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Michaelangelo
252 pages, Hardcover
First published January 1, 1968
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Displaying 1 - 4 of 4 reviews
February 11, 2026
I mean let's just say it, this is the biggest failure of a book I own. An art book is supposed to do two things: give you access to the art, and tell you about the art. Complete disaster on both fronts, huge disappointment from Thames & Hudson. I have very mixed thoughts on Michelangelo himself, but this review is just about the book.
Art. The 11% of the plates in color are printed in HALFTONE. I mean what a joke. Three of the 12 color plates depict works by other artists. Outrageously, the Sistine Chapel Ceiling and Last Judgement are not among the color plates, and no part of the Last Judgment is printed in color at all. In fact, the Sistine Chapel Ceiling is so poorly printed that it's very hard to figure out which prophet is which even for those prophets who get full-page details. The quality of the black and white plates is extremely variable. Some are good; others, the photographer has failed to capture the entire painting in focus. Plates which span more than one page are regularly misimposed[1]. This is really really shoddy work, very embarrassing for the photographers and compositor (nowadays usually called the prepress technician). And there aren't enough images.
Text. This text is idiotic, inane, pretentious, and ignorant. Schott is a deeply shallow communicator and a gossip-monger. At his best (on the Sistine Chapel Ceiling) he draws the eye to larger structure and detail that it would take a long time to see. Usually he's saying horrible horrible meaningless bullshit. Schott is obsessed with the hidden meanings and symbols; he finds, in the path the eye naturally takes in The Conversion of Paul, the shape of a bishop's staff; in the Palazzo dei Conservatori "an astonishing demonstration of the laws of the universe." His praise for Michelangelo is sycophantic, substanceless, and unceasing. Every subject I know even a little bit about, I know Schott is wrong about every time he mentions it: Gothic art, the Reformation, Kabbalah. Actually that last one is particularly grating, since it gets a lot of space and is nothing more than a Da Vinci Code level conspiracy theory. It actually is not true Mr. Schott, if you can believe it, that the number of stairs in some random building Michelangelo worked on encodes a Kabbalistic mystery.
It's hard to communicate how bad the art criticism here is. Let's do the David for an example. Schott, as a critic, should show me things on the page I didn't see before, and give me new contexts with which to understand the form before me. I happen to remember from my third grade English class (my teacher happened to have studied Art History) that David's hands are far larger than would be anatomically proportional, and that the pose is Contrapposto, which contributes to the sense that David is about to move. These are two relatively basic art-criticism facts on which I can meditate while looking at the work. They help me understand how the statue produces its effect, and they increase my appreciation for the work. Let's see what Schott has to say. On hands: "the superbly fashioned hands are those of a killer." On the pose: "the backward bend, more apparent than real, makes it appear slightly lopsided." On the overall effect, he calls it "naturalis[tic]", "overpowering because of a stupendous tension and élan", and "bold and defiant to the point of gruesmoness." The rest of the space is dedicated to the kind of limp-dick psychologizing and vacuous hagiography Schott spends most of his energy on: Michelangelo is "moving in a new direction, motivated at first by a spirit of revolt and grim struggle;" he has "ris[en] above the autonomy of nature, ascending towards the post-classical daemonic concept of the divine." The work itself "contains an element of the divine" ("like all Michelangelo's works") "more deeply hidden than in any other;" David is "the quintessence of a figure" -- though "not beautiful", yet still the work "radiates a nameless beauty: the pristine beauty of man in the Garden of Eden." Its effect on his contemporaries was "a thunderbolt", and indeed "what the artist meant to say springs to the eye: 'This is I, and thus are we!'"
What a waste of time. It's all like this, by the way, except perhaps the Sistine Chapel Ceiling bit, which is forced to be a little more technically descriptive on account of the poor quality of the plate and the density of the work.
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Anyway I'll come back some other time and say what I think of Michalangelo as an artist. Definitely the book was sufficient to get me thinking. But what a mess. Pathetic.
---
[1]This is a technical term I don't want to explain. But the result is that sometimes: 1. there is a white line separating the two halves of the plate because one plate was printed too far from the middle, or 2. the plate 'runs on' to the verso or recto of the same sheet, so, randomly, some pages have bits of other plates printed on them in their inner margins. Outrageously again, this applies to the plate of the Last Judgement! (You can see the resulting misprint on p. 164).
Art. The 11% of the plates in color are printed in HALFTONE. I mean what a joke. Three of the 12 color plates depict works by other artists. Outrageously, the Sistine Chapel Ceiling and Last Judgement are not among the color plates, and no part of the Last Judgment is printed in color at all. In fact, the Sistine Chapel Ceiling is so poorly printed that it's very hard to figure out which prophet is which even for those prophets who get full-page details. The quality of the black and white plates is extremely variable. Some are good; others, the photographer has failed to capture the entire painting in focus. Plates which span more than one page are regularly misimposed[1]. This is really really shoddy work, very embarrassing for the photographers and compositor (nowadays usually called the prepress technician). And there aren't enough images.
Text. This text is idiotic, inane, pretentious, and ignorant. Schott is a deeply shallow communicator and a gossip-monger. At his best (on the Sistine Chapel Ceiling) he draws the eye to larger structure and detail that it would take a long time to see. Usually he's saying horrible horrible meaningless bullshit. Schott is obsessed with the hidden meanings and symbols; he finds, in the path the eye naturally takes in The Conversion of Paul, the shape of a bishop's staff; in the Palazzo dei Conservatori "an astonishing demonstration of the laws of the universe." His praise for Michelangelo is sycophantic, substanceless, and unceasing. Every subject I know even a little bit about, I know Schott is wrong about every time he mentions it: Gothic art, the Reformation, Kabbalah. Actually that last one is particularly grating, since it gets a lot of space and is nothing more than a Da Vinci Code level conspiracy theory. It actually is not true Mr. Schott, if you can believe it, that the number of stairs in some random building Michelangelo worked on encodes a Kabbalistic mystery.
It's hard to communicate how bad the art criticism here is. Let's do the David for an example. Schott, as a critic, should show me things on the page I didn't see before, and give me new contexts with which to understand the form before me. I happen to remember from my third grade English class (my teacher happened to have studied Art History) that David's hands are far larger than would be anatomically proportional, and that the pose is Contrapposto, which contributes to the sense that David is about to move. These are two relatively basic art-criticism facts on which I can meditate while looking at the work. They help me understand how the statue produces its effect, and they increase my appreciation for the work. Let's see what Schott has to say. On hands: "the superbly fashioned hands are those of a killer." On the pose: "the backward bend, more apparent than real, makes it appear slightly lopsided." On the overall effect, he calls it "naturalis[tic]", "overpowering because of a stupendous tension and élan", and "bold and defiant to the point of gruesmoness." The rest of the space is dedicated to the kind of limp-dick psychologizing and vacuous hagiography Schott spends most of his energy on: Michelangelo is "moving in a new direction, motivated at first by a spirit of revolt and grim struggle;" he has "ris[en] above the autonomy of nature, ascending towards the post-classical daemonic concept of the divine." The work itself "contains an element of the divine" ("like all Michelangelo's works") "more deeply hidden than in any other;" David is "the quintessence of a figure" -- though "not beautiful", yet still the work "radiates a nameless beauty: the pristine beauty of man in the Garden of Eden." Its effect on his contemporaries was "a thunderbolt", and indeed "what the artist meant to say springs to the eye: 'This is I, and thus are we!'"
What a waste of time. It's all like this, by the way, except perhaps the Sistine Chapel Ceiling bit, which is forced to be a little more technically descriptive on account of the poor quality of the plate and the density of the work.
---
Anyway I'll come back some other time and say what I think of Michalangelo as an artist. Definitely the book was sufficient to get me thinking. But what a mess. Pathetic.
---
[1]This is a technical term I don't want to explain. But the result is that sometimes: 1. there is a white line separating the two halves of the plate because one plate was printed too far from the middle, or 2. the plate 'runs on' to the verso or recto of the same sheet, so, randomly, some pages have bits of other plates printed on them in their inner margins. Outrageously again, this applies to the plate of the Last Judgement! (You can see the resulting misprint on p. 164).
November 16, 2024
I just returned from a trip overseas, which included Rome and Florence, just before reading this book. I found I could not put it down. I have many books on artists but found this author's personal approach refreshing. Understanding what Michelangelo was going through or being affected by while creating various works added a new layer of understanding for me. One minor negative point for me was how the author writes about how important Michelangelo's work/design of Capitoline Hill was, yet I do not see where an illustration is included among the many he does include. It's not a huge deal as I simply printed one out off the internet and put it in the book for future reference.
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May 7, 2023I was impressed with a biography of Michaelangelo in 2010. Not sure if it was this one. Sorry.
December 21, 2019
Where are all. Michelangelo’s sonnets? Where do I find them? Michelangelo was gay? What’s his main lover called? What about the women his great platonic love.
Displaying 1 - 4 of 4 reviews