The 450th anniversary of the death, at 88, of the great Renaissance sculptor, architect, painter and poet, Florentine Michelangelo Buonarroti, has produced a flurry of new books about him and his work. One of the best and unique among these is Carl Smith’s What’s in a Name? Michelangelo and the Art of Signature.
A professor at the Blair School of Music at Vanderbilt University in Nashville, Tennessee, Smith began his research on Michelangelo when he composed musical settings for more than 40 of the artist’s letters and poems. His attention was soon drawn to baffling aspects in the artist’s signatures as he looked at the extensive array of books published about Michelangelo over the decades. Some books offered reproductions of his signatures, but in others, the signature clearly had been tampered with, and some were even forgeries.
There were, for example, instances where ‘Michelangelo’ appeared in the way with which we are familiar today, yet Smith’s closer study of the more than 300 surviving examples of Michelangelo’s signature found in the Buonarroti Archives in Florence and other Italian libraries revealed that he never used this spelling. In fact, proud to be named after the Archangel Michael (‘Michelangelo’ in Italian), the commander of God’s army and the defender of the faith, with whom he closely identified, the artist preferred and used the old Tuscan version of his name, ‘Michelagniolo.’
As evidenced by his poetry, Michelangelo loved word games and often, seemingly mysteriously, overwrote certain letters or used abbreviations or symbols in his own peculiar way, and these can be found within his signatures. For example, although Giorgio Vasari tells us he later regretted it, Michelangelo’s most famous signature is chiselled into the marble of the Pietà (1498–99) housed in St. Peter’s basilica at the Vatican. With great boldness considering the religiosity of his commission, Michelangelo carved what have been interpreted to be the Latin words MICHEL ANGELUS BONAROTUS FLORENT FACIEBAT across the sash draped over Mary’s breast. But the original is, in reality, quite different from this straightforward phrase: on careful examination, it is interspersed with strange dots, symbols and letters within letters. Commonly said to mean ‘Michelangelo Buonarroti, Florentine, made this,’ Smith believes that what the artist was really saying through the manipulation of his signature was ‘The Florentine Michelangelo Buonarroti, a messenger from God, made this.’
So, unlike Shakespeare’s Juliet, who maintains that a rose, no matter what it is called, would smell as sweet, Michelangelo may have been trying to say through his multiple signatures that what he is and what he is called matter equally. This is just one of the many examples Smith provides of Michelangelo’s associative thought processes, which, we learn, are similar to those of other great artists, as demonstrated by Smith’s comparison of Michelangelo to composer and musician Johann Sebastian Bach. Through the lens of research on Michelangelo’s signatures, Smith opens a window onto the complexities of the mind of a genius. Given the stature of Michelangelo and his art, his book is not only a valuable tool for experts and students of the Renaissance but also, because of its graceful yet easy style, a fascinating read for anyone who wants to know more about the great maestro as a man and about his life and heritage.
Details
Carl Smith, What’s in a Name? Michelangelo and the Art of Signature. The K Press, 2014. Pp. xviiiI + 258.
In Florence, available by order at the Paperback Exchange; in Italy and elsewhere (except USA), order online at theflr.net/2bs0sq
In the USA, distributed through theflr.net/peq3we
