michel angelo (i)

Michelangelo made this devotional image...

for his friend Vittoria Colonna. An aristocratic poet and religious reformer, she became his confidante in the mid-1530s, Michelangelo then being at his fifties.

Unusually, Michelangelo shows the Crucified Christ alive and suffering, at once human and divine. This imagery, as well as Michelangelo's late additions of the lamenting angels and a skull, may reflect Colonna's input into the design.

Upon receiving the drawing, Colonna wrote the following letter to Michelangelo to thank him:

Unique master Michelangelo and my most particular friend, 

I have received your letter, and seen the Crucifix which has certainly crucified itself in my memory more than any other picture that I have ever seen. No image better made, more alive, or finished could be seen. Certainly, I could never explain how subtly and marvellously it is made, and for this reason I am resolved that I don't wish it to be in the hands of anyone else… 

I've looked at it closely using a lamp, a magnifying glass, and a mirror: 

never did I see anything more finely executed.

Michelangelo was a devout Catholic...

and during the last three decades of his life, his faith deepened. This was partly inspired by Vittoria Colonna, as well as a growing sense of his own mortality.

The Crucifixion was a subject which he returned to right at the end of his life in a series of three drawings. The potency of this earlier image inspired a number of painted and engraved versions.


~bron~