The Cicognara Library and Michelangelo Buonarroti: a Historiographical Reading through the Sources

The Library of Count Leopoldo Cicognara (1767-1834) represents the intellectual framework of a man who shaped the culture of his time not only in Venice but also, thanks to broad contacts with artists, antiquarians, archeologists, scholars and collectors, in Europe as a whole. His library does not simply reflect his lively participation in artistic debates but extends our understanding of his impressive network and his impact upon it. This paper focuses on Cicognara’s participation in one of the most substantial art historical debates of his day: the precise significance of Michelangelo Buonarroti. Cicognara’s Storia della scultura represents a central point in studies on Michelangelo. It provided a more historic evaluation of Buonarroti, a "genius favored by nature," whom Cicognara situated within the context of his predecessors. It was thanks to Cicognara and his theories for example that, after the publication of the second volume of Storia della scultura, Giovanni Degli Alessandri, director of the Uffizi Gallery, placed Michelangelo's famous Tondo Pitti in the Sculpture Corridor of his renovated museum, and designed a "collection of Tuscan Sculpture arranged historically from the revival of art to its completion." Looking to Cicognara’s library, we find his sources for re-evaluating Michelangelo, from Vasari's admiration to the fierce criticism of Francesco Milizia, an important architecture theorist whose irreverent definition of Michelangelo's Moses ("head of a satyr with swine hair") became a “manifesto” of neoclassical ideology. Cicognara’s library thus becomes a textual lens through which to observe the shifting plots of art history and its protagonists.