Leo Steinberg was one of the most original art historians of the twentieth century, known for taking interpretive risks that challenged the profession by overturning reigning orthodoxies. In essays and lectures ranging 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 writings, 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 This volume of essays and unpublished lectures elucidates many of Michelangelo’s paintings, from frescoes in the Sistine Chapel to the Conversion of St. Paul and the Crucifixion of St. Peter, the artist’s lesser-known works in the Vatican’s Pauline Chapel; also included is a study of the relationship of the Doni Madonna to Leonardo. Steinberg’s perceptions evolved from long, hard looking. Almost everything he wrote included passages of old-fashioned formal analysis, but always put into 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 to express fundamental Christian tenets once expressible only by poets and preachers. Leo Steinberg was one of the most original art historians of the twentieth century, known for taking interpretive risks that challenged the profession by overturning reigning orthodoxies. Michelangelo’s Painting is the second volume in a series that presents Steinberg’s writings, selected and edited by his longtime associate Sheila Schwartz.

In every act of one who lives in the Divine Volition he pronounces the Fiat there and forms of it so many divine lives. How he gives himself into the power of the creature and lets her do that which she wants with him. Difference that passes between one who lives in him and between one who is resigned. I am always between the arms of the divine Fiat, and, oh, how I feel the need of his life, that breathes, beats, circulates in my poor soul! Without him I feel that all dies for me, the light dies, sanctity, strength, even heaven itself, as if it might not belong to me anymore. Instead as I feel his life, all rearises in me. The light re-arises with its beauty that vivifies, purifies and sanctifies. My own Jesus re-arises with all his works. Heaven re-arises which the holy Volition encloses within my soul as within a sanctuary in order to make it all mine. So that if I live in his Will everything is mine and nothing should be missing for me.