Michelangelo and the Sublime in Romantic Art Criticism
Author(s): Michael H. Duffy
Source: Journal of the History of Ideas, Vol. 56, No. 2 (Apr., 1995), pp. 217-238
Published by: University of Pennsylvania Press
Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/2709836
Accessed: 20-01-2026 02:48 UTC
JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide
range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and
facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact support@jstor.org.
Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at
https://about.jstor.org/terms
University of Pennsylvania Press is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and
extend access to Journal of the History of Ideas
This content downloaded from 199.241.246.2 on Tue, 20 Jan 2026 02:48:14 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
Michelangelo and the Sublime
in Romantic Art Criticism
Michael H. Duffj
During the first two-thirds of the nineteenth century in Europe the painting
and sculpture of Michelangelo enjoyed a critical acclaim that was matched jonly
in the sixteenth century. This new interest in Michelangelo which blossomed at
the end of the eighteenth century closely coincided with the arrival of romanticism, with its emphasis upon personal experience, strong emotion, and transcendental thought. In his seminal study of the sublime in eighteenth-century British
aesthetics and criticism, Samuel Monk for the first time focused upon the
important role which Sir Joshua Reynolds and Henry Fuseli played in introducing Michelangelo's artwork to visual artists interested in romantic ideals. He
suggested that Reynolds and Fuseli were creating, from the highly imaginative
and expressive figure composition of Michelangelo, a paragon of the sublime for
romantic subjects and expression.'
Recent scholarship has seriously questioned Monk's initial assumption
that Michelangelo's most ardent romantic admirers were willing or even able
to bring about a realignment in taste in traditional academic selection theory.2
According to Monk's thesis, such a shift would have favored Michelangelo
instead of Raphael as the best role model to follow for the ideal imitation of
nature. Yet from the 1770s through the 1820s professors at the Royal
Academy of Arts in London continued to lecture on the classical selection
1 Samuel Monk, The Sublime: A Study of Critical Theories in XVIII-Century England
(Ann Arbor, 19602), chap. 9. With additional material from travel guides, art treatises, and
poetry texts, Giorgio Melchiori (Michelangelo nel settecento Inglese: Un capitolo di storia
del gusto in Inghilterra [Rome, 1950]), elaborated on Monk's argument that Reynolds
helped to popularize the sublime through his admiration of Michelangelo. He extended
Monk's discussion in time to include more about the art and writings of Fuseli and Blake,
in which the enthusiasm for Michelangelo, he believed, was finally developed into
personalized myths of the creative artist.
2 See, for example, Floyd Martin, "Which Ought to Hold the First Rank? An Examination of Some Opinions of Raphael and Michelangelo in British Romantic Art
Theory," SECAC Review, 11 (1987), 120-26, and John Barrell, The Political Theory of
Painting from Reynolds to Hazlitt (New Haven, 1986), 294-302.
217
Copyright 1995 by Journal of the History of Ideas, Inc.
This content downloaded from 199.241.246.2 on Tue, 20 Jan 2026 02:48:14 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
218 Michael H. Duffy
theory initially developed in the early seventeenth century by Annibale
Carracci and his Bolognese followers. This theory called for the study of
Renaissance masters such as Raphael, Correggio, Titian, and Michelangelo
as well as seventeenth-century exemplars such as Annibale and Ludovico
Carracci, Domenichino (Domenico Zampieri), Guido Reni, and Nicolas
Poussin, who each captured some visual quality of the natural world with an
unprecedented degree of ideal perfection.3 These classical-minded theorists
of the academy considered Michelangelo to be superior in drawing but rated
him overall below the first level of masters on account of his rounded forms
and dynamic figure poses.
Nevertheless, studies by Andrew Wilton and Morton Paley on the sublime in romantic landscape and history painting have brought new attention
to the early importance of Michelangelo for visual artists and writers at the
end of the eighteenth century. The latter found in Michelangelo's Sistine
Chapel ceiling fresco paintings pictorial conceptions and stylistic features
that could be used for extraordinary subject matter from early biblical history
and prophecy, topics that had rarely been treated by painters since the middle
of the seventeenth century.4 Romantic artists and critics would continue, over
a seventy-year period, to identify as sublime common stylistic attributes,
visual imagery, and aesthetic experiences closely associated with Michelangelo's oeuvre. Their lectures, essays, and histories will additionally allow
us to chart the subtle changes in emphasis that characterized the discourse on
the sublime during this era.
I will show that in the early nineteenth century the romantic identifica-
tion of Michelangelo with sublimity evolved from a focus on the beholder's
point of view and experience to a focus on the work of art as a reflection of
the artist's interior being and state of mind. I will suggest that there were
three models of the sublime for Michelangelo's compositions, presented by
British and French professors of art, critics, and historians interested in the
origin and persuasiveness of the sublime experience. These paradigms illu-
3 This selection theory was adopted and codified during the 1670s and 1680s by the
Academie Royale des Peinture et Sculpture in Paris and the Academie de France in Rome
and subsequently revived by French, Italian, and German fine art academies during the
1750s and 1760s. The different painters were studied for their mastery of visual elements
and organizing principles that appeared best suited to their experience, skills, and interests.
4 Andrew Wilton, Turner and the Sublime (Chicago, 1981), 12-19; Morton Paley, The
Apocalyptic Sublime (New Haven, 1986), 1-8, 94ff. See also Charles de Tolnay, "The
Historic and Artistic Personality of Michelangelo," The Complete Work of Michelangelo,
ed. Mario Salmi (New York, 1965), 7-71, and for bibliography, Ernst Steinmann and
Rudolf Wittkower, Michelangelo Bibliographie, 1510-1926 (Leipzig, 1927), Luitpold
Dussler, Michelangelo-Bibliographie 1927-1970 (Wiesbaden, 1974), and, concerning
Michelangelo's Sistine Chapel ceiling frescoes, Giorgio Vasari, La Vita di Michelangelo
nelle redazioni del 1550 e del 1568, ed. Paola Barocchi (5 vols.; Milan, 1962), II, 450-597,
and Charles de Tolnay, The Sistine Ceiling, vol. 2 of Michelangelo (5 vols.; Princeton,
1943-60), 121-256.
This content downloaded from 199.241.246.2 on Tue, 20 Jan 2026 02:48:14 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
Michelangelo and the Sublime in Romantic Art Criticism 219
minate three critical junctures in the history of romantic criticism of the
sublime. I am using the term "discourse" to designate a number of texts
historically grounded in a milieu where aesthetics was discussed. These
specific texts describe the rules and effects of sublime style, imagery, and
experience. They also define the relationship of style to experience and to
important transformations that were occurring in the visibility of the sublime
and in the interrelationship of elements making up the sublime.
Most of the critics who credited Reynolds with the revived interest in
Michelangelo's art cited the distinguished academician's last presidential
discourse, delivered to the Royal Academy of Art in December 1790, as the
most important "event" in the restoration of Michelangelo's reputation.
Were he to start his career over again, Reynolds told his large audience at this
time, he would follow more closely the life and works of that artist. "To kiss
the hem of his garment, to catch the slightest of his imperfections, would be
glory and distraction enough for an ambitious man."5
This generous tribute to the Florentine master was the culmination of
Reynolds's longstanding admiration for Michelangelo, which was first publicly expressed in his October 1759 letter to the Idler. The early essay
anticipated Reynolds's collective Discourses on Art in representing Michelangelo's art as the most sublime of the history painters who worked in the
grand style of Italian painting. In the Idler essay Reynolds for the first time
equated great heights of sublimity with the quality of original genius. This
early defense of enthusiasm, spirit, and extravagance in the style of Michel-
angelo bore the unmistakable impress of the Earl of Shaftesbury's A Letter
Concerning Enthusiasm (1711), which Reynolds had carefully read at the
time of his first Italian tour in 1752.6
Thirteen years later, in his fifth discourse (1772), Reynolds again discussed the characteristics of sublimity and original genius which distinguished Michelangelo in the grand style. It was Reynolds's plan in his fourth
and fifth discourses to acquaint students at the intermediate level with the
comparative method of selection theory as it had been shaped in the Seicento
5Sir Joshua Reynolds, Discourses on Art, ed. Robert Wark (New Haven, 19752), 282.
6 The Works of Sir Joshua Reynolds ... to which is prefixed an account of the life and
writings of the author by Edmond Malone, ed. Edmond Malone (3 vols.; London, 17982), II,
229-34; Anthony Ashley Cooper, third earl of Shaftesbury, A Letter Concerning Enthusiasm in Characteristics of Men, Manners, Opinions, Times, ed. J. M. Robertson (2 vols.;
Gloucester, Mass., 1963), I, 7-39. Roger de Piles's apology for the sublime as a concrete
expression of enthusiasm (Cours de peinture par principes [Paris, 1708], 114-21) probably
also influenced Reynolds. For the various influences on the Idler papers of Reynolds,
which were published in the weekly newspaper, The Universal Chronicle, see Frederick
Hilles, The Literary Career of Sir Joshua Reynolds (Hamden, Conn., 19672), 15-22, and
Johannes Dobai, Die Kunstliteratur des Klassizismus und der Romantik in England (3
vols.; Bern, 1974-77), II, 739-43.
This content downloaded from 199.241.246.2 on Tue, 20 Jan 2026 02:48:14 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
220 Michael H. Duffy
by Giovanni Bellori and Roger de Piles.7 His comparison of Michelangelo
with Raphael as an illustration of this method was a defining moment in
Reynolds's reappraisal of Michelangelo.
In this comparison Reynolds took the unprecedented step of incorporating the sublime as a category of preeminence in the selection theory of artists.
He essentially extricated the sublime from the constellation of finer qualities,
long associated with Raphael and academic classicism, and gave it more
visibility in a practitioner like Michelangelo. Following Homer and Demosthenes, Michelangelo was wholly devoted to sublimity in its purest form. In
Reynolds's view, if Michelangelo were preferred to Raphael and Annibale
Carracci, it was because his sublime conceptions were inspired by such
ancient poets. His art surprised and more completely involved the beholder
than Raphael's compositions; and achieved this effect by depicting people
who were "a superior order of beings" in the air of their actions, their
attitudes or the style of their limbs and features.8
In his thirteenth discourse Reynolds expanded upon this highly artificial
poetic language by describing its criteria. It required a novel combination of
facts and a consistency in the perfection and elevation of all its parts. The
sentiments had to march in step with the style and measure of the composi-
tion and be elevated above the familiar aspect of common nature. By constantly checking the superior forms and airs of great artworks against our own
"diminutive" nature, according to Reynolds, we can detect a sublime grandeur. For example, when the beholder encounters the unnatural archetypes of
the Bolognese and Florentine history painters, his mind is transported a great
distance in time and place, moving from the mundane present into an
environment that is marvelous. This same effect could be achieved by placing
Michelangelo's figures beside those of Raphael, Titian, or Annibale Carracci.9 This important component of sublime figuration was first introduced
by Joseph Addison in his papers on The Pleasures of the Imagination in The
Spectator (nos. 414-20). Reynolds subscribed to Addison's belief that our
enjoyment of natural objects, elevated in our mind to a new order of existence, comes from our comparison of this mental image with the inferior
object itself.10
7 For a general discussion of this theory of taste, which became popular in the 1760s,
see Denis Mahon, Studies in Seicento Art and Theory (Westport, Conn., 19712), 11-54, 207-
29; Jean Locquin, La peinture d'histoire en France de 1747 a' 1785 (Paris, 1912, repr.,
1978), 71-90; and Dobai, Kunstliteratur, II, 756-62.
8 Reynolds, Discourses, 83. Daniel Webb's influential treatise on neoclassical art
theory (An Inquiry into the Beauties of Painting and into the Merits of the Most Celebrated
Painters, Ancient and Modern [London, 17612], 44-46) also viewed the sublime emotions
of astonishment and ambition as more powerful and instantaneous than the steady, familiar
and minute pleasures associated with the beautiful.
9 Ibid., 234-37.
10 Joseph Addison, The Spectator, ed. Donald Bond (5 vols.; Oxford, 1965), III, 548-77
(June-July, 1712).
This content downloaded from 199.241.246.2 on Tue, 20 Jan 2026 02:48:14 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
Michelangelo and the Sublime in Romantic Art Criticism 221
Not only did Reynolds discuss sublime figuration in Michelangelo's
work, he gave it practical application. In describing the superiority of
Michelangelo's figures, Reynolds specified a grandeur of appearance that
was separate from the style of design, chiaroscuro, and color.1" In his final
discourse Reynolds suggested that it was precisely in this "grandeur of
character, air and attitude" that Michelangelo surpassed the ancients, while
equaling them in his contours and in his emphasis upon gesture over expression. When he talked about appropriation in the same lecture, Reynolds gave
a practical application to his definition of Michelangelo's achievement. He
advised students to preserve the poses of Michelangelo's figures in their own
art even when their purpose had changed. 12
In the last discourse and in examples of Reynolds's portrait painting from
the later 1770s and the 1780s, we can discover the figure type that he sought
most in Michelangelo's artwork. Reynolds's very few verbal citations of
Michelangelo's fresco paintings include the personification of God in The
Separation of Light and Darkness and the enthroned Prophets and Sibyls that
prominently flank the nine episodes from Genesis. Reynolds also mentioned
Fra Bartholomeo's St. Mark (1515) as well as Raphael's Sibyls and Angels
(1514), The Prophet Isaiah (1512), and The Vision of Ezekiel (1518) which
he saw in Florence or Rome and which he regarded as "inventions so much
in Michel Angelo's manner of thinking ....''13
Reynolds admired Michelangelo's Hebrew and pagan seers who prophesied the fate of humankind and the coming of the Messiah, and he seemed to
understand that the power and energy of their physical presence is communi-
cated through rotational motion of the shifting parts of their body. Such
activity effectively links the different movements of their spiritual awakening
in a broad arc or circumference. Reynolds knew that Michelangelo's fresco
painting and sculpture contained the ancient Greek sculptor's penchant for
perfect form and effective mime so that it could be universally understood.
We can additionally surmise from some of Reynolds's own portraits of
women and children from his later years, in which he imitated Michel11 Reynolds was influenced by Jonathan Richardson's An Essay on the Theory of
Painting, the favorite art book of Reynolds's youth, which had made the same correlation,
as Reynolds, between greatness of presence in the air and attitude of certain painted figures
of Raphael and Michelangelo. See Richardson, An Essay on the Theory of Painting
(London, 1725, repr., 1971), 173, 176, 226-65, and Two Discourses (London, 1719, repr.,
1972), 35. Reynolds was also aware of Lambert Hermanson Ten Kate's slightly later essay
(The Beau Ideal, tr. J. C. Le Blon [London, 17321, 9) which made reference to
Michelangelo's "Gigantesque drawing style" that produced a "Race of Giants."
12 Reynolds, Discourses, 279.
13 The change in Reynolds's style of portrait painting and the resulting Michelangelesque elements that he occasionally appropriated for his own works are documented in
Reynolds, ed. Nicholas Penny (London, 1986), 163ff. See also Giovanna Perini, "Sir
Joshua Reynolds and Italian Art and Art Literature: A Study of the Sketchbooks in the
British Museum and in Sir John Soane's Museum," Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld
Institutes, 51 (1988), 141-68.
This content downloaded from 199.241.246.2 on Tue, 20 Jan 2026 02:48:14 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
222 Michael H. Duffy
angelo's poses, that he recognized how the mass of Michelangelo's figures
helped to create the sense of space around them. Reynolds's figures tended to
hug the front plane of the pictorial field. Michelangelo's figures and drapery
overwhelmed the painted niche or frame, as if the figure had preceded the
background-an observation earlier made by Giorgio Vasari.14 Reynolds
would additionally elevate his portrait subjects by generalizing and simplify-
ing their clothing and facial expressions. These techniques illustrate how
Reynolds tried to use his understanding of Michelangelo's sublimity in his
own work.
Reynolds's assessment of the sublime in Michelangelo's artwork was
further developed in the fifth and sixth discourses, in which he shifted from
an emphasis on style and technique to the emotion created in the beholder.
Reynolds explained how he experienced the sensation of the sublime twenty
years earlier on a Vatican tour. Michelangelo's Sistine Chapel ceiling frescoes made him walk back and forth through the hall with "the greatest selfimportance."15 Years later, in the notes for his sixth discourse, he reflected
upon that experience and wrote that the sight of Michelangelo's and
Raphael's Vatican frescoes caused him to feel joy and "an expansion of
mind" and "self-congratulation" as if he himself had produced these
works.16 Clearly, Reynolds had remembered his earlier Vatican experiences
for their uplifting effects, an emphasis that originated in Longinus, On
Sublimity.
In the fifth discourse Reynolds singled out these "effects" produced on
the beholder by Michelangelo's finer works and Homer's Iliad as the most
important characteristic of the sublime. Reynolds used Francesco Algarotti's
account of Edme Bouchardon's celebrated experience of being uplifted at
reading Homer, as an example of this effect.17 Yet Reynolds deviated from
14 Vasari, La Vita di Michelangelo, I, 41. For the meaning of Michelangelo's choice of
subjects and his development of style in the Sistine Chapel ceiling, see Charles de Tolnay,
The Sistine Ceiling, 24-76; Frederick Hartt, "Lignum Vitae in Medio Paradiso: The Stanza
d'Eliodoro and the Sistine Ceiling," The Art Bulletin, 32 (1950), 115-46, 181-218;
Michelangelo: Six Lectures by Johannes Wilde, ed. John Shearman and Michael Hirst
(Oxford, 1978), 48-84; Sidney J. Freedberg, "Michelangelo: The Sistine Ceiling," in
Michelangelo: The Sistine Chapel Ceiling, ed. Charles Seymour (New York, 1972), 187207; Roberto Salvini, The Hidden Michelangelo (Milan, 1978), 66-92; Howard Hibbard,
Michelangelo (New York, 1974), 99-147; Rudolf Kuhn, Michelangelo. Die sixtinische
Decke. Beitrdge iuber ihre Quellen und zu ihrer Auslegung (Berlin, 1975); and Edmund
Leach, "Michelangelo's Genesis: A Structuralist Interpretation of the Central Panels of the
Sistine Chapel Ceiling," Semiotica, 56 (1985), 1-30.
15 Charles Leslie and Tom Taylor, The Life and Times of Sir Joshua Reynolds: With
Notices of Some of His Contemporaries (2 vols.; London, 1865), I, 41; Longinus, On
Sublimity, tr. D. A. Russell (Oxford, 1965), 7.1-4.
16 Hilles, Literary Career, 225-26.
17 Reynolds, Discourses, 83; Francesco Algarotti, Saggio sopra la pittura, in Opere di
Francesco Algarotti (8 vols.; Cremona, 1778-84), II, 205; Longinus, On Sublimity, 9.5-10.
This content downloaded from 199.241.246.2 on Tue, 20 Jan 2026 02:48:14 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
Michelangelo and the Sublime in Romantic Art Criticism 223
Algarotti's account to better convey Longinus's argument in chapter 9 of On
Sublimity. According to Reynolds, not only did Homer's heroes take on the
physical stature of gods, but the reader himself takes on the god-like stature
of Homer, sharing in the elevated consciousness of the author. Both reader
and author feel greatly enlarged while the earth is correspondingly reduced in
scale. Reynolds was referring to the nobility of soul, whose true source for
Longinus was the majesty of the divine nature, with which the author Homer
felt so intimate.
Suzanne Guerlac's interpretation of sublime speech in On Sublimity
elucidates the structure of the sublime experience as Reynolds portrayed it.
Guerlac recognizes how the very force, power, or speed of sublime enunciation by a speaker causes listeners to be transported out of themselves and then
uplifted with a sustainable joy and a pride of authorship, as if they had
produced the statement. She describes the elusive character of the sublime,
which seems to achieve its cohesiveness through the moment of its initial
impact on listeners and through the indelible nature of its impression on
them. The sublime, she suggests, endeavors to be like nature. Guerlac's
argument, indicating how the inspired text, as message, absorbs enthusiastic
speaker and listener, is especially relevant to our discussion.18
Our first model of the sublime therefore recognizes the beholder's direct
identification with the sublime idea in the artist's artwork as text. In raising
himself to the stature of Michelangelo's figures in the scenes of Prophecy and
Creation, Reynolds responded to Michelangelo's Renaissance humanist appeal to the beholder. He said, in effect, that each beholder could raise himself
to the level of these figures and participate in the sublime elevation of an
ideal world.
Eleven years after Reynolds's last discourse, Henry Fuseli, in his second
and third professorial lectures on painting to students of the Royal Academy
in 1801, took up the late president's praise of Michelangelo. Along with the
historian Robert Bromley and the history painter James Barry, Fuseli would
continue to promote Reynolds's view that Michelangelo created new possibilities in the modem era for marvelous subject matter through the assistance
of poetry and the imagination. These artists and authors would also adopt
Reynolds's neoclassical belief that Michelangelo's elevated style was the
result not only of energy and majesty put into his figure poses but also of a
uniformly grand contour carried into every part of the human figure. 19 Fuseli,
18 Suzanne Guerlac, "Longinus and the Subject of the Sublime," New Literary
History, 16 (1985), 275-89. In her commentary on Guerlac's article Frances Ferguson ("A
Commentary on Suzanne Guerlac's 'Longinus and the Subject of the Sublime,'" New
Literary History, 16 [1985], 291-97) rightfully locates this reader-identification in the
author's text. Enunciation identifies the initiator of sublime communication through his or
her authority, competence, and action.
19 Reynolds, Discourses, 273; James Barry, An Inquiry into the Real and Imaginary
Obstructions to the Acquistion of the Arts in England (London, 1775), 46-49, 134-36; The
This content downloaded from 199.241.246.2 on Tue, 20 Jan 2026 02:48:14 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
224 Michael H. Duffy
however, differed from Reynolds in two important respects, his emphasis on
style and his fascination with the inner workings of the artist's imagination.
Fuseli devoted less attention than Reynolds to the effect of the sublime
and more to the style producing sublimity, particularly with regard to draw-
ing and composition. For this style he looked to the characterization of
ancient drawing made by Winckelmann and Mengs, his friends of the past.20
He was also aware of Barry's more recent An Inquiry into the Real and
Imaginary Obstructions to the Acquisition of the Arts in England (1775) and
his third Royal Academy lecture on design in 1784. The latter focused on
Michelangelo's drawing style and took a closer look than had Reynolds at
specific Sistine Chapel representations of Jonah, Haman, and God the Father
creating the heavenly spheres.21
Fuseli treated the large curves and the breadth of form of Michelangelo's
defining contour as a foundation for his sublimity. The principle of breadth in
drawing was as important as the content in facilitating the sublime transport
of the beholder with one irresistable idea. Fuseli imagined that an uninterrupted contour with many changes of direction along the way effectively
directed attention toward the whole and away from individual parts. He made
use of Winckelmann's earlier comparison of the Torso Belvedere's muscles
upon the body's surface with swelling and shrinking hills and waves in the
open land and sea. Fuseli felt that the curves described by the firm outline or
suggested by the artist's rendering of muscles over the figure's entire surface
continually gave the impression that a strong power was directing them.
"Waves approach, arrive, retreat," remarked Fuseli, "but in their rise and
fall, emerging or absorbed, impress us only with the image of the power that
raises, that directs them."22 Unlike Reynolds, Fuseli would see the power and
life-force of God the Father freshly infused in the forms represented through-
out Michelangelo's fresco cycle.
Fuseli designated Michelangelo's Creation of Adam (1511-12) as the
episode in which God the Father reveals the source and character of this
power in His most creative period. This scene was also the centerpiece of the
entire cycle for Fuseli, since the theme of man's relation to God is initiated
and stated as directly and spontaneously as possible. He recognized how
design elements from ancient relief sculpture simplified and monumentalized
Lectures of James Barry, in Lectures on Painting, by the Royal Academicians. Barry, Opie
and Fuseli, ed. Ralph Wornum (London, 1848), 124-26; Robert Bromley, A Philosophical
and Critical History of the Fine Arts, Painting, Sculpture, and Architecture (2 vols.;
London, 1795), II, 371-78.
20 Gert Schiff, Johann Heinrich Fuseli (2 vols.; Zurich, 1973), I, 236-48, and Dobai,
Kunstliteratur, II, 948-77.
21 The Lectures of James Barry, 124-25.
22 John Knowles, The Life and Writings of Henry Fuseli (3 vols.; London, 1831), II
(lecture 5), 250.
This content downloaded from 199.241.246.2 on Tue, 20 Jan 2026 02:48:14 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
Michelangelo and the Sublime in Romantic Art Criticism 225
this relationship. For Fuseli, Michelangelo's parallel placement of figure
parts, collateral arrangement of the two principal masses, and endowment of
the forms with great volume were principles of ancient design which paradoxically enhanced both the separation and connectedness of Adam and God.
The Biblical reference to the passing breath of life was transformed by Fuseli
into an electrifying spark, a simile which he made famous. Fuseli began to
discuss the active and passive features of the two figures that are so important
in their analysis. In Adam he saw both the "half-raised" and "half-reclined'
figure, whose awakening passion of adoration and growing sense of willpower are expressed in his being "tremblingly alive," a figure who "hastens
to meet his Maker."23 Fuseli, however, did not explore further the implications of Adam's complementary pose as a mirror image of God. In this
context Adam's concave form, active side, and sleepy facial expression
confront the self-contained, closed form, and convex shape of the heavenly
mantle as well as the intense concentration from God's windblown head.
Man's sadness and God's compassion were not an issue for Fuseli in this
cycle of paintings.
Fuseli also gave attention to the representation of grandeur in Michelangelo's generalized figures. He recognized the fine line between grandeur
and bulkiness frequently observed in Michelangelo's figures. Yet Fuseli
challenged Lodovico Dolce's highly influential, original argument that
Michelangelo could not suitably differentiate men, women, and children for
their robust, delicate, and soft qualities. He conceded to Dolce, without
identifying him by name, that Michelangelo's figures were stamped with a
grandeur that gave them a certain uniformity, adding that these figures were
respectively elevated a level beyond their human condition so that age and
gender seemed less important.24
Fuseli acknowledged that this elevation of size and sentiment in the
represented figures was a feature of Michelangelo's own reverential feeling
for the feat of Creation and the corresponding dignity of man, "the last, best
work, the lord of his [God's] creation." According to Fuseli, the Chapel
visitor ought to understand the ancient classical Greek pattern of developing
a full and supreme type of formal majesty, from which all other mythical
3 Ibid. (lecture 3), 160. For a discussion of these issues conceming The Creation of
Adam, see Tolnay, Sistine Ceiling, 34-37; La Vita di Michelangelo, ed. P. Barocchi, 52230; Hartt, Michelangelo, 102-6; Kuhn, Michelangelo, 23-29.
24 Fuseli continued in lecture 2 (Knowles, Fuseli, 85; Mark Roskill, Dolce's
"Aretino " and Venetian Art Theory of the Cinquecento [New York, 1968], 159-61): "His
women are moulds of generation; his infants teem with the man; his men are a race of
giants." The 1770 English translation of Dolce's Dialogo della pittura (1557) may have
also inspired Reynolds's comparison of Michelangelo and Raphael in his fifth discourse, in
which Michelangelo's grandeur was set against the greater combination of Raphael's
talents. In the Discourses Reynolds had variously referred to Michelangelo's figures,
collectively, as "species," "archetype," or "order," which alluded to their uncommon
appearance and generalized nature.
This content downloaded from 199.241.246.2 on Tue, 20 Jan 2026 02:48:14 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
226 Michael H. Duffy
personages descend in their less perfect character and form. Michelangelo
returned to this ideal by making the "Supreme Being" younger and stronger
than was the custom in the previous century and by associating his image
with the elemental majesty of the creator of man.25
Fuseli reintroduced the concept of terribilitai and its narrow association
with Michelangelo's images. Whereas Reynolds spoke of Michelangelo's
vehement execution, Fuseli referred to the forceful expression and overpow-
ering aspect of Michelangelo's representations. For Fuseli the uncommonly
grand depiction of humans attested to the artist's "terribil via." Similarly,
Fuseli's identification of God the Father with "irresistable velocity" and an
"awful presence" was consistent with Vasari's use of terribilitta in his Vite.6
The narrative structure of the composition was yet another important part
of the sublime style. Like Reynolds, Fuseli was interested in painting inspired by ancient epic poetry, but he used the term "epic" for painting more
consistently and more narrowly than Reynolds. Fuseli's division of history
painting into epic, dramatic, and historic styles recalled the classical notion
of ut pictura poesis and the ancient rhetorical conception of the "high style"
as exemplified in John Dryden's preface to his translation of Charles Du
Fresnoy's De arte graphica. Fuseli, however, placed new emphasis upon the
Aristotelian distinction, encountered in the Poetics, between poetic and
historic truth. He found in Michelangelo's paintings the same sense of
subject unity in diverse episodes, closely connected in time, that Hugh Blair,
in his widely read Lectures on Rhetoric and Belles Lettres (1783), had
identified as epic and Homeric.27
Fuseli convincingly asserted that the epic style of Homer and Michelangelo had put before the audience one elemental theme treating the existence, self-preservation, and happiness of humankind-a focus that helped to
underscore throughout the narrative development a sense of urgency and
wonderment. Homer impressed his listeners with one forcible idea of war and
its necessary evolution, while Michelangelo dealt with "theocracy, or the
empire of religion" and continually kept before the beholder the direct
relationship between God and humankind.28
25 Ibid. (lecture 4), 203-5. For the important theme of Michelangelo's praise of God
and the dignity of man, see John O'Malley, "The Theology Behind Michelangelo's
Ceiling," in The Sistine Chapel: The Art, the History and the Restoration (New York,
1986), 92-148.
26 Knowles, Fuseli (lecture 2), 85 (lecture 3), 161, 167. For the concept of terribilita as
it was applied to Michelangelo and his artwork, see La Vita di Michelangelo, ed. P.
Barocchi, 472-79, 517-18; Robert Clements, Michelangelo's Theory of Art (New York,
1961), 93-94, and David Summers, Michelangelo and the Language of Art (Princeton,
1981), 235-41.
27 Hugh Blair, Lectures on Rhetoric and Belles Lettres, ed. H. F. Harding (1783;
Carbondale, 1965), II, lectures 41-43.
28 Knowles, Fuseli (lecture 3), 157-59.
This content downloaded from 199.241.246.2 on Tue, 20 Jan 2026 02:48:14 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
Michelangelo and the Sublime in Romantic Art Criticism 227
Fuseli's pedagogical art criticism brings us to the second phase in the
romantic association of Michelangelo with sublimity. In this stage the beholder loses the close sense of authorship or identity with the artist and his
work. He becomes overpowered and awestruck by the artist's religious
imagery itself. "We stand with awe before Michelangelo," exclaimed Fuseli
in his second lecture on painting, "and tremble at the height to which he
elevates us."29
Fuseli's understanding of Michelangelo's sublimity brings to mind
Kant's concept of the sublime as Thomas Weiskel has characterized it. Fuseli
resembled Kant in the Analytik des Erhabenen when he established for the
sublime moment a universal a priori legitimacy through the faculty of reason.
According to Weiskel, this quantifiable unity brought an overextended
imagination under control and ignored the empirical basis of the mind's
intuition in the interest of the object, itself.30 For Fuseli, too, the beholder's
reason intervenes and constructs a causal unity of body movements and
narrative developments in a purposeful whole. The Sistine Chapel fresco
cycle, for example, has a development of plot that is rationalized according to
a supersensible goal of Redemption. The reason helps to regain an equilibrium between mind and object and to alleviate the apparent bewilderment
that is caused by the repetition of forms and the views of continuous space in
Michelangelo's paintings. Fuseli also suggested that Adam and Eve had
awakened to a higher consciousness of God's greatness through their rational
apprehension within themselves of God's power. Weiskel has referred to this
notion of Romantic transcendence as "metaphorical" and "negative" since
the imagination's relation to the sublime object is internalized, rationalized,
and made unattainable through empirical operations.
It should be noted, however, that Fuseli gave a greater role to the
imagination than Weiskel would allow under Kant's system. Like Kant,
Fuseli found Comprehension (Zusammenfassung) to be essential in the consciousness of sublimity. For Fuseli, one discovers sublimity by comprehend-
ing uncommon motivation or energy in an individual figure or a group of
figures. The viewer notices the coexistence in space of connected or collateral
forms, which are not necessarily differentiated by time.
As the beholder's respect for the sublime image was detached from his
own sense of possessing it in the discovery of greater self-worth, he experienced a stronger illusion of reality in the sublime transport. Fuseli felt that the
creative imagination, at this point, had the ability to make the illusion of
29 Knowles, Fuseli (lecture 2), 88.
30 Immanuel Kant, Kritik der Urteilskraft und Schriften zur Naturphilosophie, in
Werke in Sechs Bande (6 vols.; Wiesbaden, 1956), V, 333-53; Thomas Weiskel, The
Romantic Sublime: Studies in the Structure and Psychology of Transcendence (Baltimore,
1976), 34-48, 83-106. See also Fuseli's commentary on Michelangelo's The Battle of
Cascina (1504-6) cartoon or Raphael's The Fire in the Borgo (1514) fresco painting, in
Knowles, Fuseli (lecture 3), 151-55.
This content downloaded from 199.241.246.2 on Tue, 20 Jan 2026 02:48:14 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
228 Michael H. Duffy
nature especially vivid and compelling, and he suggested that it was the
ancients who had provided modem-day geniuses like Michelangelo with the
best examples of an invented naturalism under such circumstances. According to Fuseli, ancient poets and orators in their search for original and intense
inventions had discovered how to communicate to their audience unrehearsed
mental pictures. These images were organized under the mind's powers of
collection and analogy. Fuseli consulted Quintilian, Longinus, and, more
recently, Lord Kames for their fascination with the mind's ability to bring to
life those things that are absent from the present time and place.31
In On Sublimity (ch. 15) Fuseli related how Michelangelo's enthusiasm
for sublime objects led to such descriptive and emotional power of visualiza-
tion, with the result of situating the narrative in the present tense. Fuseli
suggested that each scene of Michelangelo's History of Humankind introduces a transient present moment that contains hints of past and future but
oriented toward an anticipated outcome yet to occur. Fuseli's discussion of
the pregnant moment and the temporal sense given to a unified space was
heavily influenced by Shaftesbury and Lessing.32
The creative imagination of Michelangelo endowed this representation of
the real world with an unusual sense of life and urgency. Fuseli discovered in
Michelangelo's The Creation of Eve the perfect illustration of a past event
recreated in the artist's mind with all the emotion that the original occurrence
would have inspired. The Lectures on Painting also celebrated the intuitive
power of invention for its ability to reconstruct a real event with a compatible
combination of known and probable circumstances surrounding that event.
For Fuseli, Michelangelo's cartoon for the Battle of Cascina was an impressive example of the artist's creative ability to subsume natural displays of
alarm, haste, hurry, exertion, and eagerness under the rubric of the general
emotion displayed by soldiers who desired to engage an attacking force under
the discipline of command.33 According to Fuseli, such an artwork is elevated
to an epic level when the great and rampant physical exertion of individual
figures suggests the presence of an irresistable desire that has a moral
conviction with it.
31 Knowles, Fuseli (lecture 3), 144; Longinus, On Sublimity, ch. 15, and Lord Kames,
The Elements of Criticism (London, 1762), 21-41. Gert Schiff has noted Fuseli's admira-
tion for The Elements of Criticism, as recorded by Fuseli in 1764, just after the book
appeared in German translation (Schiff, Fuseli, 50). Fuseli's own discussion in his third
lecture of Lord Kames's doctrine of ideal presence, in the "waking dream," may have
further been inspired by Archibald Alison's treatment of this subject, in terms of the
liveliness and unity of trains of associated ideas. This interest appeared in Alison's Essays
on the Nature and Principles of Taste (1790), which Fuseli reviewed in May 1790 for the
Analytical Review.
32 For the contributions of Shaftesbury and Lessing in the context of ut pictura poesis,
see Wladislaw Folkierski, Entre le Classicisme et le Romantisme, Etude sur 1'esthetique, et
les estheticiens du XVIIIe Sie'cle (Paris, 1925).
33 Knowles, Fuseli (lecture 3), 154.
This content downloaded from 199.241.246.2 on Tue, 20 Jan 2026 02:48:14 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
Michelangelo and the Sublime in Romantic Art Criticism 229
In The Creation of Eve the artist as well as the figures he has created are
absorbed in the sublimity that issues from God's very presence: an image of
overpowering stature and sublimity that Fuseli borrowed from Milton's
Paradise Lost (VIII, 453-90).34 The sublime sentiment of adoration is pushing Eve forward in a reverential posture, while Adam becomes restless as he
dreams about God's presence. In The Creation of Eve Michelangelo focused
on the connectedness of awe and adoration as an indication of the figures'
growing active sense. He anticipated current interest in Michelangelo's
depiction of the first age of humankind as one marked by a greater vigor,
human beauty, and closeness between humans and their Creator.
Fuseli described Adam as half-conscious and Eve as newly astonished at
becoming alive. His account of the inspired artist, Michelangelo, and his
enthusiastic painted figures paralleled Robert Lowth's slightly earlier Lectures on the Sacred Poetry of the Hebrews (1787). Lowth identified a
Longinian force of enunciation in the vehement, profuse, and impulsive
language of the inspired Hebrew Prophets of the First Testament. Like
Fuseli, Lowth discussed the potency of Biblical narrative that included action
in the present, irregular speech, a brevity of description, and the movement of
one individual through different emotions.35
Fuseli provided no better indication of his preference for a romantic over
a classical sensibility than in his contrast of Creation scenes painted by
Michelangelo and Raphael at the Vatican. He revealed that in Raphael's The
Creation of Eve (1518-19) in the Vatican logge, astonishment had subsided
in the expressions, which lessened the degree of emotion and the sense of
immediacy contained in this version of the subject. Raphael's more didactic
intention was clearly expressed through the completed action and the grace-
ful figures. Such organization caused the beholder to inquire with pleasure
about the significance of the event.
In the decade before the March 1800 opening of his Milton Gallery in
London, dedicated to recreations from Milton's Paradise Lost and L'Allegro,
34 Schiff, Fuseli, 235ff.
35 Robert Lowth, Lectures on the Sacred Poetry of the Hebrews, tr. G. Gregory (2 vols.;
London, 1787), I (lectures 14-17), 302-82; Knowles, Fuseli (lecture 3), 159. Fuseli was
aware of the book's first appearance in Latin in 1753. For the influence of Lowth's
expressive theory in the late eighteenth century, see Michael Abrams, The Mirror and the
Lamp: Romantic Theory and the Critical Tradition (New York, 19582), 76-78, and David
Morris, The Religious Sublime. Christian Poetry and Critical Tradition in 18th-Century
England (Lexington, 1972), chaps. 2, 4. Subscribing to the kind of primitivism promoted in
Fuseli's commentary on Michelangelo, the notes to Le peintre, pome en six chants (1829)
of Anne Louise Girodet-Trioson portrayed the figure of Eve from Michelangelo's Creation
scenes as a "type de beaut primordiale," who possessed a "lueur de grace native"
(Oeuvres posthumes de Girodet-Trioson, peintre d'histoire, ed. P. A. Coupin [2 vols.;
Paris, 1829], I, 235). For the appearance of Michelangelo as a "primitive" in the eyes of
some nineteenth-century critics and collectors, see Francis Haskell, Rediscoveries in Art:
Some Aspects of Taste, Fashion and Collecting in England and France (Ithaca, 1976), 4950.
This content downloaded from 199.241.246.2 on Tue, 20 Jan 2026 02:48:14 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
230 Michael H. Duffy
Fuseli had developed for his own paintings springing and crouching figures
derived from those of Michelangelo's Creation and Last Judgment scenes in
the Sistine Chapel. In Fuseli's The Creation of Eve (1793) the beholder's
point of view was changed so that he would face God and also seem to share
the cold, dark, and unfamiliar space with Adam and Eve. Fuseli represented
Eve more disoriented and Adam more open and vulnerable-looking in attitude than we find in Michelangelo's paintings, features that confirm Fuseli's
interest in the primitive and immediate. Fuseli was pleased with how
Michelangelo's depictions of Genesis made the beholder feel "time, space
and matter team in the creation of the elements."36
Fuseli next recognized the important role of the Prophets and Sibyls in
clarifying aspects of inspired contemplation that came from studying the
historical evidence of human salvation. He regarded the Prophets as above all
personifications of certain kinds of mental activity. Their movements and
poses were characterized as types, appropriate to the mood and significance
of their visionary discovery concerning the Messiah and the fate of human-
kind. Michelangelo accordingly condensed the character of inspiration, diligence, consideration, inquiry, fancy, and grief that seemed to epitomize
prophecies by Isaiah, Daniel, Zachariah, Joel, Ezechiel, and Jeremiah.
Fuseli followed Vasari's La Vita di Michelangelo when discussing the
artist's considerable use of naturalism in the Prophets and Sybils. Michelangelo had depicted the very weight of mental concentration and noted any
sudden redirection of the figure's attention. Fuseli also alluded to each seer's
spiritual rebirth, which was played out in shifting poses and gestures that
marked the passage of time in each figure. He was rightfully aware that in
some sense the Sibyls were the counterpart of the Prophets.37
John Opie, Fuseli's successor as professor of painting at the Royal
Academy, carried forward Fuseli's praise of Michelangelo's sublimity of
style and subject. He combined Fuseli's characterization of unencumbered
breadth and Reynolds's description of sublime power of affect in the creations of an artist, such as Michelangelo, who "hastens by one sure blow to
affect his purpose."38 Opie presented his own idea of "intellectual energy"
36 Knowles, Fuseli (lecture 3), 158, 166-67; Schiff, Fuseli, 235ff.
37 It is not clear whether Fuseli was familiar with Hauchecorne's Vie de Michel-Ange
Buonarroti, peintre, sculpteur et architecte de Florence (Paris, 1783), which praised
Michelangelo's Prophets and Sibyls for expressing the passage of time as well as the
thought and intentions of the figures. For the placement, gestures, and significance of
Michelangelo's Prophets and Sibyls, see La vita di Michelangelo, ed. P. Barocchi, I, 46-49,
II, 551-97; Hartt, Michelangelo, 74-122; Edgar Wind, "Michelangelo's Prophets and
Sibyls," Proceedings of the British Academy, 51 (1965), 47-84; Salvini, The Hidden
Michelangelo, 73-85; Michelangelo: Six Lectures by Johannes Wilde, 56-82; Esther G.
Dotson, "An Augustinian Intepretation of Michelangelo's Sistine Ceiling, Part II," The
Art Bulletin, 61 (1979), 405-29, and Hibbard, Michelangelo, 108-3 1.
38 The Lectures of John Opie, in Lectures on Painting, ed. R. Womum, (third lecture,
on design), 263-65.
This content downloaded from 199.241.246.2 on Tue, 20 Jan 2026 02:48:14 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
Michelangelo and the Sublime in Romantic Art Criticism 231
in Michelangelo's figures. This consisted in having the situation and turn of
every limb and feature play its own part in the whole attitude and general
feeling of the figure. Opie also emphasized Michelangelo's own uplifted
feeling of "inspiration" and of being "possessed" that was conveyed to the
beholder through the figure's considerable ability greatly to project thought,
capacity, and dignity.39
Stendhal's La Vie de Michelangelo (1817), which was the first writing on
art in France to promote a general revival of interest in Michelangelo and his
art, fits into this second phase of sublime discourse by emphasizing the
lifelike results of sublime transport and the disparity between sublime image
and beholder. Stendhal called attention to the forceful movements and deep,
troubled expressions in Michelangelo's figures, and he noted that this strong
and abundant display of sentiment would "make known to the man of
sensibility a new ideal beauty."40 Stendhal attributed this new, romantic, and
international fascination with Michelangelo to the efforts of Reynolds and
Fuseli. Such a development, Stendhal felt, was made possible by recent
British poets who created the public taste for strong, heartfelt emotions and
primitive subjects.4'
Stendhal departed from British writers in his preoccupation with Michel-
angelo's terribiliti. There was no more striking example of this principle of
necessary terror than in the Medici Madonna (ca. 1521-34), in which Jesus
resembled more the infant Hercules from classical mythology in the way he
turned toward his mother. Such movement was full of vivacity and was
marked by force and impatience. Stendhal suggested that this feeling was
conveyed by the strong demarcation of the child's muscles and the accented
pleats of the mother's drapery.42
The Sistine Chapel Prophets produced a sublime effect by appearing to
put the beholder's safety in peril. On the other hand the physical distance of
the feared image or its weakened presentation caused a pleasure in the
beholder: a response that Stendhal knew was at the heart of Edmund Burke's
A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and
Beautiful (1757). The Prophets and Sibyls were more threatening for
Stendhal than for Fuseli. Their "terrible majesty" was summed up in their
proud, audacious, and forced expression. The slow and grave motion, ample
drapery, and scorn for what was human seemed to make the Prophets and
Sibyls more fit to receive the voice of Jehovah.43
39 Ibid., 264-66.
4 "Toutes font connaitre a l'homme sensible une nouvelle beaute ideale." Stendhal
[Marie Henri Beyle], Histoire de la peinture en Italie (2 vols.; Paris, 1929), II, 296; Henri
Martineau, L'oeuvre de Stendhal (Paris, 19662), 106-29; Anita Brookner, The Genius of the
Future: Studies in French Art Criticism (London, 1971), 43-46.
41 Stendhal, Histoire, 408-15.
42 Ibid., 318.
43 Ibid., 295. In his Storia della scultura dal suo risorgimento in Italia sino al secolo di
Napoleone (Venice, 1818), Leopoldo Cicognara resembled Stendhal in his association of
Michelangelo's sublime genre of elevated horror with Burke's treatise.
This content downloaded from 199.241.246.2 on Tue, 20 Jan 2026 02:48:14 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
232 Michael H. Duffy
Stendhal saw in the later works of Michelangelo a new degree of verisimilitude which made the beholder experience nature itself in its gloomy
aspect. The artist's earlier exaggeration and show of force was wholly absent
in the statue of Lorenzo de' Medici (ca. 1524-34) from the Medici Chapel,
which Stendhal considered as the "most sublime expression of deep thought
and of genius.""4 Michelangelo's The Last Judgment (ca. 1534-41), largely
passed over in British commentary, was of great interest to Stendhal, since
passion was expressed now through features and countenance rather than
through muscles and posture. Stendhal observed that we want to cover our
own ears as we imagine the trumpets resound and in a poetic manner believe
that the action could not have happened otherwise.45
Stendhal described the great degree of urgency displayed in the moment
of Christ's pronouncement, when figures divided their attention between
their worldly and eternal interests. The liveliness of the Saints, Patriarchs,
and Holy Family were "full of nature and truth" and individual character, so
that the beholder was invited to feel himself close at hand, especially since all
the actual participants of the scene responded to the central event in a
believable manner.46 The beholder was transported by the depth of emotion
and found that the impression stayed with him. Stendhal followed Richard
Duppa's example in comparing Dante with his great admirer, Michelangelo.
Like Fuseli, Stendhal highlighted the qualities of seriousness and universality that pervaded The Last Judgment, feeling that a minimum of rhetoric
enhanced the impression of human beings in the act of experiencing some
object of horror.47
44 "Sa statue est la plus sublime expression ... de la pensee profonde et du genie"
(ibid., 316).
45 Ibid., 337.
46 Ibid., 343. On Michelangelo's The Last Judgment, see Pierluigi de Vecchi,
"Michelangelo's Last Judgment," in The Sistine Chapel, 176-207, 268-69. For a recent
discussion of the "poetic" aspects of Michelangelo's Last Judgment, see Bernadine
Barnes, "Metaphorical Painting: Michelangelo, Dante and the Last Judgment," The Art
Bulletin, 77 (1995), 65-81.
47 Ibid., 341, 362; Richard Duppa, The Life and Literary Work of Michel Angelo
Buonarroti (1806). For Stendhal's concept of imagination and genius, see Emile Talbot,
Stendhal and Romantic Esthetics (Lexington, 1985), 37-45, 142-47. Stendhal's sublime
departed from that of earlier French writers like the Chevalier de Jaucourt, who in his
Encyclopedie article "sublime" (1765) emphasized a conscious elevation and nobility of
soul. In his influential treatise Traite de peinture (Paris, 1765) Michel-Frangois DandreBardon had also equated the sublime with one's enthusiasm for a superior idea and image
of the soul's grandeur. Girodet-Trioson and Delacroix would take up the newer interest in
terror as exemplified in The Last Judgment. It should be noted that Fuseli explicitly
separated pathos and terror from true sublimity, the former being considered as the domain
of dramatic subjects. Stendhal, however, shared with Fuseli an enthusiasm for the doctrine
of ideal presence. Charles Pouilly de Levesque had also expressed such an interest in his
earlier article "genie" for the Dictionnaire des arts de peintre, sculpture et gravure
(1792).
This content downloaded from 199.241.246.2 on Tue, 20 Jan 2026 02:48:14 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
Michelangelo and the Sublime in Romantic Art Criticism 233
During the 181 Os and 1820s the artist and critic William Hazlitt offered a
third way to perceive sublimity in Michelangelo's artworks, emphasizing the
power of the artist to reinvent the natural world in his own creative imagina-
tion. In his important article "On Gusto," published in May 1816 in The
Examiner, Hazlitt argued that the artist's mind has the power to create the
"internal character and living principle" of natural objects. This was made
possible by the truth and intensity of the artist's own strong and controlling
feelings of gusto. Most effectively to strike and to preoccupy the beholder,
such feelings ought to involve the different senses.48 In his essay "On Genius
and Common Sense" for the first volume of Table-Talk; or, Original Essays
(1821) Hazlitt praised the originality in great art. He surmised that the
successful painter and poet discovered original viewpoints by which to
perceive the relationships between objects in ordinary nature. In doing so,
their imaginations created "moulds" out of natural objects: concretions of
sort that were shaped by the superior quality of mind and temperament of the
artist.49
Hazlitt's first eyewitness accounts of the Sistine Chapel appeared in the
Morning Chronicle and the New Monthly Magazine, in 1825 and 1827
respectively. They expanded upon his early cautious assessment of Michelangelo's style. Hazlitt confirmed his initial impression that Michelangelo's
created forms were full of strong and personalized gusto in the consistent way
they visually projected power in their muscular strength, moral grandeur,
commanding presence, and strong sense of will power. Now he compared the
Prophets and Sibyls to gigantic molds from a fabulous past, whose size and
strength seemed to empower them with the capacity necessary to fulfill their
important situation and high calling in the history of Providence.
Hazlitt nevertheless felt that the faces of these figures were only a
continuation of their large and bold physical form. He did not discover in
Michelangelo's figures a "vivifying spirit" or a "marked intelligence" that
originated from the head. For him the Prophets and Sibyls did not display the
sudden effects of sublime transport: neither "the blaze of immediate inspira-
tion" nor "the hallowed radiance" and "the mystic gloomy light that
follows it." Hazlitt criticized the figures for not revealing more than generalized expressions of grief, distraction, and contemplation, since they were in a
position to depict the historical or textual context of the action.
Hazlitt recognized the difficulty of distinguishing the heads from so great
a distance within the Chapel. Yet he preferred more vulnerable expressions of
humanity to the simplified and seemingly invincible countenances of heads
from ancient classical sculpture and from the figures of Michelangelo. For
Hazlitt the Prophets lacked the more ordinary and endearing aspect of nature
48 "On Gusto" in The Complete Works of William Hazlitt, ed. P. P. Howe (20 vols.;
London, 1930-34), IV, 77-80.
4 "On Genius and Common Sense" in Complete Works o Hazlitt, VIII, 42-43.
This content downloaded from 199.241.246.2 on Tue, 20 Jan 2026 02:48:14 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
234 Michael H. Duffy
that Weiskel likewise identified as a hallmark of the later "egotistical" phase
of the romantic sublime.50
Hazlitt did discover a "sublime" expression in Michelangelo's Adam
and Eve, in which premature murmurings of consciousness or an elasticity of
pose conveyed the full weight of narrative. In these instances Adam was
beginning his life while Eve was rising from under the Forbidden Tree.
Hazlitt conceded that Michelangelo could still "give a greater blow to some
imaginations and lift the mind more out of itself, resembling the rocky
precipice, whose 'stately height though bare' overlooks the various excellence and beauty of subjected art."'51
During the 1820s artists and art critics were interested in how the sublime
artwork was especially expressive of the spirit or temperament of its creator.
The artist's spirit was mediated by the imagination, which subjectified the
natural world according to the artist's personality. In artworks of a sublime
genius peculiar traits of the imagination were powerfully marked in the
contours and masses of the figure compositions. In his commentary on
Michelangelo's oeuvre John Memes, for example, continually referred to the
spirit of the artist behind the work. This spirit, Memes felt, was displayed in
Michelangelo's mastery of execution, which enhanced the visibility of superior power in the represented figures. Memes compared the artwork to the
artist's imagination:
Thus isolated by its own peculiar sublimity of character, this statue
[Moses] exhibits a striking resemblance to the imagination from
whence it derived existence. We behold a being who awes, who
subdues, yet who fails to interest.52
In Michelangelo's artworks the sublime experience is of the most intense
kind. Here, the irresistible first impression of awful supremacy is not easily
explained and bewilders the beholder's judgment by the disparity between
what is familiar and what appears to be great in magnitude. Memes also
introduced subjective criteria like comfort, well-being, and happiness, which
were lacking in these austere figures. Following the example of Hazlitt, he
compared Michelangelo's artwork to a giant cliff, whose very height misled
the artist as to the "distance" and "immediate relations to the site."53
50 "The Vatican" in Complete Works of Hazlitt, XVII, 145-46, and Weiskel, Romantic
Sublime, 48-58, 138-51. Hazlitt criticized Michelangelo for excluding fresh inspiration
from the living models of nature for the satisfaction of his own personalized formula, a
tendency that Hazlitt also discovered in the "egotism" of William Wordsworth.
51 "The Vatican" in Complete Works of Hazlitt, XVII, 150, and see W. P. Albrecht,
The Sublime Pleasures of Tragedy: A Study of Critical Theory from Dennis to Keats
(Lawrence, 1975), 115-31.
52 John Memes, History of Sculpture, Painting and Architecture (Edinburgh, 1829),
108-9.
53 Ibid., 102.
This content downloaded from 199.241.246.2 on Tue, 20 Jan 2026 02:48:14 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
Michelangelo and the Sublime in Romantic Art Criticism 235
Memes was influenced by the Royal Academy lectures on painting for
1827 and 1828 given by Thomas Phillips, who had argued that the true
excellence of Michelangelo's works lay in the powerful impulse of mind
behind them. Such an impulse took precedence over considerations of surface
grandeur and contrast of form with which critics were mostly concerned.
According to Phillips, this "spirit" caused the artist, Michelangelo, to
overemphasize in his copious drawing boldly flowing lines and the everextending boundaries of his forms. For Phillips this tendency confirmed
Michelangelo's uncontrolled feeling of fullness and his own identification
with the creative role of God the Father. Adam's sculptural look in paint and
Michelangelo's use of quotations from ancient sculpture for this figure have
led some scholars to assume that Michelangelo the sculptor may have
identified with God the Father when he fashioned man out of the earth's dust.
Vasari intimated that a figure with the beauty, attitude, and contour of Adam
seemed to be newly made by the Creator rather than by the brush and drawing
of a man.4
Michelangelo's intensity of feeling was bound up with the message of
God's blessing of life and will power upon humankind as well as with the
Savior's coming. The imagery and its exact imitation in nature, Phillips
believed, was not an end in itself but rather an important factor in producing
the irresistible empathy that Phillips and the beholder had to have for the
feelings that animated Adam, Eve, God, the Prophets, and the Sibyls. Never-
theless, Phillips had difficulty reconciling the different points of view of
inspired artist and transported beholder. On the one hand the invigorated
artist created the electrical spark of life in the Creation scenes and the "living
soul" of the Prophets; on the other the artist and beholder imagined the
superior figures before and around them on the ceiling and in the lunettes.
Steven Knapp has studied this interest of the time in tranquilly perceiving
powerful images of personification, whose long-forgotten originating emotions had to be recreated. This inevitably contributed to a more impersonal
and abstract doctrine of transcendence.55
The French history painter, Anne-Louis Girodet-Trioson, also correlated
the physical features of the sublime artwork with the artist's imagination. In
his essay read to the assembled academies of the Institut de France in 1817
Girodet remarked that the portrayals of Judgment Day by Dante and
Michelangelo bore the imprint of their physiognomy and personality: they
were as fierce, somber, terrible, and impetuous in person as the passions that
54 Thomas Phillips, Lectures on the History and Principles of Painting (London,
1833), 70-76. For the association of Michelangelo with God the Father in his role as the
creator of man, see Vasari, La Vita di Michelangelo, I, 44; Hartt, "Lignum Vitae," The Art
Bulletin, 32 (1950), 190ff; Freedberg, "Michelangelo," 201; and Hibbard, Michelangelo,
136-37.
55 Phillips, Lectures on Painting, 76, 229; Stephen Knapp, Personification and the
Sublime: Milton to Coleridge (Cambridge, Mass., 1985), 107-27.
This content downloaded from 199.241.246.2 on Tue, 20 Jan 2026 02:48:14 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
236 Michael H. Duffy
they painted. The two men were as profound as the abyss that they represented."6
Peter de Bolla's investigation of the shift in subject emphasis in British
oratorical and political literature during the 1790s from the sublime speaker
to his text seems especially pertinent to the third model of sublime enuncia-
tion as described by Girodet and Memes. The text of the romantic oratorartist was substituted for his physical presence. Moreover, De Bolla could
have been describing Girodet's poem, Le peintre, when he pointed out the
tendency of romantic visual imagery to refer back to the artist's internal life
of thinking and rehearsing the subject in subconscious dreams and poetic
reverie.S7
Eugene Delacroix was a champion of Michelangelo as well as the
romantic concepts of genius and the sublime. He suggested in his wellknown article, "Michel-Ange," that Michelangelo's reading of Dante and
the First Testament had blackened his imagination. As a consequence,
Michelangelo's The Last Judgment painting became as frightful, melancholic
and restless as its creator in his private life and thoughts. Delacroix appropri-
ated from Girodet's poem, Le peintre, the compelling image of Michelangelo's poetic reverie, recounting how Michelangelo probably had imagined the final Judgment in his dreams and then rehearsed the terrible images
of the event in his mind. Delacroix felt that Michelangelo's reverie had given
him the courage to experience mentally the secret terror from his painted
images that he wished to evoke in his audience."8
In his article "Sur Lejugement dernier" for the Review des deux Mondes
(1837) Delacroix argued that it was precisely the simplicity of Michelangelo's style that helped transport the beholder to a wholly ideal region.
There poetry could suggest further the immaterial and indefinable in expres-
sion. Michelangelo's depiction of the catastrophe was made more terrible by
unifying the dozen or so groups of figures and symmetrically arranging them
around Christ.
56 Oeuvres de Girodet, I, 236, II, 194. For the influence of Michelangelo, Reynolds,
and Fuseli on Girodet, see James Rubin, "An Early Romantic Polemic: Girodet and
Milton," Art Quarterly, 35 (1972), 219-38.
57 Peter De Bolla, The Discourse of the Sublime. Readings in History, Aesthetics and
the Subject (Oxford, 1989), 146-82.
58 Eugene Delacroix, "Michel-Ange," Revue de Paris, 16 (1830), 173-74. In his
painting, Michelangelo in His Studio (1855), Delacroix depicted the tortured and melancholic artist, Michelangelo, deeply meditating over the execution of his Medici Madonna:
Stendhal's example of Michelangelo's "principle of terror." Since its pose is nearly
identical to that of the brooding artist, the sculptural group reflects back to Michelangelo's
imagination and the intense emotional state that was necessary to create it. See Charles de
Tolnay, "Michel-Ange dans son atelier par Delacroix," Gazette des Beaux-Arts, 59
(1962), 43-52, and Jack Spector, "Towards a Deeper Understanding of Delacroix and His
Art: An Interpretation of Michelangelo in His Studio," Gazette des Beaux-Arts, 103
(1984), 19-28.
This content downloaded from 199.241.246.2 on Tue, 20 Jan 2026 02:48:14 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
Michelangelo and the Sublime in Romantic Art Criticism 237
Delacroix contrasted this idealism of Michelangelo to the impression
created by seventeenth-century painters like Rubens, who, he believed, made
the scene too palpable and familiar. Delacroix read Stendhal and studied
Xavier Sigalon's ambitious copy of Michelangelo's fresco painting, The Last
Judgment. Like Stendhal, he was moved in this painting by the instantaneous
quality of the action and the savage vigor of gestures and contortions. In
Delacroix and Phillips, we see in particular a new concern for the controlling
and fictional unity of Michelangelo's painted scenes of Creation and Judgment that were relived in the artist's mind.
Delacroix and Phillips also identified the distance between the artist and
the nineteenth-century beholder. They assumed that Michelangelo's paintings served the public art of devotion and moral instruction meant for a
different era. With a romantic sense of sympathy for cultural differences in
history, Delacroix suggested that Michelangelo's lifelike depiction of venerated Christian subjects was more suited to the religion and taste of his own
time.59 Phillips said that the old Italian masters, from Giotto to Michelangelo
wanted the art image especially to "inspire and interpret" the religious
sentiment of the subject. The modern Roman Catholic audience, he felt,
would not be so intensely moved by Michelangelo in their effort to derive
comfort and hope from the religious content of the art.60
The art criticism of Fuseli and Stendhal changed the nature of the beholder's identification with sublime imagery. Fuseli made beholder empathy
with the godlike stature of Michelangelo's figures more difficult when he
emphasized unlimited power and strongly inspired emotion in Michelangelo's representations of episodes from Genesis. The beholder's experience of inward pride and nobility of soul in sublime transport was replaced by
the reverential emotion of awe or even terror for the sublime object.
Michelangelo's creative imagination was now given more credit for causing
the beholder to relive the scenes with all the freshness and intensity of the
original event.
In the third model the focus shifted to the artwork, as it bore the peculiar
imprint of its maker-genius. Phillips, Memes, and Delacroix suggested that
Michelangelo was over-stimulated by his subject to the point that he overworked his contours, poses, and expressions. The artist's "faults" seemed
perhaps less pardonable in the 1 820s when naturalism was gaining ground in
the fine arts. The sublime, once again, seemed artificial, but its originating
emotions now appeared to derive from another age.
Reynolds would carry on the work of Winckelmann in bolstering the
relationship between ideal beauty and the sublime human image, a some59 Delacroix, "Sur Lejugement dernier," Revue des Deux Mondes, 11 (1837), 338-44.
On the background of Delacroix's theory of the sublime and original genius, see especially
George Mras, Eugene Delacroix's Theory of Art (Princeton, 1966), 20-33.
60 Phillips, Lectures on Painting, 210ff.
This content downloaded from 199.241.246.2 on Tue, 20 Jan 2026 02:48:14 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
238 Michael H. Duffy
times inconspicuous correlation that Ronald Paulsen considers essential to
the human sublime. Reynolds passionately embraced the artworks of
Michelangelo and ancient Greek statues for their faultless form, equipoise,
and expressive body language. Fuseli further insisted that this sculptural style
of painting concentrate significant action and emotion in a climactic moment
of time effectively to carry the moral aspect-a well-reasoned assessment of
Michelangelo's intention. Subsequent critics recognized this ideal beauty but
spoke also of excessive and uncontrolled feeling conveyed in Michelangelo's
art. This latter discovery was partly justified through the myth of the romantic genius, who tirelessly struggled to realize his bold conceptions.
Important features of the sublime enunciation advanced by Longinus and
Reynolds continued to distinguish the historical development of the sublime
idea in the early nineteenth century. I have used Guerlac's analysis of how the
inspired speaker gets transported into the message, while the listener is
disoriented, uplifted, and brought to identify with the speaker's text. I have
also utilized Weiskel's distinction between Kant's "metaphorical" and
Wordsworth's "egotistical" sublime in order to understand better the newfound respect for sublime imagery and the growing importance of the creative imagination in the critical discussion of the sublime. Self-identity and
habitual thinking came together in the sublime imagination of the artist who
rehearsed and recreated these bold conceptions in his mind. The romantic art
criticism of Michelangelo, above all, celebrated the artist's proud and selfstyled individualism and especially the recreation of the mystery and power
of divinity which Michelangelo understood by a great leap of faith.
East Carolina University.
This content downloaded from 199.241.246.2 on Tue, 20 Jan 2026 02:48:14 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms