelo's com-position as a beggar on the left side in his own Miracle of theRelics of San Filippo Benizzi at SS. Annunziata (Fig. 9). Theturning figure in the center of Michelangelo's cartoon ap-pears in the background of del Sarto's modello for an Adora-tion, again in reverse. And in Rosso Fiorentino's Assumption ofthe Virgin, Michelangelo's "running" soldier reappears, re-versed, in the third figure from the left, with his back turnedto the viewer (Fig. 10). All quotations appear extraneous tothe narrative in which they are inserted. As bystanders irrel-evant to the story, they stand deprived of any meaning otherthan referencing Michelangelo's work. In their iconographieirrelevancebeggar, youngster posing on a ledge, a mereRckenfigurthey do nothing more than index the historicalpedigree of the images in which they appear.

The reception of Michelangelo's cartoon simply reinforcedwhat was already at the basis of its conception: a conglomer-ate of isolated figure studies that has more to say about thehistory of representation than the city's glorious military past.The cartoon presented history undressed in its most rudi-mentary form, and its studious lack of resolution invited itsviewers to translate it into a finished work. Reception andci-pates models of future experience. Imagining "untested mod-

MICHELANGELO. DRAWING, AND THE SUBJECT OF ART 3I5

i

9 Andrea del Sarto, Miracle of I he Relics of San Filijtpo Benizzi,detail, 1510. SS. Annunziata, Florence (artwork in the publicdomain)

10 Rosso Fiorentino, Assumption of the Virgin, detail, 1513-14,fresco, 14 ft. 4 in. X 10 ft. (3.6 X 3.05 m). SS. Annunziata,Florence (artwork in the public domain)

els of perception and conduct," it operates as an index of thework's historical stattisof its newness and its radicalness.'The novelty of Michelangelo's cartoon, which profoundlyshifted the viewer's horizon of expectations, is illustrated iuthe tmprecedented reflections by Raimondi, Raphael, andothers on the status of invention and the relation of figure tostory. If reception is somehow indicative of the "new ques-tions" Michelangelo's work was to answer, then those ques-tious would be of less concern to the iconography of historythan to the structure of art's history.

An emphasis on isolated passages rather than on the com-position as a whole has important parallels in the writing ofart history. Reading Vasari, we get the impression that thehistory of art exists in a succession of excerpts. It is almost asif art's history can only come into being when the object ofinquiry is severed from the textual narrative that governedfresco cycleswhen, in other words, figures are understoodas isolated from the historia. In a passage on Giotto's frescoesat Assisi, Vasari, for instance, elaborated at length on "athirsty man, in whom the desire for water is vividly seen,drinking, bending down on the ground by a fountain withvery great and truly marvelous expression, in a manner that italmost seems a living person that is drinking."^ For Vasari,an artwork's historical status can he measured by the influ-

ence it had on later generations of artists. A shivering nudeinserted by Masaccio in the scene of baptism at the BrancacciChapel, S. Maria del Carmine, had been admired and copiedby artists "old and modern."^'^ Shaping the history of art tocome, Masaccio had "given order through his art to thebeautiful manner of our times." '^*

As is well known, Michelangelo had himself already workedout the division of art history into three periods later cham-pioned by Vasarithe first dominated by the art of Giotto,the second by Masaccio, and the third towered over by Mi-chelangelo, an artist acutely aware of his place in history. Inhis youth, about a decade or so before he begau the Cascinacartoon, Michelangelo had made faithful copies of Giotto'sand Masaccio's works. These drawings, Alexander Nagel re-cently reminded tis, maintain the stylistic integrity of theirmodel. Especially the drawing after Giotto does little toamend the clearly trecento pose of its model.^^ In it, Michel-angelo registered something of the stylistic strangeness of abygone age. But what has escaped comment so far is thatMichelangelo's figures are surprisiugly lifted from their nar-rative, anticipating Vasari's emphasis on the excerpt as theobject of art historical interest.

Michelangelo apparently cared little about the complete

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11 Michelangelo, alter Masaccio, Sainl Peler, ca. 1490-94, peiron paper, 15'/2 X 7% in. (39.5 X 19.7 cm). Staatliche GraphischeSammlung, Munich (artwork in the public domain; photographprovided by the Staatliche Graphische Sammlung, Munich)

narrative structure by which our discipline today definesGiotto's and Masaccio's historical importance.^'' In his draw-ing after Masaccio, Saint Peter stands severed from the trib-ute collector, rendering the saint's gesture incomprehensibleto anyone who does not know the context of Masaccio'sfresco (Figs. 11, 12). In his drawing after Giotto's Ascension ofSaint John the Evangelist in the Peruzzi Chapel, S. Croce, hedivorced the bystanders, already exempted from the mainnarrative in Giotto, even further from the main story (Eigs.13, 14). Whereas the bending figure in Giotto's fresco peeksinto the tomb from which Saint John ascended, the man inMichelangelo's drawing stares into nothingness.

Art history, Michelangelo and Vasari contended, registeredin deviations from narrative, never in the telling of the dom-inant plot. The artists who adopted Michelangelo's Battle ofCascina figures in their own work shared that belief. Refer-ences to the cartoon consistently appear in the margins ofpaindngsin those parts of the picture with no responsibilityfor recounting the main subject. If art history could register

12 Masattio, Tribute Ma iicy, (knaii, ca. 1427- _ ,^ m s

MICHELANGELO, DRAWING, AND THE SUBJECT OF ART

13 Michelangelo, after Giotto, Spectators, ca. 1490-94, pen andink on paper, 12X8 X SV in. (31.5 X 20.5 cm). Muse duLouvre, Paris (artwork in the public domain; photographprovided by Art Resource, NY)

14 Giotto, Ascension of Sniiil /n/ni Ilie Exiatigi'lisl, tli-uiil, ca. 1320,fresco. Peruzzi Chapel, S. Croce, Florence (artwork in thepublic domain; photograph provided by Art Resource, NY)

The world is so constituted that everything which exists atpresent has existed before, under different names, at dif-ferent times and different places. Thus everything that hasexisted in the past is partly in existence now and partly willexist at other times, returning into being every day, but indifferent disguises and different colors [sotto varie coperte evari colori], so that without a very good eye one takes it fornew and fails to recognize it. But someone with a sharpeye, who knows how to compare and contrast one eventwith another and considers what the substantial differ-ences are and which matter less, easily recognizes it andwith calculations and measurements of past events knowshow to calculate and measure quite a lot of the future. Sothere's no doubt that proceeding altogether in this way,we shall err very little in our discussions and we shall beable to predict much of what is going to happen in thisnew political system [of the Governo Popolare].

To begin with, Guicciardini's vocabulary bears a strong rela-tion to the theory of disegno as an underlying force of history,whose colors change only with historical progress. It is even

more striking that he would base his theory of political his-torywhich is often considered a landmark in political andhistorical thoughton a theory earlier developed for thehistory of art.'"" Here art history functions as a model forhistoriographical and political reform. Art does not reflect orillustrate politics, it produces a model of historical thoughtadopted by the practitioners of politics. Guicciardini ex-pounded a theory of history that he hoped would salvage thefragile government for which Michelangelo designed his car-toon. The need to find a new model for historical under-standing arose in direct response to the refractory history ofthe recent period.'"' The calm historical continuity that hadmarked life in Florence during Medici times, when powerhad smoothly passed from one generation to the next, wasshattered in 1494 when Piero de' Medici was expelled. TheGoverno Popolare was haunted by internal strife and externalthreats for the eighteen years it lasted. A sense of historicaldiscontinuity informs much early sixteenth-century historiog-raphy. Machiavelli was not alone in thinking that the lastdecade of the fifteenth century had broken history in two

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halves: the one, Medicean, of a tranquil continuum, theother, post-Medicean, full of scars, breaks, and ruptures.*"'^The Governo Popolare witnessed the publishing of an un-precedented number of political blueprints, now consideredessays in the boundaries of historicist thought, but thenserving as concrete models for politics.*"^

In Elorence arotind 1500, history writing ceased to be themere chronicling of historical events. In the hands of Guic-ciardini, Machiavelli, and others, the very principle of histo-ryits discontinuities, inconsistencies, and contingenciesbecame the subject of historical inquiry. Understanding thelaws of history enables one not only to "predict. . . what isgoing to happen," as Guicciardini said, but also to manipu-late future history. In 1498, the Florentine government com-missioned from the Dominican friar Girolamo Savonarola,also the de facto steward of the Governo Popolare and "ar-chitect" of the Gran Consiglio and its council room, a theo-retical statement on its form of government that seamlesslyfolded the present into the pre-Medici past as if to suggestthat republicanism remained untouched by historical partic-ulars.'"** Savonarola in fact argued that the tradition of re-publican thought never really died in the fifteenth century,even if the Medici had tried to suppress it. Republicanismexisted as a steady understream of history. It might notsurface at the time of regimes hostile to its principles, hut itsstructure remained unaffectedforever there for ftittire pol-itics to tap into. Republican thought Savonarola contended,comes closer to something resembling the design of historythan res gestae, the products of history.*" '^

Savonarola's vested interest in asserting that republics existoutside of time was of course a response to his realization oftheir historical vulnerability. His need to insist on the Floren-dne Republic's atemporality grew directly out of a discussionabout the lack of republican ethos in the overthrown Medicigovernment. History needed a theoredcal model that couldoffer clarity in an age of voladle change. Even for an ardentfriar like Girolamo, divine providence was not always a suffi-cient answer to what seemed to be happening to Florencearound the turn of the century.

At the dme, art needed no less a theoretical model of itshistory than politics. The decade following the Medici exptrl-sion in 1494 witnessed the consistent breaking down of themodel of patronage developed under Medici rulea modelof trust and belief in art that had produced such stellar artistsas Donatello, Andrea del Verrocchio, Leonardo da Vinci, andMichelangelo himself. The sculptor Donatello was said tohave received commissions from his patron and friend Co-simo de' Medici not only because Cosimo needed specificobjects but also because he wanted to keep the art of sculp-ture alive in the city.*"'' Akin to a polidcal equilibrium shat-tered into pieces in 1494, the calm continuum of art patron-age during the Medici years yielded to discondnuity in thewake of the Medici expulsion. A former trust in art to ardc-ulate political meaning gave way to art's destrucdon in thename of politics.

Political rtrptur e gained visual weight when paintings andsculptures were burned in the infamous bonfires of 1497 and1498, claiming the works of Donatello and Sandro Botticelliamong the casualdes.*"' The bonfires of "the vanides" thatSavonarola instigated, although mostly ttnderstood as acts of

religious purification, produced a careftilly orchestrated vi-sual effect that replaced a prolific artistic production with asense of absence. "Surrounding the structure [of the stake],"one witness wrote, "were seven tiers, one above the other atequal intervals, on which were set all the aforesaid objectswith a not disagreeable artfulness. . . . [T]his edifice, whichwas as decorative as it was appropriate, was rendered pleasingand delightful to the eyes of everyone in its entirety no lessthan in its parts."'" As exisdng works of art were destroyed,patrons ceased commissioning new ones, inaugurating one ofthe most benighted moments in the history of Florentineculttire. Many artists had fled the city to seek economicrefuge elsewhere.*"^ The former copula between art andpolitics needed restoration through reconfiguration. Thatreconfiguration is the subject of Michelangelo's cartoon.

The Politics of EducationFor some, Michelangelo's cartoon radically withdrew fromthe world of volatile politics that had occasioned its commis-sion. Autonomy might simply be constrtied as art's will to befree from the constraints of patronage and politics, usuallyexpressed through iconography. Michelangelo's cartooncomplicates the dream of an autonomous form of art. Hisrevision of an artwork's representational responsibilities soonacquired enormous political force in the room where thepolidcal futtire of Florence was discussed on a daily basis. Thepolitical potential of Michelangelo's work lay in its educa-tional creed. The cartoon set the basis not just for one work(Michelangelo's never-begun fresco) but also for a whole newfuture of painting. Granted, many fifteenth-century altar-pieces and fresco cycles lived second lives as comparableproto-academies of art. Besides its stattis as a work in theservice of religion in the traditional, iconographie sense, theBrancacci Chapel, for instance, lived just such a life. Arthistorians indeed often point out the similarities betweenMasaccio's chapel and Michelangelo's cartoon, one even sug-gesting that the cartoon replaced the Brancacci Chapel as anacademy for Elorentine artistsall arguments, of course, infavor of Belting's thesis of art's slow emancipation from reli-gion.'*" But the educational purpose of Masaccio's chapelremained purely one of reception; it remained secondary toits religiotis function. Michelangelo's drawing, laying bare toits pupils the principles of art, maintains a stronger relationbetween inception and reception. Michelangelo was slightlymore conscious of his work's historical impact than was Ma-saccio.

An artist's visit to the Sala del Gran Consiglio to view thecartoon was a regulated ritual. Access was reserved for thecouncil's three thousand members; others faced restrictions.Artists not elected to the Gran Consiglio had to obtain per-mission to enter the room from either one of the Palazzodella Signoria's heralds, with Michelangelo's consent, orfrom the commander of the Palazzo della Signoria, all actingon behalf of the gonfaloniere Soderini, held responsible forthe reception of Michelangelo's work as well as its commis-sion."* Some artists succeeded in viewing Michelangelo'swork and some did not. The list of those fortunates is sup-plied by Vasari, and the drawings of these masters offeradditional proof of their access. All of them were notablytalentedRaphael, Andrea del Sarto, Rosso Eiorentinoor

MICHELANGELO, DRAWING, AND THE SUBJECT OF ART

intending to ptiblish Michelangelo's invention, name and all,as did Raimondi and, later, Agostino Veneziano."^ Fxclusiv-ity secured the work's iconicity and controlled its reception.Allowing certain artists in while keeping others out, the Si-gnoria, through the heralds, assured reception in the handsof the few. With Michelangelo's cartoon, the reception of artapparently became a matter of state; even the head of theFlorentine government worried about access to the work.

Artistic education had proven a powerful tool of culturalcontrol. Michelangelo's cartoon replaced and displaced aformer Medici politics of education, vestiges of which wereput on display in the Sala del Gran Consiglio.""' The worksof ex-Medici possession gathered in the council room inthe years following the expulsion of the Medici had onceadorned their palace, as well as the Giardino di S. Marco, thesculpture garden where Michelangelo had received his train-ing as a sculptor and that had functioned as an art academyof sorts. It was through the sculpture garden that Lorenzo de'Medici managed to stipportand hence to controlthe pro-duction of Florentine art. The marble busts and Lorenzo'sfamous bronze horse head had once served as models forartists coming of age in Medicean Florence."* They hadoffered models for the style Lorenzo had propagated byallowing artists access to his collections."'' According to Va-sari, Lorenzo had founded the garden, "which was like aschool and academy for young painters and sculptors and forall those others who attended to disegno," with an urgentdidactic aim.""

In 1494, the Medici epoch was "brought to a symbolicclose" at the Giardino di S. Marco when it was looted anddismantled, its grounds sold to the highest bidder."'' Michel-angelo had fled from the garden days before the expulsion.In the source mentioning his flight, the artist was described as"Michelangelo, the sctilptor from the garden [Michelagnoloischultore dal g[ i] ardino]," as if art and artist had becomecommodities tied to a certain, politicized place and moment.Vasari even mentions that Michelangelo had rim from Mediciemploy and the garden because he was discontented withPiero de' Medici's "bad politics."" Michelangelo's experi-ences while absent from Florence brought about a change inloyalty. After wandering to Venice, Bologna, and Rome, hereturned to Florence in the spring of 1501, when he startedto work for patrons tied to the politics of the Governo Popo-lare."^ But a true symbolic close of Lorenzo's politics ofartistic education did not occur imtil the summer of 1505,when Michelangelo's Cascina cartoon was installed in thesymbolic heart of the government that had replaced not onlyLorenzo's politics but also his cultural program. With Michel-angelo working in the service of the Florentine Republic,receiving a regular income as a reptiblican court artist ofsorts, his art was to set a new direction for Florence's visualfuture, aimed to eclipse Lorenzo's cultural hegemony.'^" TheGoverno Popolare could claim a new bltieprint for art whenit decided to install the work in its council room in the fall of1505.

The politics of that gesture was understood by the retttrn-ing Medici in 1512. After they regained power, within weeksthe Sala del Gran Consiglio was dismantled and turned intosoldiers' barracks, for many a Florentine a sign of disrespectfor the city's republican system.'* '^ Michelangelo's cartoon

was taken out of the room and, after a brief spell at the Saladel Papa, where Leonardo's cartoon was also kept, ptit ondisplay at the Palazzo Medici, where its didactic potentialcontinued to be exploited. This was where, as Vasari de-scribed it, the many artists eager to copy it ended up tearingit to pieces.'^^ It was a gesture that was part of the Medici'slarger program of reasserting control over artistic education.In 1513, the family reacquired the Giardino di S. Marco andrestored it to its old function. The Medici continued todominate the education of sculptors and painters for thebetter part of the sixteenth century. And they did so throughcontrol of drawing. Cultural control culminated in the fam-ily's support of the Accademia del Disegno, established in1561 as the first professional stronghold of its sort in Westernart history, which institutionalized the making of art as apolitical program.'^^ At once serving as a model for thefuture emancipation of art and tracing back its origins toMichelangelo's disegno, the Accademia del Disegno defineddrawing as art's exclusive path to the picturing of empire.

Whereas the religious image opened itself up to the mod-ern institution of art only by shaking off its responsibility toreligious societyby promoting art theory to a subject ofrepresentation in and of itselfthe secular artwork showedthat the stripping of iconography revealed the historicalpremises of the artwork. Those premises, in turn, proved tobe of social and political value. They were placed at the heartof European art academies, whose origins lay in the Acca-demia del Disegno. Michelangelo's work privileges the pri-macy of its constructive function over the function of art toillustrate any kind of a priori meaning located elsewhere,outside the work.'^* The cartoon resists being seen as iconog-raphy in its literal meaning of an image (eikon) of writing{graphein). Referencing itself and art's history, it might bemistaken for the perfect example of the autonomous work ofart, a work whose only concern is itself and the history ofwhich it forms part. Yet here formalism is far more capablethan iconography of retrieving the political meaning of theartwork. Political meaning can emerge through iconographyonly when the text that the artwork purportedly illustrates isconsidered to have political meaning. It therefore buys intothe trap of the translatability of text into image set by theAlbertian historia that Michelangelo's image deconstructs. Inthe years around 1500, when the whole episteme of repre-sentation came under the pressure of volatile politicalchange, the problem of how art showed had to be worked outbefore art could return to the comfortable state of what itshowed.'2

Joost Keizer is assistant professor of the history of art at Yale Univer-sity. Before coming to Yale, he was a Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow andLecturer at Columbia University [History of AH Department, YaleUniversity, PO Box 208272, New Haven, Conn. 06520,

joost. keizer@yale. edu].

NotesI would like to thank the two anonymous reviewers for The Art Butletin and theeditor-in-chief, Karen Lang, for their helpful comments. Unless otherwiseindicated, translations are mine.

320 ART BULLETIN SEPTEMBER 2011 VOLUME XCIII NUMBER 3

1. Hans Rupprich, ed,, Drer: Schrifllkher Nachtass, 3 vols. (Berlin:Deutscher Verein fr Kunstwissenschaft, 1956), vol. 1, 165.

2. Hans Belting, Bild und Kutt: Eine Geschichte (tes Bitdes vor dem Zeitallerder Kunst (Munich: C. H. Beck, 1990), 523.

3. See Gerhard Wolf, Schleier und Spieget: Traditionen des Christusbitdes unddie Bitdkonzepte der Renaissance (Munich: W, Fink, 2002).

4. Rupprich, Drer, 43.5. Belting, Bild und Kutt, 535,6. See, besides Belting, Joseph Leo Koerner, The Reformation of the mage

(Chicago; University of Chicago Press, 2004); Christopher S. Wood,Atbrecht Attdorfer and the Origins of Landscape (London: Reaktion,1993); and Alexander Nagel, Michetangeto and the Reform of Art (Cam-bridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000). More recently, Nagel hasargued for a more widespread stripping of iconography in Italian artof about 1500; Nagel, "Structural Indeterminacy in Early Sixteenth-Century Italian Painting," in Subject as Aporia in Earty Modem Art, ed.Nagel and Lorenzo Pericolo (Farnham, U.K.: Ashgate, 2010), 14-42.However, for Nagel the stripping of iconography led to a reconfigura-tion of iconographie models and ultimately to speculation about thesubject matter of paintings rather than the acceptance of an artworktaking itself and its own process of becoming as a subject of represen-tation in and of itself. To Nagel's claim that the structural indetermi-nacy of early sixteenth-century art calls for philosophical inquiry onthe part of the beholdera kind of inquiry that can only happen inpainting and is quite free from art's responsibility to represent any-thing outside itselfI add the claim that this inquii-y, at least in Mi-chelangelo's case, leads to a reflection on the way an artwork is re-lated to the history of art making. And it is that history, in turn, thatfinally escapes the model of artistic autonomy. At least in Florence,the history of art became a system mobilized for political means.

7. Girolamo Savonarola, Prediche sopra Ezechiete, ed, Roberto Ridolfi, 2vols. (Rome: Angelo Belardetti, 1955), vol. 1, 343.

8. Lucien Febvre, The Problem of Unbetief in the Sixteenth Century: The Reli-gion of Rabetais, trans. Beatrice Gottlieb (Cambridge, Mass.: HarvardUniversity Press, 1982).

9. Girolamo Savonarola, Prediche sof/ra Amos e Zaccaria, ed, PaoloGhiglieri, 3 vols, (Rome: Angelo Belardetti, 1971), vol. 1, 75-76.

10. Beltng, Bitd und Kutt, 524,11. Leon Battista Alberti, On Painting and On Scutpture: The Latin Texts of

"De Pictura" and "De Statua,"Udnis. and ed, Cecil Grayson (London:Phaidon, 1972), 71, 73, 75, 95-97,

12. Francesco Guicciardini, Opere di Francesco Guicciardini, ed, EmanuellaLugani Scarano, 3 vols, (Turin: Unione Tipografico-Editrice Torinese,1970-81), vol. 1, 401, 398: "la anima del governo populare," And:"fondamento delle liberta,"

13. The inscriptions in the Sala del Gran Consiglio are recorded by LucaLanducci, Diario fiorentino dat 1450 at 1516, continuato da un annimofino at 1542, ed. Iodoco Del Badia (Florence: Sansoni, 1883), 126, Forthe decoration of the room before Michelangelo's commission, seeJohannes Wilde, "The Hall of the Great Council of Florence,"/oMT7iaiof the Warburg and Courtautd Institutes 7 (1944): 72-78,

14. Michelangelo's contract for The Battle of Cascina does not survive; how-ever, circumstantial evidence indicates that he probably received hiscommission in September 1504; see Luisa Morozzi, " 'La Battaglia diCascina' di Michelangelo: Nuova ipotesi sulla data di commissione,"Prospettiva 53-56 (1988-89): 320-24, Leonardo's contract does notsurvive either. However, on October 24, 1503, Leonardo received thekeys to the Sala del Papa at S, Maria Novella, where he began workingon his cartoon. He probably had been awarded the commissionshordy before; see Luca Beltrami, ed,, Documenti e memorie riguardantila vita e te opere di Leonardo da Vinci (Milan: Trves, 1919), 81, Wilde,"The Hall of the Great Council," 80, had previously argued that thebattle scenes were destined for the eastern wall of the Sala del GranConsiglio, For the archaeological evidence refuting Wilde's claim, seeH, Travers Newton and H, Spencer Jr., "Appunti sulla Battaglia di Ang-hiari di Leonardo," Prospettiva 19 (1977): 99-101, And for the archivalevidence, see Nicolai Rubinstein, The Patazzo Vecchio, 1298-1532: Gov-ernment, Architecture, and Imagery in the Civic Patace of the Florentine Re-pubtic (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1995), 73. It should therefore beunderstood that the altar was situated on the opposite east wail, whichis only natural considering that altars were often oriented to the east.

15. See Giorgio Vasari, Le vite de' pik eccellenti pittori, scuUori e architettorinette redazioni det 1550 e 1568, ed, Rosanna Bettarini and Paola Baroc-chi, 6 vols, (Florence: Sansoni, 1966-71), vol, 6, 25, Pieces of the car-toon were dispersed over various Italian collections, traces of it docu-mented into the seventeenth century; see Charles de Tolnay, TheYouth of Michelangelo, 2nd ed, (Princeton: Princeton University Press,1947), 211-12.

16. Vasari, Le vite, vol, 5, 393, For the cartoon, see Alessandro Cecchi's

entry in L'officina detta maniera: Variet efierezza nett'artefiorentina detCinquecento fra te due repubbtiche 1494-1530, by Cecchi and Antonio Na-tali (Florence: Giunta Regionale Toscana; Venice: Marsilio, 1996),113,

17. Wilde, "The Hall of the Great Council," 65, wrote, "This is one of therare cases where a clearly definable historical occurrence expresseditself clearly in a work of art orto put the statement in reverseformwhere the existence and significatice of a work of art can becompletely explained by reference to a political event." The most ex-haustive political interpretations of the commissions are Nicolai Ru-binstein, "Machiavelli and the Mural Decoration of the Hall of theGreat Council of Florence," in Musagetes: Festschrift fr Wottfram Prinzzu seinem 60. Geburtstag am 5. Februar 1989, ed, Ronald G, Kecks (Ber-lin: Gebrder Mann Verlag, 1991), 275-85; and Alessandro Cecchi,"Niccol Machiavelli o Marcello Virglio Adriani? Sul programma el'assetto compositivo delle 'Battaglie' di Leonardo e Michelangelo perla Sala del Maggior Conciglio in Palazzo Vecchio," Prospettiva 83-84(1996): 102-15,

18. For the Pisan war and its contemporary impact, see Humfrey Butters,Governors and Government in Earty Sixteenth-Century Florence, 1502-1509(Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1985), 83-114,

19. It was stated that Michelangelo's figures were larger than life in a de-scription of fragments of the cartoon in Turin in a seventeenth-cen-tury inventory: "large, more than life [grandi piu det naturate]" and"bigger than life [piii grandi det naturate]." See Le Gatlerie Nazionati Ita-tiane: Notizie e documenti (Rome: Ministero per la Pubblica Istruzione,1897), 62, quoted in Tolnay, Youth of Michetangeto, 211-12,

20. On the difference between work (ergon) and supplementary work(parergon) in early modern art, see Victor I, Stoichita, The Setf-AwareImage: An Insight into Earty Modem Meta-Painting, trans, Anne-MarieGlasheen (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 22, On thehierarchy between foreground and background in Renaissance art,see Jeroen Stumpel, "On Grounds and Backgrounds: Some Remarksabout Composition in Renaissance Painting," Simiotus 19 (1988): 219-43, Most scholars believe that the background figures in the Londoncopy were not on Michelangelo's original cartoon, Michael Hirst ("Idisegni di Michelangelo per la Battagtia di Cascina [ca, 1504]," in Tc-nica e stite: Esempi di pittura mrate det Rinascimento itatiano, ed. Eve Bor-sook and Fiorella Superbi Gioffredi [Milan: Silvana, 1986]) and oth-ers believed that they were based either on an oral tradition aboutwhat Michelangelo intended to paint on the wall or that they werepieced together from drawings, whether by Michelangelo or not, Va-sari tells of additional soldiers carrying tambourines, again insistingon the primacy of the foreground nudes; Vasari, Le vite, vol, 6, 24, Inthe case of Michelangelo's life, we can trust Vasari more than is usu-ally assumed; see Hirst, "Michelangelo and His First Biographers," Pro-ceedings of the British Academy 92 (1997): 63-84,

21. Cecchi, "Sul programma," The ensuing battle in the backgroimd ofthe cartoon, albeit compositionally suppressed, reveals that Michelan-gelo must have been asked to follow the account of the battle inBruni, It is only in Bruni that we are told that the bathing soldiersrushed to arms after hearing "the clamour that arose"; see LeonardoBruni, History of the Florentine Peopte, trans, and ed. James Hankins, 2vols. (Cambridge, Mass,: Harvard University Press; London: 1 TattiRenaissance Library, 2001-4), vol, 2, 460-67 (bk, 8, sec, 69-72), Cf,Giovanni Villani, Matteo Villani, and Filippo Villani, Croniche storiche diGiovanni, Matteo e Fitippo Vittani: A migtior tezione ridotte cott'aiuto dei testia penna, ed, 1, Moutier and Francesco Gherardi Drogamanni, 7 vols,(Milan: Borroni e Scotti, 1848), vol, 6, 493-97 (bk, 11, par, 97),

22. Bruni, History of the Rorentine People, vol, 2, 463 (bk, 8, sec, 69),23. See Anthony Grafton, "Historia and Istoria^Alberti's Terminology in

Context," / Tatti Studies: Essays in the Renaissance 8 (1999): 48-49' Forthe telling of history at the time, see Coen Maas, " 'Covered in theThickest Darkness of Forgetfulness': Humanist Commonplaces andthe Defence of Medievalism in Janus Dotisa's Metrical History," inEarty Modem Medievatisms: The Interptay between Schotarty Refiection andArtistic Production, ed. Alica C, Montoya, Sophie van Romburgh, andWim van Anrooij (Leiden: Brill, 2010), 330-45.

24. Giovanni Pontano, Dialoge, ed. Hermann Kiefer (Munich: Fink, 1984),217-18, On Pontano and history writing, see Felix Gilbert, Machiavelliand Guicciardini: Politics and History in Sixteenth-Century Florence (Prince-ton: Princeton University Press, 1965), 209,

25. Leonardo da Vinci, The Literary Wcrrks of Leonardo da Vinci, trans, anded, Jean-Paul Richter, 2 vols, (London: Oxford University Press,1939), vol, 1, 381-82 (sec. 669).

26. Niccol Machiavelli, Del modo di trattare i popoti di Valdichiana ribettate,in Opere, ed. Corrado Vivanti, 3 vols. (Turin: Einaudi-Gallimard,1997), vol. 1, 22-26, And see Francesco Guicciardini's remarks on theAretine issue in Denis Fach