While the core argument of Michael W. Cole’s Leonardo, Michelangelo, and the Art of the Figure owes something to his brilliant article “The Figura Sforzata: Modelling, Power and the Mannerist Body” (Art History 24, no. 4 [September 2001]: 520–51), his subsequent work on later sixteenth-century Florentine art has facilitated a book of broader significance. The opening lines signal Cole’s critical self-positioning:

Historians of Italian Renaissance art like origin stories. When we write or talk about our period, we pause at those moments when art began to employ new or newly recovered visual idioms: perspective, for example, or the grotesque, or the architectural orders, or landscape. But what, then, should we say about the human figure, the single most continuous feature of Italian Renaissance art? Perhaps we do not need to say anything at all: the very ubiquity of the figure in Renaissance art demonstrates its banality, its unworthiness of a separate history. Yet this is not the way contemporaries saw things. (ix)

Cole deals decisively with the roles previously attributed to classical antiquities and anatomical study in the formation of the Renaissance figure:

. . . perhaps what needs to be said about the Renaissance figure has already been said, often and well: some of the foundational literature in the field . . . centers on the new attention that artists gave to the overwhelmingly figural sculpture of antiquity and to human anatomy. Stepping back though, such interests may well begin to look more like symptoms than causes. We could not conclude that drawing after sarcophagi or assembling ancient marbles into garden collections in any way produced a new art of the figure or made the figure more important as a pictorial element. Artists studied the ancient past to improve their approach to what they were already doing, that is, portraying human forms. Statues that came out of the ground, moreover, were likely to be restored in ways that made over the past in the image of the present rather than the opposite. (x)

And Cole deflates expectation that he would dwell on “the rich literature of the last thirty years” on “how paintings adhere to or reinforce social constructs” (xii), namely beauty, gender, and comportment, arguing that: “We remain less well equipped to talk in historical terms about pictorial language that does not simply give onto cultural practices . . . we remain less attuned to the artifice as opposed to the transparency of painting, the elements from which a picture is built as opposed to the everyday world that paintings represented” (12).

In chapter 1, “The Force of Art,” Cole begins with Vasari’s identifying a novel forza della arte in Leonardo and Michelangelo, before transitioning swiftly to Gilio da Fabriano’s critique (1564) of Michelangelo and modern painters using “forced” (sforzate) figures and neglecting the subjects of their narratives. Gilio’s judgment was extended by Raffaello Borghini (1584) and Cardinal Federico Borromeo (1624), describing errors that “came to look paradigmatic for a whole era of painting” (2). Cole shows how this “diagnosis” was as an “early version” of “what twentieth-century writers, no longer with any comparably didactic goals, would come to call Mannerism,” citing Dagobert Frey, Arnold Hauser, and Georg Weise (4–5). Cole notes that such scholars “had in mind . . . primarily a style, a painterly technique that extended across the pictorial surface,” whereas the post-Trent viewers were troubled by “artistic priorities” concerned with “painted force” that “narrowed [painting’s] focus from the composition to a smaller pictorial unit” (4). He rightly rejects the view that “late Renaissance painting had so resolutely abandoned narrative” (5). One might add that the Gilio-Borromeo accusation about neglect of narrative resurfaced in Sydney Freedberg’s work; it has not been put to rest yet (cf., Robert W. Gaston, “Untangling the Mannerist Narrative: Bronzino’s Moses Cycle for Eleonora of Toledo,” in Art, Site and Spectacle, ed., David R. Marshall, Melbourne: Fine Arts Network, 2007, 65–77). And to suggest that recent critical hostility lacks “didactic” intention underestimates its creating a hierarchy of styles judged either worthy or unworthy of close study.

Cole cleverly shows how Gilio “inflected” Alberti’s “language” of narrative compositions in De pictura (1540s), but that Ghiberti’s concentration (in Commentarii [according to Cole “known from a manuscript written about a decade after Alberti’s Della pittura,” 6]) on “marvellous” figural poses and their copiousness “would be truer to the way that fifteenth-century pictorial ideas were disseminated” (6–7). The role of “figural inventions” in quattrocento workshop drawing and patron expectations are traced through to Leonardo’s theorizing about poses in storie. Cole leads into his “competition” analysis via Dolce (Dialogo della pittura, 1557), Lomazzo (Libro dei Sogni, 1563), Gilio (De gli errori de’ Pittori circa l’Historie, 1564), and Armenini (De’ veri precetti della pittura, 1587), recounting Leonardo’s fictionalized critique of Michelangelo’s “obsessively figural” Last Judgment (1534–41). The Anghiari (1503–6) and Cascina (1504–5) commissions are described, suggesting that each “re-imagines the action it portrays: it does not simply illustrate a known text” (22).

In chapter 2, “Circumscription,” Cole explores how Leonardo and Michelangelo would have represented their murals, comparing Leonardo’s sfumato with Michelangelo’s wrongly interpreted “sculptural” approach. Cole’s analysis is skeptical and original—ranging through “outline,” “edge,” “intersection,” “silhouette,” “enclosure,” “trace,” “arrest,” “duration,” “boundary,” “interval,” “sfumatura as polemic,” “superfluous contours,” “the autonomous figure,” and “subordination and subjectivity”—offering a convincing dialogue between fifteenth-century techniques of figure depiction and those culminating with, or developed individually by, Leonardo and Michelangelo.

Chapter 3, “Flexion,” attends to the contemporary technical terminology for invention, both pictorial and mechanical. Cole then moves to Michelangelo’s “singular flexed athletes” (87) and depictions and theories of violence and force in Leonardo, where “an Aristotelian language of mechanics [is brought] to bear specifically on the performance of human gesture” (115). Signorelli’s wrestling and twisting figures in Orvieto are used instructively. The section “Cascina and Anghiari, Revisited” unfolds numerous insights, including: “To explain figural flexion, Leonardo promoted a principle of decorum. Michelangelo undermined it” (130).

Chapter 4, entitled “Motivation,” explores the late cinquecento criticism of Raffaello Borghini (1584), showing his absorption of Leonardo’s Trattato manuscript in describing battle pictures with foreshortened figures (140). Borromeo’s 1624 chapter “On Athletic Bodies” “recalls the idea that runs from Leonardo to Borghini, that battle paintings provide space for artistic play, just in order to reject that very notion” (142). Cole reveals through texts of Orfeo Boselli (Osservationi sulla scoltura antica, 1657) and Abraham Bosse (Sentimens sur la distinction des diverses manieres de peinture, dessein et graveure, 1649) that bizarrely posed figures might appear possessed (spiritato). Working backwards through Pirro Ligorio to Gilio, Cole documents criticism associating “figure sforzate” with the beholder’s imputation of possession, linking Michelangelo’s invention of “sforzi” with the demonic. Cole returns to the Cascina drawings, showing that single figures of the “secretive” Michelangelo were transformed by printmakers into furious, frightening compositions. He summarizes:

A primary thematic this book has followed is that of force; ultimately, this places Michelangelo’s and Leonardo’s activities within the history of magic. When we think about the conjunction between art and magic in pre-modern Europe, we tend to think in terms of what English speakers call the “power of images,” Germans Bildmagie. On this model, the magic at issue is something the picture itself effects. Magic has more to do with the viewing of things than with the making of them. What I have been after here is a notion of artistic force that goes first in the other direction, into the painting. At issue is the construction of the artist in terms of the kinds of actions he or she performs, and how pictures contribute to that. (150)

Cole’s view that “The subject belongs to the history of craft more than to the history of cult practices” is strongly defended (150). However, Gilio’s argument from his dialogue On Customs Appertaining to Literati, Courtiers, and All Other Gentlemen (1564), that Michelangelo’s inventive powers brought honor to his field, and had he not done so “many would still believe, as they did previously,” “that the ancient statues of bronze and marble were made with the art of necromancy” (144), ties him, I believe, to early Christian texts not explored here. Cole writes: “And when Gilio suggests that an audience looking at an ancient statue might believe its dramatic gestures to be the work of a demon, he allows that secrecy, occultation, could be a matter not just of craft know-how, not just of poetic content, but of the depicted body itself” (151). Gilio, a scholar of canon law, was perhaps aware that Lactantius had stated in his Divine Institutes that simulacra of the pagan gods were given “image” (speciem), “shape” (figuram) and “beauty” (pulchritudinem) by the artist, who is therefore “better” (melior) than the things made. Yet no one in late Roman literary society admired or feared the craftsman, as Seneca noted. What “force” (vis) or “power” (potestas) can images of the gods have when their maker has none? Nor can he endow his gods with the capacity to see, hear, speak, and move (videre, audire, loqui, moveri). There is in the image no more than the mere “shadow” (umbra) of the artist, nothing of the god (Lactantius, Divinarum Institutionum, in Jean-Paul Migne, ed., Patrologia Latina, vol. 6, Paris: Apud Garnieri fratres, 1844, cols. 260–61).

Lactantius’s lowly opifex is contradicted by Michelangelo’s acknowledged cultural standing in Gilio. Yet there lingers a tantalizing similarity in the problematized “force” of the artist and his work, and the presence of his “shadow” in the image, that merits further study. Nevertheless, Cole’s elegantly written book is a fresh and significant contribution.