Tuesday, April 12, 2005
Michelangelo the Inimitable?
A linguistic footnote from the new book Benvenuto Cellini: Sculptor, Goldsmith, Writer, in a chapter provocatively entitled “Cellini, Michelangelo, and the Myth of Inimitability”:
Acknowledged as the greatest living artist by his contemporaries, Michelangelo has continued to exert a powerful, even mythic, presence in the history of art. Part of the Michelangelo legend has been tied to a quality first introduced into his legacy by his biographer Ascanio Condivi: his inimitability.* Not to be outdone, Giorgio Vasari, whose biography of the artist in his original Vite of 1550 was criticized by Michelangelo himself, incorporated into his second edition of Vite an echo of Condivi, as he arguest that Michelangelo could not be copied in either painting or sculpture: “le cose sue ... son quasi inimmitabili.”
* The footnote reads:
Condivi thus uses the word inimitabili for the first time in Italian as it pertains to a single individual. The first recorded use of the word is that of Leonardo da Vinci, who applied it to the study of painting.