Leo Steinberg was one of the most original and daring art historians of the twentieth century, known for taking interpretative risks that challenged the profession by overturning reigning orthodoxies. In essays and lectures that ranged from old masters to contemporary art, he combined scholarly erudition with an eloquent prose that illuminated his subject and a credo that privileged the visual evidence of the image over the literature written about it. His works, sometimes provocative and controversial, remain vital and influential reading. For half a century, Steinberg delved into Michelangelo’s work, revealing the symbolic structures underlying the artist’s highly charged idiom. This volume of essays and unpublished lectures explicates many of Michelangelo’s most celebrated sculptures, applying principles gleaned from long, hard looking. Almost everything Steinberg wrote included passages of old-fashioned formal analysis, but here put to the service of interpretation. He understood that Michelangelo’s rendering of figures as well as their gestures and interrelations conveys an emblematic significance masquerading under the guise of naturalism. Michelangelo pushed Renaissance naturalism into the furthest reaches of metaphor, using the language of the body and its actions to express fundamental Christian tenets once expressible only by poets and preachers—or, as Steinberg put it, in Michelangelo’s art, “anatomy becomes theology.” Michelangelo’s Sculpture is the first in a series of volumes of Steinberg’s selected writings and unpublished lectures, edited by his longtime associate Sheila Schwartz. The volume also includes a book review debunking psychoanalytic interpretation of the master’s work, a light-hearted look at Michelangelo and the medical profession and, finally, the shortest piece Steinberg ever published.

About the author. A. Victor Coonin is James F. Ruffin Chair of Art at Rhodes College. He has received fellowships and grants from the Mellon, Kress, and Fullbright foundations and has served on committees for the Fullbright, National Endowment for the Humanities, and College Art Association. Author of numerous articles and editor of 2 books, this is his first monograph. -- Publisher's website.

Michael Hirst's chapters are followed by Jill Dunkerton's survey of Michelangelo's technique as a painter on panel, using both egg tempera and oil paint, based on the investigation of his paintings in the National Gallery. Included in the discussion is Michelangelo's slightly later Doni Tondo in the Uffizi, Florence, his only completed panel painting and one of the most perfect of his works. Dunkerton also looks back to the paintings by Ghirlandaio and his workshop in which Michelangelo was trained. Her illuminating text helps us to understand how Michelangelo executed these two familiar but relatively little-studied paintings and also to envisage the startling finished appearance probably conceived by the artist.

This new volume is the most comprehensive examination of Italian Renaissance sculpture from 1490 to 1560 ever published. Central to the whole study is the sculpture of Michelangelo, which is illustrated in its entirety in the documentation section. Nineteen of Michelangelo's contemporaries are also treated in detail, with full individual biographies and representative examples of their work. Special attention is paid to Jacopo Sansovino, Benvenuto Cellini, Baccio Bandinelli, and Bartolomeo Ammannati. In his introductory essays, Joachim Poeschke, professor of art history at the University of Dusseldorf and the author of numerous publications on Italian art of the Middle Ages and the Renaissance, places the sculpture of the sixteenth century in its intellectual and cultural context. He discusses the shift in its subject matter and function and examines the theoretical notions that motivated the artists of the period. Poeschke's broad overview of the period makes this volume an invaluable addition to Renaissance literature. The works are presented in masterful new photographs taken especially for this book by Albert Hirmer and Irmgard Ernstmeier-Hirmer. The illustrations, which include fifty-two full-page colorplates, afford an opportunity to see these works in extraordinary detail and often from several viewpoints. With an extensive and up-to-date bibliography, Michelangelo and His World is an invaluable reference for scholars, students, and aficionados of Italian Renaissance art.