Tumarkin's Homage to the Pietà Rondanini Avigdor WG Posèq

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masterpiece in a short article on "Michelangelo and the End of Marble Statuary", in his very personal survey of landmarks in the history of sculpture. 9 The title of this book, From Earth to Earth Art, recalls the Renaissance theory of the development of figural sculpture from natural objects; unlike Alberti, however, Tumarkin conceives the mimetic tendency as an intermediary phase. In discussing Michelangelo’s position in this evolution he notes the extent to which the Pietà Rondanini diverges from earlier versions of the same subjects and marvels at Michelangelo’s almost sensual attitude to the roughly worked Carrara marble. He particularly stresses the parallelism between the non finito effect, which he says “seems like an understated reflection of the creative moment in which the mutilated appearance of the figures harmonizes with the tragic theme, and Michelangelo’s coming to terms with his lifelong personal problems”. He claims that “as an embodiment of the completeness of the incomplete, the marble group fully conveys all that the artist wished to say; 196 Fig. 2: Michaelangelo, Pietà Rondanini. Marble, 1564. Milan. Castello Sforzesco.
any further touch would have been redundant and even detrimental to its perfection - but the very plenitude of Michelangelo’s message also represents the end of carving in marble as an artistic medium”. Elsewhere in his book Tumarkin praises primitive artists, especially African sculptors who, free from Western conventions and using divergent techniques, created superb works that breathed new life into modern art. 10 He admires especially the African sculptors’ skillful use of simple materials, and says of himself that he too endeavours to create something new by composing everyday functional implements in a new context. This may be exemplified in the real troley and railway track which he added to his Pietà. The essentially non-mimetic aspect of this assemblage may thus be seen as its author’s deliberate reaction to the concept of sculpture as an imitative art which, he feels, exhausted itself in Michelangelo’s last work. This concept of the Pietà Rondanini, as final expression of a venerable tradition, only sharpened Tumarkin’s attention of the emotional content of this statue. The special meaning of Michelangelo’s configuration has been widely discussed by art historians, with particular emphasis on the departure from the conventional formulas of the "Lamentation of Christ", which show Christ’s body either prostrate on the ground or held on Mary’s lap, as in the Bella Pietà Michelangelo’s earliest version of the subject. 11 The innovatory concept of the dead Christ standing vertically and seemingly absorbed into his mother’s body has also attracted the attention of psychoanalysts, who have approached the Pietà Rondanini against the background of Michelangelo’s childhood experiences, stressing the traumatic loss of his mother and lack of warmth in his relations with his father, which in maturity resulted in a subconscious search for surrogate parent figures. 12 Michelangelo’s various representations of the Madonna and Child, and also the early Pietà have been interpreted as a projection of his neurotic longing for mother love, while the Pietà Rondanini has accordingly been understood as a symbolic expression of Michelangelo’s wish to be reunited with his mother, coinciding with the conscious awareness that the realization of this wish was possible only in death. 13 Psychological insights are sometimes compared to artistic intuition and this may be especially true of the creative individual’s instinctive comprehension of the latent content of the work of another artist. 14 Tumarkin’s spontaneous perception of the special personal meaning of Michelangelo’s last work as a token of his coming to terms with his life-long problems, was probably facilitated by certain analogies in his own childhood experiences which, like Michelangelo, he constantly exorcises in his art. 15 He was born in 1933 to a German father and a Jewish mother who, submitting to racial laws, divorced 197
Page 1 and 2: Tumarkin’s Homage to the Pietà R
Page 3: the new elements which have been ad
Page 7 and 8: Fig. 3: Tumarkin Von den ‘Dicken
Page 9 and 10: assemblage is essentially different
Page 11 and 12: 19 On the special meaning of Tumark

Tumarkin's Homage to the Pietà Rondanini Avigdor WG Posèq

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