Michelangelo Buonarroti: Catholic Reformation Piety

Abstract Michelangelo’s entire working life, from the beginning of the sixteenth century into its sixth decade, occurs in the midst of reforming religious currents that, for all their different shapes, characterized the life of the Roman Catholic Church of his time. While the early period centered more on issues of morality, wealth, and abuse of traditions than on strictly theological issues, they nevertheless signify that from the very beginning of his life’s work, reform issues were not foreign to the church Michelangelo knew. He never forgot Savonarola and his powerful, fiery, sometimes vividly detailed apoca lypticism. While Savonarola’s death in 1498 came because he defied papal power and also because he lost popular support in the political setting of Flo rence, Michelangelo remembered his impact, though Savonarola died when Michelangelo was only twenty-three years old. Given Michelangelo’s later history, one wonders if he was at all influenced by theories of justification, albeit in a Catholic context, or by affirmations of the resurrection of the body over against the immortality of the soul, found in Savonarola’s The Triumph of the Cross.1 Moreover, Michelangelo’s