Creating the "Divine" Artist: From Dante to Michelangelo

Download or read book Creating the "Divine" Artist: From Dante to Michelangelo written by Patricia Emison and published by BRILL. This book was released on 2004-05-01 with total page 468 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Turning a skeptical eye on the idea that Renaissance artists were widely believed to be as utterly admirable as Vasari claimed, this book re-opens the question of why artists were praised and by whom, and specifically why the language of divinity was invoked, a practice the ancients did not license. The epithet ''divino'' is examined in the context of claims to liberal arts status and to analogy with poets, musicians, and other ''uomini famossi.'' The reputations of Michelangelo and Brunelleschi are compared not only with each other but with those of Dante and Ariosto, of Aretino and of the ubiquitous beloved of the sonnet tradition. Nineteenth-century reformulations of the idea of Renaissance artistic divinity are treated in the epilogue, and twentieth-century treatments of the idea of artistic "ingegno" in an appendix.