Michelangelo and the Reinvention of the Human Body by James Hall


REVIEWED BY WALDEMAR JANUSZCZAK

The modern world has been so horrible to the creative greats of the Renaissance, understanding them only in its sordid ways, dumbing them down to its level. Look what it has done to poor Leonardo. Thanks to Dan Brown’s stupendously popular transformation of Leonardo’s art into the sorts of pseudo-mystical clues you find in a Harry Potter story, da Vinci has become the focus of a world-wide cult of believers in a huge dollop of new-age claptrap. But at least Leonardo gets talked about and thought about. Michelangelo, as a rule, doesn’t. Yes, we see those famous fingers of Adam regularly enough, tacked onto the fronts of late-night art documentaries and the like. And yes, the art-history industry continues to churn out long-winded adjustments to the details of Michelangelo’s career. But none of it adds up to a genuinely fresh insight, or a campaign for modern pertinence.

So I opened this book as if it were an eagerly awaited Christmas present. God, I was keen. The book’s central premise was such a tasty one. James Hall believes that Michelangelo is as relevant today as he ever was. “If we really want to understand our own culture, we need to understand Michelangelo” he insists at the outset. It’s a bold claim, repeated exactly in the blurb. I was, therefore, hoping that this aggressively revisionist tome would rescue Michelangelo from the makers of ornate BBC documentaries about men in tights and give us, instead, a proper artistic hero — timeless, universal, relevant, re-understood.

Foolish me. The opening claim turns out to be the book’s finest moment. Hall’s focus is on Michelangelo’s treatment of the human body. It is certainly true that “the body” is one of the most reliable obsessions of contemporary art, and that countless, tediously sensational explorations of it have been mounted in recent years by puerile and sex-obsessed modern imaginations. Blood, gore, penises, breasts and orifices are the bread and butter of the contemporary cultural feast. It is also true that, 500 years ago, Michelangelo demanded that new attention be paid to the human body by making it the primary focus of his art as well. So the opportunity exists to play snap across the ages and to see Michelangelo as some sort of direct precursor of our own modern body-maniacs. And Hall, alas, has seized it.

Full review at timesonline.co.uk >>>

Posted: Tue - January 11, 2005 at 11:41 AM        

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