Tumarkin's Homage to the Pietà Rondanini Avigdor WG Posèq

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
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