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{"id":16437,"date":"2014-08-13T00:00:00","date_gmt":"2014-08-13T00:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/leithart.level2d.com\/?p=1340"},"modified":"2014-08-13T00:00:00","modified_gmt":"2014-08-13T00:00:00","slug":"artist-prophet","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/leithart\/2014\/08\/artist-prophet\/","title":{"rendered":"Artist-Prophet"},"content":{"rendered":"\n\n<\/head>

As the title suggests, Miles Unger\u2019s\u00a0Michelangelo: A Life in Six Masterpieces<\/a> tells the life story of Michelangelo through six of his great works, including his Pieta<\/em>, the David statue, the Sistine chapel.<\/p>\n

As masterful as those works were, and as much as the impressed themselves on the future of art, his most lasting contribution to art may have been his success in cultivating a new portrait of the artist.<\/p>\n

According to Unger, \u201cIn the face of the skeptics and the scoffers, Michelangelo promoted a new conception of t he artist, one in which the crass demands of commerce and the demeaning associations of manual labor have been sloughed off to reveal a creature as yet ill-defined but still thoroughly magnificent. \u2018I was never a painter or a sculptor like one who keeps a shop,\u2019 he insists. But if not, what kind of artist is he? Implicit in Michelangelo\u2019s outburst is a radical claim: the painter or sculptor was no longer just a humble craftsman but a shaman or secular prophet, and the work of his hands was akin to holy writ.\u201d<\/p>\n

Unger sees \u201cMichelangelo\u2019s entire life [as] a rebuke to those who thought the artist\u2019s job was to supply pretty images to order for anyone with a few ducats in h is pocket.\u201d Rather, artist exists to \u201cchannel the most profound aspirations of the human spirit.\u201d<\/p>\n

The artist transcended not only commerce but domestic life: \u201cAsked why he never married, he responded, \u2018I have too much of a wife, which is this art that has always given me tribulation, and my children will be the works that I shall leave.\u2019 In a sonnet, he took this analogy one step further, writing of his unforgiving muse: \u2018This savage woman, by no strictures bound, Has ruled that I\u2019m to burn, die suffer. . . . My blood, however, she drains pound by pound; She strips my nerves the better to undo My soul.\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n

For Michelangelo, the artistic results speak for themselves, but it\u2019s not clear that the mantle of the prophet fits every artist. And it\u2019s an open question whether this ideal of the artist has been good for the arts.<\/p>\n<\/body><\/html>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"