Dreaming of Michelangelo: Jewish Variations on a Modern by Asher D. Biemann

By Asher D. Biemann

Dreaming of Michelangelo is the 1st book-length examine to discover the highbrow and cultural affinities among glossy Judaism and the existence and paintings of Michelangelo Buonarroti. It argues that Jewish intellectuals stumbled on themselves within the snapshot of Michelangelo as an "unrequited lover" whose paintings expressed loneliness and a eager for humanity's reaction. the fashionable Jewish mind's eye therefore grew to become consciously idolatrous. Writers dropped at life—literally—Michelangelo's sculptures, seeing in them their very own worldly and emotional struggles. The Moses statue specifically grew to become an archetype of Jewish liberation politics in addition to a valuable concentration of Jewish aesthetics. And such affinities prolonged past sculpture: Jewish viewers to the Sistine Chapel reinterpreted the ceiling as a manifesto of prophetic socialism, with out its Christian components. based on Biemann, the phenomenon of Jewish self-recognition in Michelangelo's paintings provided an alternative choice to the failed gives you of the German enlightenment. via this unforeseen discovery, he rethinks German Jewish background and its connections to Italy, the Mediterranean, and the paintings of the Renaissance.

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126 Yet, while her modern conscience is undoubtedly offended by the cultic elements of a religion, whose saints are borrowed from the Olympian mountain,  The Unrequited Eros her human heart, if such an unscientific metaphor is permitted to us, also feels a certain attraction to the worldly joys (Erdenfreuden), the inner poetry, and the sheer abundance of physical beauty that penetrates all Catholic ritual. When visiting the great Milan cathedral, her eyes, trained by Protestant simplicity, are at first blinded by the splendor, then alienated by the tumultuous action of worship, but at last fixed upon the “beautiful priest,” who enters the pulpit with an expression of “satisfied happiness” to deliver a passionate sermon about the tempesta del cuore, about the errant paths of love, which ends in an all but musical refrain, “sweet and affectionate like the love song of a Primo Tenore,” like an aria of unhappy farewell: “Ritorna!

But this desire need not be mutual and should not betray the fact that coconstitution rarely occurs as a symmetrical act. As sentimental as Scholem’s image of the unrequited lover seems to be, it hauntingly preserves the possibility of a love constituting no more than the lover, while leaving the beloved unharmed. “See to it I do not return to me” is the lover’s call that rebounds from the beloved’s will to be the same. Hope Remote and near, love’s self-estrangement foreshadows what we colloquially term hope.

Rome is the Eternal City,” Hermann Vogelstein would later write from his American exile in 1940, “[and] the most genuine representatives of its eternity are the Jews of Rome. All else in Rome has been transformed time and again, sometimes quite entirely. ”158 A peculiar fantasy animates the city to a site of simultaneous events, buildings, people, and streets, to a single Now, where everything and everyone has a place without displacing the other. Rome, in Freud’s fantasy, becomes the site and symbol of eternal, imperishable coexistence as it exists, of course, only in the mind.

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