Michelangelo as a Baroque Poet

Michelangelo Buonarroti's influence upon baroque sculpture is now widely recognised by historians. Ever since that morning in 1506 when he and the Sangalli, father and son, watched the white Pentelic marble of the Laokoön emerge from the farmland of Felice de Freddis near the Baths of Titus, Michelangelo's restless mind found authority in antiquity for a revision of his aesthetic canons. In this agonising group Michelangelo found justification for moving beyond the symmetry, restraint, and proportione divina of the Donatellian mode of sculpture, the static scientism of Da Vinci's painting, and the Vitruvian rules of architecture—even though he paid lip service to those rules and even recited them to popes. Whereas Michelangelo did not acknowledge this influence in writing, or apparently in speaking, his contorted and anguished Haman (1511–12) on the spandrel of the Sistine Vault was an admission of the influence of this Rhodian group —just as El Greco's newly-restored Laokoön in Washington acknowledges it as the one work of art which initiated European baroque. Moreover, the anguishes of the Vatican Laokoön and the expressions thereof were to parallel those tensions—visible even in his death mask—of Michelangelo's own soul and to leave an imprint upon his poetry. Laokoön, it should be remembered in view of his impact upon European baroque, was a militant, ritualistic priest.