Phenomenology of Revelation: Faith, Truth, and the Darkness of God in Sixteenth-Century Italy

Abstract

This essay unfolds a phenomenology of revelation in sixteenth-century Italy and elucidates its undergirding concepts of faith, truth, and divine darkness. Analyzing visual and verbal works by Michelangelo Buonarroti (1475–1564) and poetry by Vittoria Colonna (1490–1547) and Muzio Sforza (1542–1597), this study offers a portrait of faith as embodied experience. Darkness emerges from these analyses as a condition of faith, a place or space beyond the senses and a state of emptiness achieved through closing them, a precondition for spiritual visions or divine union, and the only proportional means for approaching the transcendent divine.

1. Introduction

This essay has its origin in a series of questions and intuitions about the meaning of darkness in the works of Michelangelo Buonarroti (1475–1564) that arose as I was pursuing research on cosmic enchantment and its expression in religious poetry and art in Italy in the final decades of the sixteenth century and first decades of the seventeenth, specifically as I was studying the nocturnal poetry of the Pugliese courtier Muzio Sforza (1542–1597) and began to question the relation it might bear to the emergence of the night-time landscape and the devotional scenes created by Sebastiano del Piombo (1485–1547) and by Jacopo Pontormo (1494–1557) in collaboration with Michelangelo in particular: the Pietà from 1516–1517 (Figure 1) and the Noli me tangere from 1530 (Figure 2). Many other works came quickly to mind as I pondered the place and sense of darkness in Michelangelo.

First, the frescoes of the Sistine Chapel ceiling and Michelangelo’s rendering of the biblical God separating light and darkness in an act of seeming self-genesis (Figure 3).1 Next, Michelangelo’s famous four sonnets on the night, where the dark time assumed positive value as a period or condition for rest, renewal, restoration, and reproduction or recreation, and where Michelangelo described it as “a shadow of death” (“ombra del morir,” L47/G102, v. 9), as a source of spiritual healing (L47/G102, v. 12), and as a time for “sowing mankind” (“piantar l’uomo,” S20/G103, v. 12)—an ambiguous verse interpreted as signifying both physical generation and spiritual regeneration, or insemination and planting the seeds of faith, respectively.2 Then, Michelangelo’s four allegories of the times of day and the movement and behavior of light in the Medici Chapel, an architectural project that overlapped temporally with the poems on the night (Figure 4 and Figure 5). Finally, the hazy insistence and pregnant indistinction of Michelangelo’s depictions of divine immanence on the cusp of its return to transcendence in his late drawings of Christ on the Cross (Figure 6 and Figure 7).

In these and other works, I wondered, does Michelangelo convey divine mystery, otherworldly encounter, immanent expressions of the transcendent, or faith itself by means of darkness specifically, and if so, how? In what ways does Michelangelo’s work anticipate Baroque tenebrism and/or participate in related theological discourses? Where, if at all, in his descriptions or representation of light and darkness, or the sun and the moon, does he go beyond the traditional metaphorical associations of their antithesis with fleetingness and the passage of time, or loss and the passing of a life or a love? Where in his work might darkness signify more than melancholy, death, and sin; the encumbering effect of worldly desires on the will; or the obscuring impact of flesh on the intellect and its capacity for spiritual sight?

In search of answers, I turned not only to his production but also to that of his friend and interlocutor on spiritual matters in the 1530s and 1540s, Vittoria Colonna (1490–1547). A reform-minded Catholic intellectual and foremost poet in sixteenth-century Italy, Colonna’s tenebrous visionary sonnets include ample descriptions of light and darkness accompanied by reflections on sight and visibility and on the relations among faith, reason, spirit, and the senses—verses that reveal the religious writer’s keen attention to theological and philosophical distinctions of many kinds, but most especially between lux and lumen (luce and lume), or the uncreated light of God (which appears dark to the enfleshed) and its reflection in created things (which appears as light, splendor, or brilliance of a still or moving kind to the embodied). Colonna’s poetry, both amorous and spiritual, proved an immensely promising point of departure in my quest to illuminate the complex relations among theology, philosophy, and embodied experience in Michelangelo’s descriptions, depictions, and evocations of shadow, shade, and darkness. In this essay, I share the details of my discovery and the fruits of that endeavor.

This essay unfolds a phenomenology of revelation in sixteenth-century Italy and elucidates its undergirding concepts of faith, truth, and divine darkness. The study progresses through three movements. It begins with a discussion of faith and the night sky. An examination of the relations between faith and the darkness of God follows. The presentation of a view from within of faith, truth, and revelation brings the essay to a close. Analysis centers on texts that describe, allude to, or engage with the darkness of God as a phenomenon. This study examines three primary archives: the lyric poetry of Vittoria Colonna and of Muzio Sforza, and the visual and verbal production of Michelangelo Buonarroti, especially his verse. Together, the works of Michelangelo, Colonna, and Sforza span the sixteenth century and convey the many spiritual meanings of darkness. Their works examined in this study reveal an understanding of faith, not as a set of religious beliefs or ideas, but as embodied experienced. No mere poetic conceit, darkness emerges from them as a condition of faith and as a precondition for spiritual visions and divine union: a theological concept corresponding to a sought-after phenomenological reality rooted in psycho-physiological experiences of divine encounter and the pursuit of it.

2. Faith and the Night Sky

The mystically inclined Petrarchist poet Muzio Sforza published a series of five nocturnal sonnets in his Rime sacre (1590).3 These poems on God, the soul, and the heavens both describe and embody faith. In the first quatrain of a sonnet on the night sky that relates beauty to devotion, he vividly describes heaven’s lights, proffering a dynamic and painterly depiction ekphrastic of God’s handiwork:

      Se di notte serena il Ciel sì puro

e terso appare; e sì lucenti, e belle

i lor tremanti rai vibran le stelle

per l’aer chiaro, e senza Luna oscuro.

      Com’esser può, ch’un sozzo, horrido, impuro

Spirito aspiri: over mai saglia a quelle

Sedie beate? Ma ne mira ad elle,

Ne pensa un cor grave, terreno, e duro. (Sonnet 35, vv. 1–8)

If, on a serene night, the Sky appears so pure and spotless, and the stars, so bright and beautiful, [with] their trembling rays vibrating through the clear, dark, moonless air, how can it be that a foul, dreadful, impure spirit never aspires or rises to those blessed seats? Rather, a heavy, worldly, and hard heart neither looks at [the stars] nor thinks of them.

• In this nocturnal scene, the moon is present only by mention of its absence: it is the night of a new moon when the sky is darkest, and the celestial lights shine brightest. The poet describes a vision of the heavens scintillating and pulsating as if alive. The unfaithful, however, do not see the luminous display above. They remain in literal and figurative obscurity. Sforza seeks to overcome their failure to be moved by insisting on viewing. He makes available what they would not otherwise raise their eyes to see, offering in verse what God provided in nature to encourage their gaze and the cultivation of faith and moral uprightness.

According to its title, the sonnet expresses “a thought similar to the words of St. John in the Apocalypse. Nihil coinquinatium intrabit in illam Sanctam civitatem” (“Un pensier simile a quelle parole di S. Giovanni nell’Apocalipsi. Nihil coinquinatium intrabit in illam Sanctam civitatem” (Sforza 1590, p. 48)). The Latin phrase, meaning “nothing unclean will enter the holy city,” constitutes a (partial) reference to Apocalypse 21:27: “There shall not enter into it anything defiled” (Non intrabit in eam aliquod coinquinatum). In Apocalypse 21, John recounts his vision of the new Jerusalem. He describes it as both a “holy city” (“sanctam civitatem”) and a “bride” (“sponsam”) in Apocalypse 21:2: “And I John saw the holy city, the new Jerusalem, coming down out of heaven from God, prepared as a bride adorned for her husband” (“Et ego Joannes vidi sanctam civitatem Jerusalem novam descendentem de cælo a Deo, paratam sicut sponsam ornatam viro suo”). The nuptial image in the scriptural allusion is doubly significant. First, because Sforza’s sonnet is as much about love (or the heart, the will, and unitive experience), as it is about contemplation (or the eyes, the intellect, and visionary experience): the reason why the hardened of heart described in verse eight do not look up is that they lack desire and thus inclination (not merely purity, and thus capacity). Second, because it suggests that Sforza is thinking typologically, and thus that those interpreting his poem should too. While the sonnet’s emphasis is on worthiness for admission to heaven, the moon is not an insignificant image in the poem.

Symbolically, the moon is associated with the Virgin Mary, a connection beautifully suggested in a nocturnal pietà by Sebastiano del Piombo in collaboration with Michelangelo—a haunting meditation on the transience of temporal things and the destiny of souls in the Christian tradition (Figure 1). Drawing on Origenian, Augustinian, and Neoplatonic sources as well as on the Easter liturgy, scholars engaged in interpreting the work have persuasively argued for the symbolic connection between the moon and Mary as both Church and Bride of Christ (see, especially, Barbieri 2017, pp. 65–73, and Libina 2020, pp. 385–418). A poem by Vittoria Colonna conveys and confirms this contemporary association between the divine mother and the luminous body:

      Eterna luna, alor che fra ’l Sol vero

e gli occhi nostri il tuo mortal ponesti

Lui non macchiasti, e specchio a noi porgesti

da mirar fiso nel Suo lume altero.

      Non L’adombrasti ma quel denso e nero

velo del primo error coi santi onesti

tuoi prieghi e i vivi Suoi raggi rendesti

d’ombroso e grave candido e leggiero. (S1:110, vv. 1–8)

Eternal moon, when you placed your mortal self between the true Sun and our eyes, you ma[d]e no blemish on his light but offered us a mirror so we could look straight into his high brightness; you did not dim his light, but with your holy pure prayers and his bright rays, you made limpid and light that dense black veil of man’s first error where it had once been heavy and dim.4

• Both the moon and Mary mediate the divine and the eternal for humans, with the Virgin Mother additionally serving as a model for devotion.

Like the Viterbo Pietà’s viewers, Sforza’s readers and listeners are encouraged to contemplate. Unlike the nocturnal landscape, Sforza’s nightscape features no moon; rather, it emphasizes moonlessness. This identified absence is meaningful. It may be read as an important component in the poet’s approach to spiritualizing Italian love poetry and its traditional idealized earthly beloved. In this sonnet, Sforza makes a double move, first substituting the luminous sky for the lovely lady (Petrarch’s Laura becomes the heavens), and then subtracting the moon, thus removing all trace of corporeality from the scene—a strategy far more sophisticated than the kind of simple allegorical substitution of the fair woman with a goddess or personified virtue that others have suggested (for example, Malipiero 1536, p. 7).

Ultimately, Sforza encourages a move beyond the corporeal, including the beauty of the physical stars, which beckon viewers to what lies beyond them. Sforza’s intimate, introspective sonnet titled “Parla a l’anima, levatosi di notte, e rimirando al Cielo” (“[The poet], having gotten up at night, and contemplating Heaven, speaks to his soul”) makes this clear:

      Hor che nel puro Ciel splendon le stelle,

E per la cheta notte il sonno regna,

Non ti traggan per terra hor queste, hor quelle

Cure mondane, Anima eccelsa, e degna.

      Ne lascivo ocio in piume ti ritenga.

Ma sorgi da le dolci spine, e felle.

E se sai, di volar la sù t’ingegna,

Mirando in quelle fiamme ardenti, e belle.

      Là sù cose invesibili, ed eterne;

Quì visibli son, caduche, e frali.

Quì pena, e morte, & ivi è gloria, e vita.

      Quì in parte, s’apri levi, e monde l’ali,

Quella luce vedrai, ch’a le superne

Sedie ti s’aprirà chiara, infinita. (Sonnet 45)

Now that the stars shine in the pure Sky and sleep reigns over the still night, O most high and worthy Soul, worldly cares do not drag you, now here, and now there across the earth. Let no lascivious idleness in down hold you back. Rather, rise from the sweet and treacherous feathers. And if you know [how], apply [all] your wits to fly up above, taking aim at those blazing and beautiful flames. Up there, things are invisible and eternal; here, visible, fleeting, and fragile. Here is suffering and death, and there, glory and life. Here, if you open and raise your pure wings, you will see, in part, the clear and infinite light that will open the supernal seats to you.

• The poet has shunned both sloth and sin in abandoning the feather pillow. Neither slumber nor acedia holds him back or tethers him to the earth. Having risen from his downy headrest, the poet encourages his soul to soar. The symbolism is uniquely suggestive even if the trope is common. The governing image of feathers (“piume,” v. 5) is Petrarchan. The fifth verse of Sforza’s sonnet alludes quite clearly and specifically to Petrarch’s “oziose piume” (“pillows of idleness,” v. 1) in Rvf 7.5 In Sforza’s poem, the feathers represent both the thing to flee (idleness) and the means of escape (winged ascent) while subtly indicating both life and death—that of the soul through the symbol of the bird, twice evoked: as animatedly present in the imagined flight of verse seven; as absent, or formerly present, in the still image of its inanimate plumage in line five.

The poet distinguishes clearly between the visible and invisible realms of the material and immaterial worlds. His is a traditional and religiously orthodox metaphysics positing two discrete ontological realms, demarcated in the Aristotelian–Ptolemaic conception of the cosmos by the moon, with the sublunar region governed by the four elements constituting the place of matter, of birth, death, and decay, and of humankind. The “flames” toward which the poet encourages his soul to move likely denote the sphere of fire believed to encircle the terrestrial globe, a natural boundary between the earth and the moon that separated the sublunar and the supralunar regions. The “supernal seats” are those of the blessed near God’s throne in heaven, specifically in the empyrean that lies beyond the fixed stars and outside time and space (the other possible realm symbolized by “flames” in verse eight). With “il Cielo” (v.1), Sforza denotes not only “sky” and “Heaven” but also, and importantly, “heavens” and “firmament.”

God created the firmament he called “Heaven” on the second day of creation to separate the waters above from those below (Genesis 1:6–8). On the fourth day, he set lights in it—the sun, the moon, and the stars—to distinguish day from night and to mark the passage of time and of the seasons (Genesis 1:14–19). This expanse of heaven was imagined as a solid dome in which stars and celestial bodies were lodged (Job 37:18).6 Above the firmament sat the palace and throne of God, where He might be seen walking (Job 22:14). John’s vision of the New Jerusalem also includes a description of precious stones (Apocalypse 21:10–11 and 21:18–19). The firmament is invoked in the devotional songs of the Old Testament to praise God (Psalms 18:2 and 149:1 in the Vulgate). The association of God’s glory with the firmament extends naturally to qualifying those who turn to Him and reflect His light—the wise and the righteous (Daniel 12:3). In the Old Testament, God’s chosen people and those free from iniquity may ascend the mountain like Moses (Ezekiel 28:14–15).

In a similar sonnet bearing the title “Il fè di notte, e guatando alle stelle” (“Faith at night, and staring at the stars”), the poet offers not a dialogue between himself and his soul, but rather the reported speech of faith personified:

      O’ fortunato chi fuggendo il mondo,

E diletti, e ricchezze, si ritira

In qualche aspra spelonca, over sospira

In sacra cella a Dio dal cor profondo;

      Quella eletta in palaggio alto, e giocondo;

E contra i primi suoi falli s’adira.

Quanto ben può, qualhor di notte mira

Il Cielo andar di stelle ornato a tondo,

      Pensare, e dir, in quel cui servo io spero,

Che da quì a poco tempo la sù fia

La mia magion con gli Angeli, e co’ Divi.

      Vada chi vuol d’oro, e di gemme altero,

Pur ch’ivi alberghi, & ivi ricco io sia,

Quì d’ogni bene il Ciel mi spogli, e privi. (Sonnet 40)

O how fortunate is the one who, fleeing the world, and pleasures, and riches, withdraws into some rugged cave, or in a holy cell, yearns for God from the heart’s depths; that [soul is] elected to the high and merry palace, and becomes angry about her past transgressions. As much as possible, whensoever at night she watches Heaven adorned with stars circle around, she thinks, and says: “I hope in that which I serve, so that, in a short time, from here, my abode will be there with the Angels and with the Saints. Begone the proud one who wants gold and gems. So that I might live there, and there be rich, here Heaven strips me and deprives me of every possession.”

• In this sonnet, Faith encourages contemplation of the heavens, both the beautiful sky and its luminous bodies, and the divine realm beyond the firmament containing them, the empyrean, where the blessed dwell with God in a realm beyond time and space. Christian tradition had it that there were three heavens, the third of which we associate with Dante’s empyrean and Christian heaven proper.7 Both to merit it in the afterlife and to glimpse it while living required stripping oneself of earthly desires and possessions, or as this essay will show, closing off the senses to them. This was understood as entering into poverty—a condition of possessionlessness, or absence of the desire to possess, by which one ultimately comes to possess all or to be possessed by the All, the transcendent divine.

In a laud titled “On Holy Poverty and its Threefold Heaven,” thirteenth-century Franciscan mystic and poet Jacopone da Todi (c. 1260–1306) described the three heavens and their significance for Christians.8 Following the first heaven, or the starry “firmament” (“fermamento,” v. 39), and the second heaven, a “hidden sky” (“un altro cel velato,” v. 53) made of “frozen waters, crystal-clear” (“acque clare sollidate,” v. 54), one finds the third. Infinite, possessing neither “end” nor “measure” (“non n’à termene nné mesura,” v. 80), it “lies beyond the reach of the imagination” (“for de la ’magenatura,” v. 81). In it, everything that has been lost is “replaced with true treasure” (“tesaurizzat’el so mercato,” v. 85). This third heaven is “founded on nichil [nihil, or “nothing”]/Where purified love lives in Truth” (“Questo celo è fabrecato,/enn un nichil è fundato,/o l’amor purificator/viv’ennela Veretate,” vv. 87–90). It is a place of “dark light” (“luce ottenebrate,” v. 102). It bears the name “Nonbeing” (“None,” v. 99). In that nowhere and nothing, “All light is shrouded in darkness/All darkness bright as the noonday sun” (“Onne luc’è ’n tenebria/e ⟨’n⟩ onne tenebre c’è dia,” vv. 103–104), and the poet lives a paradox: “To live as myself and yet not I,/My being no longer my being (“Vivar eo e⟨n⟩ non eo/e l’esser meo e⟨n⟩ non esser meo,” vv. 115–116).” His is a state of ecstasy initiated by contemplation of the heavens. It is, as Denys Turner calls it, a “dark ecstasy” (Turner 1995, p. 131). Tradition had it that Moses experienced it first on Mount Sinai (in Exodus 24: 15–18, when the glory of God appeared to him as a cloud).

In his Mystical Theology, Pseudo-Dionysius the Areopagite (fl. 500), wrote: “By an undivided and absolute abandonment of yourself and everything, shedding all and freed from all, you will be uplifted to the ray of the divine shadow which is above everything” (Mystical Theology 1000A; Pseudo-Dionysius 1987, p. 135). Of Moses, he observed: “he pushes ahead to the summit of divine ascents. And yet he does not meet God himself, but contemplates, not him who is invisible, but rather where he dwells” (a reference to the partial view that God grants him, of His glory, hand, and rear, but not His face lest having seen the divinity he dies); until finally, Pseudo-Dionysius continues “renouncing all that the mind may conceive, wrapped entirely in the intangible and the invisible, he belongs completely to him who is beyond everything. Here, being neither oneself nor someone else, one is supremely united to the completely unknown” (Mystical Theology 1001A; Pseudo-Dionysius 1987, p. 137). We do not contemplate God, then, but His immanent adjacent. “To really see and to know,” Pseudo-Dionysius added, is “to praise the Transcendent One in a transcending way” (Mystical Theology 1025A; Pseudo-Dionysius 1987, p. 138). The mystic and poet St. John of the Cross (1542–1591) expressed similar ideas nearly a thousand years later in the sixteenth century.

Commenting on the second stanza of his poem “The Dark Night,” St. John wrote that “faith,” a means of ascent, is “comparable to midnight” (Ascent 2:2.1; John of the Cross 1979, p. 156). In both his Ascent of Mount Carmel and The Dark Night, he described the progress of the soul metaphorically in terms of three phases of the night: the twilight period after dusk, when “sensible objects begin to fade from sight;” midnight, the darkest hour, “the innermost and darkest period of night,” when one is blind; and the moment before dawn, when “we approach the illumination of day.”9 Faith, as he described it, is both a “cause” and a “part” of this night (Ascent 2:2.1; John of the Cross 1979, p. 155). It corresponds to the “night of the spirit” (Ascent 2:1; John of the Cross 1979, p. 154). Experiencing faith was like experiencing the night. To quote the editors of the English translation, Kieran Kavanaugh and Otilio Rodriguez: “From the perspective of the subject, it is dark. From the perspective of its object, it is light” (John of the Cross 1979, p. 105). In other words, God’s glory blinds the senses and illuminates the spirit.

3. Faith and the Darkness of God

• Descriptions of God’s glory appear in the lyric poetry of both Vittoria Colonna and Michelangelo.10 Colonna alludes to the phenomenon of God’s darkness in the first two verses of sonnet S1:88, where she addresses the Lord as an unreachable light in a high mist:

      Signor, che ’n quella inacessibil luce,

quasi in alta caligine, T’ascondi,

ma viva grazia e chiari rai diffondi

da l’alto specchio on’ogni ben traluce,

      genera il tutto ed a fine il conduce

un solo cenno Tuo, che puri e mondi

far può gli affetti altrui di sozzi immondi

pur che l’uom segue Te, suo vero Duce. (S1:88, vv. 1–8)

      Lord, you who in that inaccessible light,

almost in a great fog, hide yourself,

but spread lively grace and splendid rays

in the mirror where every good shines forth,

      all is created and brought to its end

with your single word, what thousand worlds

it can make and unmake, since in the earth’s deep

pits, and in heaven, you are the true leader.11

• Emphasizing the creative power of the divine Word in the second quatrain, Colonna draws attention to the biblical God of Genesis as cosmic maker. She displays her own creative powers of imagination in figuring a material depiction of an immaterial reality in sonnet S1:64. Picturing heaven, the poet imagines the blessed enjoying light without shadow, free from the “chiaroscuro” (“chiaro e scuro,” v. 5) that defines mortal existence:

      In forma di musaico un alto muro

d’animate scintilla alate e preste,

con catene d’amor sì ben conteste,

con l’una porge a l’altra il lume puro

      Senz’ombra che vi formi il chiaro e scuro,

ma sol vivo splendor del sol celeste

che le adorna, incolora, ordina e veste,

d’intorno a Dio col mio pensier figuro. (S1:64, vv. 1–8)

In the form of a mosaic, a high wall of winged swift live sparks of fire, bound together so well with chains of love that each offers its pure light to the others, without any shadow that gives shape through chiaroscuro but only the bright splendor of the heavenly Sun, which adorns, colors, and orders them and clothes them in light—this I figure in my thought, arrayed around God.12

• The acoustic dimension of the sonnet amplifies its meaning. The rhyme of “muro” (“wall,” v. 1), “puro” (“pure,” v. 4), “chiaro and scuro” (“chiaroscuro,” v. 5), and “figuro” (“figure,” v. 8) evokes the image of a rarefied incorporeal barrier separating light from darkness.

In sonnet S1:90, Colonna asks the Lord when her thought, ever-centered on Him, will pass beyond the “fog” (“nebbie,” v. 3) to reach the “true light” (“lume vero,” v. 4), and she prays for the rending of the veil that will free her from the influence of both “dark and shining rays” (“rai foschi od illustri,” v. 13):

      Quando fia il dì, Signor, che ’l mio pensero,

intento e fisso in Voi sempre, Vi veggia?

ché mentre fra le nebbie erra e vaneggia

mal si puote fermar nel lume vero.

         […]

      onde non più da rai foschi od illustri

s’affreni o sproni l’alma, ma, disciolta,

miri il gran Sol nel più beato Cielo! (S1:90, vv. 1–4, 12–14)

      When will the day be, Lord, in which my thought,

always intent and fixed on you, might see you?

For while it wanders and roves through the fog,

it cannot rest in the true light.

         […]

      so that the soul might no longer be held back or pushed away

by dark or shining rays, but, let loose,

might admire the great Sun in the most blessed Sky.13

• Addressing his father in heaven rather than the Father in heaven in a moving unfinished capitolo from the early 1530s, Michelangelo described the afterlife in comparable terms of shadow and light:

      Novanta volte el sol suo chiara face

prim’ha nell’oceàn bagnata e molle,

che tu sie giunto all divina pace.

         […]

      Fortuna e ’l tempo dentro a vostra soglia

non tenta trapassar, per sui s’adduce

fra no’ dubbia letizia e certa doglia.

      Nube non è che scuri vostra luce,

l’ore distinte a voi non fanno forza,

caso o necessità non vi conduce.

      Vostro splendor per notte non s’ammorza,

né cresce mai per giorno, benché chiaro,

sie quand’el sol fra no’ il caldo rinforza.

      Nel tuo morire el mie morire imparo,

padre mie caro, e nel pensier ti veggio

dove ’l mondo passer ne fa di raro.

      Non è, com’alcun crede, morte il peggio

a chi l’ultimo dì trascende al primo,

per grazia, etterno appresso al divin seggio

      dove, Die grazia, ti prosumo e stimo

e spero di veder, se ’l freddo core

mie ragion tragge dal terrestre limo. (F42/G86, vv. 37–42; 49–66)

      Ninety times did the sun plunge and soak

its bright torch in the ocean, before

you attained to divine peace.

         […]

      Fortune and Time, who produce among us

doubtful merriment and certain pain,

no longer try to cross beyond your doorstep.

      There is no cloud that can obscure your light,

the successive hours have no power over you,

neither chance nor necessity controls you.

      Your brilliance is not damped down by the night,

nor ever increased by the day, however bright,

even when the sun intensifies the heat among us.

      In your death I am learning how to die,

O my dear father, and in my thoughts I see you

up there where the world only rarely lets us pass.

      Death is not, as some believe, the worst for one

who, through grace, rises up on his final day

to his first eternal one near the divine throne,

      where, God willing, I presume and believe you are,

and where I hope to see you, if my reason

can draw my cold heart out of the earthly mud.

• The final two verses signify that the poet’s senses must be submitted to reason if he is to be saved and go to heaven after death. We might distinguish here between the fate of the soul (based on how the senses are managed through reason during life) and the operation of the soul (to be discussed in greater detail in what follows).

At the center of Michelangelo’s vast and heterogeneous corpus of Neoplatonic poetry stands the luminous beloved (or a beloved luminosity) whose radiant beauty reflects the divine and draws the lover’s soul toward its spiritual source. It is a phenomenon at once difficult to understand and impossible to experience under normal conditions of waking consciousness; one must transcend the mortal human state to know it:

      Quel che nel tuo bel volto bramo e ’mparo,

e mal compres’ è dagli umani ingegni,

che ’l vuol saper convien che prima mora (L23/G60, vv. 12–14)

      What I yearn for and learn from your fair face

is poorly understood by mortal minds;

whoever wants to know it must die first.

• With these lines, the poet emphasizes the fundamental distinction between the two types of love routinely contrasted in his verses and those of his contemporaries, the carnal and the spiritual:

      L’un tira al cielo, e l’altro in terra tira;

nell’alma l’un, l’altr’abita ne’ sensi,

e l’arco tira a cose basse e vile. (L81/G260, vv. 12–14)

      One love draws toward heaven, the other draws down to earth;

one dwells in the soul, the other in the senses,

and draws its bow at base and vile things.

• In this tercet on sacred and profane love, Michelangelo clarifies their respective sites of operation in the soul and the senses.

Other sundry references to heaven and to the immortal soul pepper Michelangelo’s poetic corpus. He describes heaven as a timeless place: “Blessed is the soul where time does not flow:/it has been brought by you to contemplate God” (“Beata l’alma, ove non corre tempo,/per te s’è fatta a contemplare Dio,” F18/G37, vv. 5–6). For Michelangelo, these verses imply, contemplation is not merely a perceived experience of suspended time; it is rather a phenomenon that occurs outside of time and space. Elsewhere, the poet conveys a related notion, the idea that the immortal soul experiences peace before it incarnates.14 In the unfinished capitolo from which I cited the passage about Michelangelo’s father, the poet describes heaven as “that place where truth is safest from the senses” (“là dove ’l ver dal senso è più sicuro,” F42/G86, v. 21).

Michelangelo does in fact allude to the darkness of God in the first of his four nocturnal sonnets, where he describes the night as that place on the globe to which Phoebus’s arms do not extend:

      Perché Febo non torce e non distende

d’intorn’ a questo globo freddo e molle

le braccia sua lucenti, el vulgo volle

notte chiamar quel sol che non comprende.

         […]

      E s’egli è pur che qualche cosa sia,

cert’è figlia del sol e della terra;

ché l’un tien l’ombra, e l’altro sol cria. (L46/G101, vv. 1–4, 9–11)

      Since Phoebus does not stretch out and curl

his luminous arms around this cold, moist globe,

the ordinary multitude desire

to call ‘night’ that sun which they don’t understand.

         […]

      Yet if it’s true that she is anything,

she’s surely the daughter of the sun and the earth:

for the latter holds her shadow, the former alone creates it.

• Michelangelo qualifies night as “that sun” that the masses “do not understand” and as a ‘not thing,’ and characterizes night as unknowable—as beyond both comprehension and being—just like the transcendent divine whose glory is too bright to be perceived by normal mortals. In a fragment preserved in Benedetto Varchi’s Due lezzioni (1549), Michelangelo describes an experience of being blinded by excessive light:

il tuo volto nel mio

ben può veder, tuo grazia e tuo mercede,

chi per superchia luce te non vede. (F85/A34, vv. 3–5)

your face can well be seen,

in mine, thanks to your mercy and your grace,

by one who, through excess light, cannot see you.

• This last example brings us to the matter of physical and spiritual perception. Vittoria Colonna makes a firm distinction in her poetry between the sensible realm of reason and the intelligible realm of the soul and of faith.

In a sonnet on the incredulous apostle Thomas, Colonna has Christ explain faith to him using the psycho-physiological terms of faculty psychology (the idea that the various functions of the human mind are organized into faculties and associated with specific, inner, spiritual operations and senses):

      Ond’Ei li disse, poi: «Maggior è il metro

Di creder l’invisible per quella

virtù che non ha in sé ragion umana». (S1:118, vv. 9–11)

      And then Christ said to him, “It is of greater merit

to believe in the invisible through the virtue

that is not possessed of human reason.15

• To have faith, Christ explains, is to believe in the unseen through the faculty “that does not contain” (“che non ha in sé,” v. 11) reason, that is, through a different faculty, presumably the one above it.16 With these words, Colonna alludes to the conception of the rational soul. A uniquely human phenomenon, which was believed to contain the intellect and the will, and to be able to function in the absence of physical organs, it encompassed the lower sensible soul, which was held to house the motive and perceptive functions, including the inner and outer senses.17 Herein lies the distinction, in the period and in her poetry, between the soul and the senses and their respective relations to faith and to reason.

As Colonna makes clear in the second poetic excerpt, reason ranks far below spirit, from whose perspective it is but a shadow:

      Quanto è più vile il nostro ingordo frale

Senso terren de la ragion umana

tanto ella poi riman bassa lontana

da lo spirto divin, che sempre sale.

      Non han principio, fin, né mezzo equale;

la ragion par col senso infermo sana

ma con lo spirto eterno è un’ombra vana,

ché con quel lume il suo poter non vale. (S1:148, vv. 1–8)

How much baser is our fragile, gluttonous earthly sense of human reason the farther below it remains from the divine spirit, which always rises. It has neither beginning, end, nor proportional means; reason appears healthy to our weak senses but a vain shadow to eternal spirit, because its power has no worth before that light.18

• As Colonna understands it, the image of God (imago dei) resides in the deepest chamber of the heart-mind where only truth can reside:

      Perché la mente vostra, ornate e cinta

d’eterno lume, serbi la sembianza

del gran Motor ne la più interna stanza

ove albergar non puote imagin finta, (S1:142, vv. 1–4)

Because your mind, adorned and encompassed by eternal light, conserves the likeness of the great Mover in that innermost chamber where no false image can dwell[.]19

• Just as one covers coals to keep a fire alive through the night, Colonna writes in sonnet S1:76, so must one close the senses to protect the soul and preserve that divine light in the heart from the dark world outside:

      Se per serbar la notte il vivo ardore

dei carboni da noi la sera accensi

nel legno incenerito arso conviensi

coprirli, sì che non si mostrin fore,

      quanto più si conviene a tutte l’ore

chiuder in modo d’ogn’intorno i sensi,

che sian ministri a serbar vivi e intensi

i bei spirti divini entro nel core?

      Se s’apre in questa fredda notte oscura

per noi la porta a l’inimico vento

le scintille del cor durean poco;

      ordinar ne convien con sottil cura

il senso, onde non sia de l’alma spento,

per le insidie di fuor, l’interno foco. (S1:76)

      If, to conserve the lively heat of coals

through the night, we light them in the evening

beneath the burnt ashes of dry wood, it is important

to cover them so that no trace can be seen;

      how much more important is it then at all times

to shut off our senses from their surroundings,

so that they may serve as wakeful and alert ministers

to those beautiful, divine sparks that inhabit our hearts.

      If, in this cold dark night, the door opens

to allow the cruel wind in to us,

the sparks of fire in our hearts will not burn for long;

      with delicate care we must prepare

our senses, so that the internal fire within the soul is

not extinguished by assaults from without.20

• Though it has long been observed that Colonna wrote about the inner and outer senses, that light and darkness figure prominently in her verse, and that her visionary poems reflect contemporary contemplative practices and anticipate spiritual sight in heaven, her conception of faith and its modes of operation has been less well understood.

In a very different way, Michelangelo’s poetry alludes to the same understanding. Looking at and thinking about the beloved constantly leaves the poet no time for pursuing divine things; that is, a focus on sensible images prevents him from attending to intelligible ones.

Ond’ il tempo comparto:

per gli occhi il giorno e per la notte il core,

senza intervallo alcun c’al cielo aspiri. (L79/G258, vv. 7–9)

Thus I allot my time:

the day for your eyes and the night for your heart,

with no intervals in which to aspire to heaven.

• The senses cannot fully discern the soul and its significance:

      Ma perché l’alma per divina legge

ha lunga vita, e ’l corpo in breve muore,

non può ’l senso suo lode o suo valore

appien descriver quel c’appien non legge. (F28/G58, vv. 5–8)

      But since the soul, by divine decree,

has a long life, while the body swiftly dies,

the senses can’t fully describe or celebrate

its worth, which they cannot fully perceive.

• The soul becomes fuller and richer the more one turns away from the world; that is, when one closes one’s senses and enters divine darkness, and free from earthly obsession, one opens to divine possession: “The soul gains more, the more it loses the world/and art and death do not go well together” (“Più l’alma acquisita ove più ’l mondo perde;/l’arte e la morte non va bene insieme,” F61/G283, v. 4–5).

4. Faith, Truth, and Revelation

Michelangelo composed two meditations on truth that reveal the subtle connections his culture assumed and interrogated between faith and reason and between humans and the source of their being. The first one, a religious allegory in verse, attends to the relations among truth, faith, and God. The second one, comprising a prose text and diagram, explores the relations among truth, revelation, and the imagination. In the poem, Michelangelo grapples with moral principles and contemporary society, and through the picture and accompanying prose, with metaphysical conceits and the context in which he pursued religious art. Both texts combine word and image to convey insights into matters of faith and to invite contemplation. Considered together, they reveal his ideals of faith, his understanding of truth and revelation, and the place of darkness, both real and figurative, therein.

Michelangelo’s incomplete allegorical poem “Nuovo piacere e di maggior stima” (“What a new and more worthwhile pleasure,” F30/G67) comprises fifteen stanzas in ottava rima, the rhyming octave of Italian narrative poetry. It features three distinct but interspersed components: the description of a golden age, a scathing indictment of contemporary mores, and nine figurations depicting Wealth and Poverty, Doubt and Perhaps, How and Why, Truth and Falsehood, and Adulation. The poem begins with a pastoral scene and an image of ascent: goats climbing up the rocky face of a steep incline. Readers are presented with an image of boundless peaks, or summits, on which they graze. Below, a shepherd sings from his depths a “raw” tune (“aspre note,” v. 4; “roza rima,” v. 5) to a woman possessing an “iron heart” (“cor di ferro,” v. 7). Michelangelo’s audience observes the bucolic setting and its dwellers as the speaker does: as pleasing and as distant.

The poet describes their “dwelling on high” (“eminente loco,” v. 9), and he introduces a series of nameless but industrious agents by the expression “chi” (“the one who”) followed by a description of their activity: theirs is a perfectly balanced world in which everyone has his or her part to play. An old man sits quietly in the sun by the door of his dwelling—an image of fulfillment and peace, of a life well led. He stands at a threshold, both literal and metaphorical. The poet explains that “[f]rom outside, one can see what they have within” (“Di fuor dentro si vede quel che hanno,” v. 17). He describes what they possess: “peace without gold and no thirst for it” (“pace sanza oro e sanza sete,” v. 18). They leave their doors open to chance and sleep well at night. They trust, and no danger looms. They live free from adversity, for they do not know vice. Envy does not exist there, and pride consumes itself, for theirs is a society without greed. Michelangelo’s, however, is not.

An apostrophe to “blind avarice” (“avarizia cieca,” v. 33) and to “base intellects who make ill use of nature’s goods” (“o bassi ingiegni,/che disusate ’l ben della natura,” vv. 33–34) follows. The tone changes dramatically as the speaker condemns those who “see [k] gold, and land, and wealthy realms” (“Cercando l’or, le terre, e’ richi regni,” v. 35). Addressing his listeners in the informal second person plural, the speaker invites them to “let” those who once “relieved their hunger and thirst with water and acorns” be their “example, guide, lamp and mirror” (“si trasser fame e sete d’acqua e ghiande/vi sieno esemplo, scorta, lume e specchio,” v. 42–43). With a psalmic echo, he encourages them to lend him their ear (“Porgiete al mie parlare un po’ l’orecchio,” v. 45).21

Personifications of Wealth and Poverty come next (vv. 49–56). “Adorned with gold and jewels, yet with a face that’s filled with terror” (“D’oro e di giemme, e spaventata in vista/adorna,” vv. 49–50), Wealth “goes about lost in thought” (“va pensando,” v. 50) and attentive to “omens and to marvels” (“gli augùri e’ prodigi,” v. 52). Poverty, by contrast, enjoys security and serenity “in the woods” (“ne’ boschi,” v. 55), where she “does not think of how or when” (“né pensa come o quando,” v. 54). For the shepherd, however, “[d]ebits and credits” (“L’aver e ’l dar,” v. 57) and “the pinnacles of art” (“le cime dell’arte,” v. 58) hold no interest.

In a crucial stanza, the poet presents the shepherd as an ideal embodiment of simple faith, who loves, fears, adores and prays to God and to heaven:

      Onora e ama e teme e prega Dio.

pe’ pascol, per l’armento e pel lavoro,

con fede, con ispeme e con desio

per la gravida vaca e pel bel toro

El Dubio, el Forse, el Come, el Perché rio

no ’l può ma’ far, ché non ista fra loro:

se con semplice fede adora e prega

Idio e ’l ciel, l’un lega e l’altro piega. (F30/G67, vv. 65–72)

      He honors and loves and fears God, and prays to Him

for his pastures, for his herds, and for his work;

he prays with faith, and with hope, and with yearning

for the pregnant cow and for the handsome bull.

Doubt and Perhaps and How and Why can never

spoil him, for he is not involved with them:

if he adores and prays to God and heaven

with simple faith, he’ll bind one and bend the other.

• An exemplary creature (if not Christian), the shepherd does not doubt or waver; he asks neither how nor why; his trust is complete. He lives according to faith and not reason. The simplicity celebrated in the octave is underscored by both the syntax and style. Clear and rhythmic, the octave is defined by the polysyndeton: the thrice repeated coordinating conjunctions of “and” (“e,” v. 65), “with” (“con,” v. 67), and “for” (“per,” v. 66 and v. 68)—an accumulation echoed in the stanza’s multiple instances of enumeration.

Following this stanza, the poet offers allegorical descriptions of the enemies of faith: Doubt and Why (vv. 73–80); How and Perhaps (vv. 81–88). Doubt and Why are weak characters, one lame, and the other lean, one feeble and the other fumbling. Why has tools he cannot use. He must act surreptitiously and enter spaces by trickery; he gropes in the dark. How and Perhaps, by contrast, are strong but willful. Giants who strive and climb, they represent pride and ambition, and Michelangelo’s description of them evokes both Ovid’s Metamorphoses (1.151–176) and the Tower of Babel (Genesis 11:1–9). Read in light of these and other intertexts, the implications are clear: the giants follow their own strategy and designs, not providence; the possibility in which they hope is rooted in their own industry and ingenuity. One deduces that they operate against God, or the natural order, not in cooperation with Him or it.

Next appear Truth (vv. 89–96) and Falsehood (vv. 97–104), the final set of paired figures. The reasoned order according to which Michelangelo presents his personifications becomes clear. Beginning with Wealth and Poverty, proceeding to Doubt and Why, How and Perhaps, and arriving at Truth and Falsehood, he first offers figurations of material conditions, then mental and moral states, and finally spiritual and metaphysical categories: a progression that suggests not only a hierarchy of values, but also of emanation; he evokes both ascent and ontology.

Poor, naked, firm, and constant, Truth possesses but one shining eye, a sign of singular focus. Michelangelo describes Truth as a phenomenon that multiplies or increases through death. The rationale is incarnational, and the suggestion Christological. Michelangelo’s figure of “il Vero” (literally, “the True”) is to “Truth” as Christ is to God. Like Christ, “the True” is present to humanity (or to the humble few), and a bridge between creature and Creator that enables their reacquaintance and reconciliation.

While Truth stands alone, the hypocrite Falsehood, or “the False” (“il Falso”), is accompanied. Adulation, or Flattery, is one of his many companions, but the only one Michelangelo bothered to depict. Described as one who “adores with her eyes, while with her hands she robs” (“cogli ochi adora, e con le mani invola,” v. 112), Adulation seems a striking allegorical representation of false praise, the antithesis of true prayer and adoration. Her hands reach out to steal rather than to pray; to fellow humans and not to God; to take rather than to offer. Her gaze is set greedily on earthly goods and not celestial beauty. Morally speaking, she lacks all nobility. Voicing only those words that others will find pleasing, this most odious of Michelangelo’s figurations is the very embodiment of false religion. Untruthful and insincere, she is faithlessness personified.

In a curious record from an uncertain date after 1527 that now follows a series of recipes for ocular disturbances in the Ricordi, Michelangelo engaged in a reflection on how the human imagination enables an individual to approach the true and the false.22 He opens this philosophical inquiry into the asymptotic process of nearing truth with a geometric diagram in which angles serve to define the opposite trajectories leading to the true, on the one hand, and to the false, on the other (Figure 8). The text immediately below it begins with the following reflection: “On the path [leading] to the true there is no truth at all, but only in-magination of truth” (“Per la via del vero non e verità nessuna, ma solo inmaginatione di verità”).23

The diagram and two paragraphs that accompany it are both compelling and confounding. The picture consists of a rectangle divided into three parts, the middle section further divided into two opposing, right-angle triangles. The text in the first and the third sections makes clear that in this intellectual exercise, Michelangelo imagines the false and the true as mirror opposites and envisioned each “as a perfect square that sits well on each side” (“un quadro perfetto che siede bene per ogni verso”). The word “quadro” in Italian means not only “square,” but also “picture” or “painting.” The artist here offers a metaphorical window with a view.

Michelangelo schematizes the passage from the false to the true in the middle section, where he introduces a vertical dimension: an angle suggestive of rising from the bottom left of the box represents “the way that leaves from the false and goes to the true” (“la via che si parte dal falso e va al vero”), and an angle suggestive of a descending movement from the top right hand to the bottom left hand of the box represents “the way that leaves from the true and goes to the false” (“la via che si parte dal vero e va al falso”). The false and the true are inversely proportional. Michelangelo represents both space and time in his diagram, for he describes a process. The movement from the false to the true happens in the imagination, represented geometrically as a square.

At the beginning of his conjecture, Michelangelo offers the road to the city of Prato as an analogy for the way to the true and to the false:

Per la via del vero non è verità nessuna, ma solo inmaginatione di verità; e la verità è la dove ella è: come per la via di Prato non si truova mai Prato se non per i(n)maginatione, ma truovasi là dove egli è. Chosì avvien similmente per la via del falso, che e’ non vi si truova elf also se non per inmaginatione, se non là doce gli è, sichome è detto che per la via di Prato non si tuova mai Prato, ma truovasi solo dove gli è. E è più certo uno esser fuora di Prato quando gli è apresso a Prato a un trar di mano in luogo che e’ lo vegha, che e’ non è quando e’ n’è dischosto diecei miglia in un luogo che e’ lo vegha, chonoscie più non essere al vero, che non fa cholui che n’è lontano in luogo che e’ no(n) ’l vede, e più si dispiace in tutte le sua opere.

(Buonarroti 1970, p. 368)

On the way of the true there is not any truth, but only imagination of truth; and the truth is there where it is; as, on the road to Prato, Prato is not to be found but in the imagination, but rather is found where it is. So it is by the way of the false, that the false is not found but in imagination, if not there where it is, as has been said: Prato is never found on the way to Prato, but only where it is. And one is more certain of being outside Prato when he sees it at arms length, then he is when ten miles distant. So, whoever is nearer the truth when he sees it, more knows himself not to be at the truth than does he who is far from it in a place from which he cannot see it; and is more unhappy in all his works.

(Summers 1981, p. 201)

• Michelangelo here observes how knowledge of the true appears farther the closer one comes to it, suggesting that displeasure in his own works increases as he approaches the true—an ambiguous statement that I read in light of his emanationist Neoplatonic worldview to mean that by comparison with the good, the true, and the beautiful, his works seem lesser than; one might also read into the statement the poet’s frustration with a perceived incapacity to have his works truly reflect his mental conception of them, an idea he expressed in his well-known poem, “Non ha l’ottimo artista alcun concetto” (L57/G151).

The ensuing text makes clear, however, that the movement toward the city of Prato stands, metaphorically, for the journey of the mind to God; and where there is only the true, there can be no imagination:

Lo spatio della via del falso è lo spatio che à la inmaginatione, che più diminuiscie quante più s’apressa al vero, come è segniato disopra; lo spatio della via del vero è la notitia di quello, che più crescie quante più vi s’apressa, e quante più vi s’apressa più conoscie che n’à più notitia non esservi dentro. Pogniano che’l vero sia quatro braccia per ogni verso e che nel vero manchi la inmaginatione, come è certo, perché che vede Iddio che è verità, non può più inmaginare. Così chi più si discosta dal vero, più gli diminuiscie e cr[e]sciegniene la inmaginatione.

(Buonarroti 1970, p. 369)

The space of the way of the false is that space of the imagination that diminishes the more it approaches the truth, as shown above (the upper triangle); the space of the way of the true is the knowledge (of the true) that increases the more as it nears there (the lower triangle); and, as it is approached, he who has more knowledge, also knows more and more that he is outside of it. Let us say (sic: pogniano) that the true be four braccia on every side and that, in the true, imagination is absent, as is certain, because whoever sees God, who is truth, may imagine no more; and so who distances himself from the true, diminishes the truth for himself and his imagination increases.

(Summers 1981, p. 201)

• Here Michelangelo alludes to the ineffability of the mystical experience: the imagination at the point of its dissolution in truth, where the perceiving subject merges with the object of perception—God, as principle and foundation of Being, or Intellect.24 He writes:

[V]ie(n)-mene tanto nella via del vero quant’in quella dell’inmaginatione, ma parmi esser più fuora del vero che nell’angulo, perché lo comincio più a vedere. Fo sì il vero ancora più apresso al vero, e tanto più vego che io son fuora, perché l’inmaginatione, che me ’l crescieva, mi dimniuiscie; e ’l vero, per esservi più apresso, me da più notitia di sé, che mi fa paragone a quell che i’ò fatto per più vero esser men vero che nell’angolo.

(Buonarroti 1970, p. 369)

It seems as much the truth as the imagination, and yet it seems more outside the truth than in the angle, because I begin to see the truth more clearly. So I make the true even nearer to the true, and just as much more I see that I am outside it, because the imagination that increases me, diminishes me; and the true, by being near at hand, makes itself more clearly known to me; and by comparison it shows me that what I had done and thought to be more true was less true than that in the angle (Or, what he had considered more true, and had cherished most, is, by contrast with the true, less true than what he had known only in imagination to be true).

(Summers 1981, p. 201)

• The phenomenal dissolves as the noumenal is revealed.

David Summers described the combined image and text as “a metaphysical riddle” and as “a meditation, at once serious and full of conceits, upon the question of the relation of art and idea” (Summers 1981, p. 200). While Michelangelo does express experiencing displeasure in his own works, the closer he comes to the true, his geometric conjecture is more of a reflection on object and intellect than a meditation on art and idea (though one that certainly holds implications for the devout artist). Michelangelo’s riddle offers a concrete representation of the experience in space-time of something that exists outside of it. He seems to be exploring, from a phenomenological perspective, the Aristotelian principle taken up by Thomas Aquinas in Book 1, Question 16 of his Summa Theologica, “The true and the false reside not in things but in the intellect,” where Aquinas writes: “As the good denotes that towards which the appetite tends, so the true denotes that towards which the intellect tends.” It is in this section of his Summa that Aquinas affirms that God is Truth.

For Michelangelo, there were precedents for speculating about theological matters through geometry. Nicholas Cusanus (1401–1464) famously conjectured about the infinite, immaterial, unknowable based on what finite, material forms and simple shapes suggested. In his On Learned Ignorance (De docta ignorantia 2.12), Cusanus invites readers to consider God as a sphere whose center is everywhere and circumference nowhere, suggesting that this kind of speculation could enable one to conceive of a “coincidence of opposites” (coincidentia oppositorum). Michelangelo’s diagram and text reveal a similar heuristic approach. Like Cusanus, he goes beyond dialectic, in this case, of sense and intellect, to penetrate imagination as the site of their collapse and convergence in Being. Michelangelo’s primary question in this riddle seems to be, “What happens when I come face-to-face with God?” and only secondarily, “What does this mean for or about my art?” Like Prato, God is where he is; unlike Prato, God is Being. His location, like Dante’s empyrean, exists nowhere—He is beyond the realm of space-time.

When Michelangelo composed his riddle, he was busy at work on the Medici Chapel at San Lorenzo. It was also during this time that he composed the sonnets on the night. The Medici Chapel is a mausoleum. Its construction was prompted by the deaths of two younger members of the family (Pope Leo X’s brother, Giuliano de’ Medici, Duke of Nemours, in 1516, and Pope Leo X’s nephew, Lorenzo de’ Medici, Duke of Urbino, in 1519). In addition to providing sculptures for the chapel, Michelangelo designed and oversaw the building of this New Sacristy, which was meant to complement the Old Sacristy that Filippo Brunelleschi (1377–1446) had prepared a century earlier for the remains of Giovanni di Bicci de’ Medici (1360–1429) and his wife Piccarda Bueri (c. 1368–1433). Like the Old Sacristy, the New Sacristy possessed a perfectly square base, a domed top, and a rationally designed space with simple shapes, repetitions, and meaningful proportion. The order, unity, and elegant simplicity of the space reflected the harmony, beauty, and intelligent design of the cosmos.

As others have noted, Michelangelo’s sacristy possesses three discrete stories, each symbolizing a cosmic realm: the lower level represents the subterranean, the place of our burial; the middle level, the terrestrial, and the place of our life and achievements; the upper level, the celestial, the place of our origin and our afterlife—three realms corresponding to or conceived of in terms of different temporalities—historical and sacred; linear and cyclical—all evoked in the liturgical as it unfolded in that space, in which priests were to perform daily mass, say prayers for the deceased, and sing psalms.25 A chapel dedicated to the Resurrection, it embodied the idea of ascent and of going beyond. In his sacristy, Michelangelo not only replicated God’s design for the universe but also for the humans at its center: a return journey to Him as principle and ground of their Being; a constant process of becoming. For the living, seminal means of that return and becoming was contemplation. This too implied motion.

Thought, as conceived by Michelangelo and his contemporaries, was movement: of mental images, or phantasms, through the fluid-filled ventricles of the brain and the mental faculties they were held to house; and of spirits, or pneuma, through the blood, humors, and organs of the body that circulated the phantasms (See Agamben 1993, pp. 61–131). Such movements involved not only changes in location, but also in nature; metamorphoses in the direction of increasing spiritualization envisioned as ascent: images became purified through abstraction and recreation in the imaginative faculties of estimation and cognition, where the percipient was remade along with his or her mental images on the pattern of thoughts in the divine mind; the life-sustaining vital spirits arising in the liver, passed through the heart, where they combined with air from the lungs to become natural spirits that, at the threshold of the brain, became transformed yet again into an even more rarefied psycho-physiological substance known as animal spirits, which carried mental impressions from sensory data from the front to the back of the brain enabling thought (Prodan 2024, pp. 642–44, 646–49). Thought, like the imagination, required an object and an orientation. For the early modern Christian pilgrim, the ultimate object and orientation were God. Faith was the means of movement toward Him. One pursued it in darkness.

5. Conclusions

In early modern Christianity, darkness signified many things: a condition of faith; a place or space beyond the senses, and a state of emptiness achieved through closing them; a precondition for spiritual visions or divine union; the only proportional means for approaching the transcendent divine. An archetypal image of mystery and a theological symbol of divine unknowability associated with the place of truth in and beyond things impenetrable to ordinary human consciousness, darkness represented more than metaphor. It was a phenomenon.26 It was also a technical psycho-physiological requirement for the perception of intelligible things.

In sixteenth-century Italy, the intellect was the very place of faith: a component of the rational soul comprising active and passive functions; a receptacle for intelligible images rather than sensible species, and one whose functioning at this higher spiritual level requires that the senses be closed to engagement with and influence from the outside world, that is, from the contact and contagion of sensible things. If the rational soul is connected to the senses, and freedom from sin required that their operation be submitted to the dictates of reason, faith required their near total suspension, so that the intellect-soul, temporarily liberated from the constraints of the immanent world, might experience a dawning of the transcendent divine on the inner horizon of the darkened, inward- and upward-oriented heart-mind.