The Secret Life of Michelangelo
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The Secret Life of Michelangelo Details
Ken Schuman has deftly connected the artist and his context--a Florence rich in artistic tradition, but also roiling with tensions and intolerance for any dissident religious or political beliefs. In this fascinating and insightful biography, Schuman argues persuasively that Michelangelo often embedded subtle, coded messages in his creations, thereby providing plausible deniability in case the authorities guessed his true intent. Schuman is at his sleuth-like best when teasing out and helping us to see what has been hiding in plain sight since Michelangelo first created it.--Bob Clyman, author, Secret OrderHeretical in his spiritual beliefs, homosexual in his desires, and politically vulnerable to Rome’s deadly politics, Michelangelo hid his secret beliefs in his art. After reading this fascinating, accessible and revelatory book, you’ll never look at Michelangelo’s genius the same again.--Laurie Lico Albanese, co-author, The Miracles of PratoKen Schuman’s groundbreaking new book “The Secret Life of Michelangelo” brings to life the artist we never knew and the turbulent times in which he lived.--Steven Mintz, author, Five Eminent Contrarians
Reviews
The first clue that this is a problematic book is the image on the cover with the explanatory inside note claiming that the painting is a self-portrait of Michelangelo as the head of Holofernes being carried off by Judith. Michelangelo was 37 when he finished the grueling work of frescoes the Sistine Chapel ceiling. His nose had been crushed and his profile flattened by a rival artist when both were in their very early teens. The head of Holofernes as painted on the Sistine Chapel lunette is that of an old man with a full beard and a prominent beak of a nose. If this is a portrait of anyone, it is most likely a portrait of Pope Julius II, the man who had put Michelangelo to this endless backbreaking task and whose head Michelangelo would have liked to have seen severed from his body.And this is just the cover.Throughout the book, tedious mythology is repeated as fact while factual information is simply wrong. Worse, the thrust of this small volume is to find in Michelangelo's art evidence of a supposedly homosexual orientation. Now, it is perfectly possible that Michelangelo had homosexual drives, but this is scarcely established as fact, and while I don't care as far as the artist goes, I do fear that we as a culture are still new enough to the subject of homosexuality that an interpretation of Michelangelo as gay tends to reduce his work to nothing more that homoerotic sublimation which is the stated conclusion of this book. Given that Michelangelo's work is richly layered and has been the subject of intense and seemingly endless interpretation for 500 years, the impulse to reduce it all to mere sex is a severe disservice to both the artist and to art history.Further, the writing of this book is mediocre, and it's structure jerks around in time and place, making the material intelligible only to those who already have a complete and detailed understanding of the artist, his life, his career, the sequence of works he created, and the political and other forces that swirled around him for the 90 years he was alive.I can't think who this book could possibly be for, because you'd have to be well informed on the Italian Renaissance and Michelangelo to have any meaningful understanding of the names, dates, places, and events casually alluded to in this book, but if you did have this information, the book's glaring errors and narrow interpretations and assumptions would be all too obvious, making the book, actually, useless. In fact, this book is for absolutely no one.