• Open Daily: 10am - 10pm
    Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm

    3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
    612-822-4611

Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm
3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
612-822-4611
Mysterium Magnum: Michelangelo's Tondo Doni

Mysterium Magnum: Michelangelo's Tondo Doni

Hardcover

Art HistoryMedieval & Renaissance History

ISBN10: 9004165444
ISBN13: 9789004165441
Publisher: Brill
Published: Mar 27 2008
Pages: 160
Weight: 1.25
Height: 0.59 Width: 6.58 Depth: 9.79
Language: English
This study presents the Tondo Doni to the new Florentine republic as a model of the 'great sacrament' of marriage from the New Testament book of Ephesians. Following fifteenth-century theology, Michelangelo portrayed Mary as a humble wife dominated and possessed by a virile guardian Joseph, the couple united as if 'two in one flesh'. To compensate for their symbolic propinquity, the painter cast her as a paragon of virginity, a muscular mulier fortis. In order to keep this virago in her place, Michelangelo coupled the Virgin in spiritual union with Christ, maenad-Psyche to bacchic Eros, attempting to mystify her social subordination into self-sacrificing love via Ficinian commentary and Saint Paul. Then, firing the Doni infant's vehemence with a distinctly violent strain of Christian love, the painter turned to Dante's rime petrose to continue the implied action and authorize a new painterly style, a sculptural stile aspro.

Brill's Studies on Art, Art History, and Intellectual History, vol. 1

Also in

Medieval & Renaissance History