Michelangelo and the Sublime in Romantic Art Criticism

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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