Leo Steinberg was one of the most original and daring art historians of
the twentieth century, known for taking interpretative risks that
challenged the profession by overturning reigning orthodoxies. In essays
and lectures that ranged from old masters to contemporary art, he
combined scholarly erudition with an eloquent prose that illuminated his
subject and a credo that privileged the visual evidence of the image
over the literature written about it. His works, sometimes provocative
and controversial, remain vital and influential reading.
For half a century, Steinberg delved into Michelangelo's work, revealing
the symbolic structures underlying the artist's highly charged idiom.
This volume of essays and unpublished lectures explicates many of
Michelangelo's most celebrated sculptures, applying principles gleaned
from long, hard looking. Almost everything Steinberg wrote included
passages of old-fashioned formal analysis, but here put to the service
of interpretation. He understood that Michelangelo's rendering of
figures as well as their gestures and interrelations conveys an
emblematic significance masquerading under the guise of naturalism.
Michelangelo pushed Renaissance naturalism into the furthest reaches of
metaphor, using the language of the body and its actions to express
fundamental Christian tenets once expressible only by poets and
preachers--or, as Steinberg put it, in Michelangelo's art, "anatomy
becomes theology."
Michelangelo's Sculpture is the first in a series of volumes of
Steinberg's selected writings and unpublished lectures, edited by his
longtime associate Sheila Schwartz. The volume also includes a book
review debunking psychoanalytic interpretation of the master's work, a
light-hearted look at Michelangelo and the medical profession and,
finally, the shortest piece Steinberg ever published.
