Chapter 2 - Some Notes on Beckett and Michelangelo

Summary

Abstract

Beckett's deep immersion in the visual images of the Italian Old Masters emerges in the pages of several scholars, although this story has yet to be told in coherent and comprehensive terms. This essay focuses mainly on the Irish playwright's interest in, not to say fascination with, Michelangelo Buonarroti, a giant through whom he may have found his artistic way. From his first published story, Assumption to Catastrophe, in which Protagonist stands on a plinth like a sculpture, Michelangelo was firmly rooted in Beckett's mind and played a pivotal role in his theatre, a role that is somehow impossible to describe with precision but inescapable.

Keywords: Michelangelo; sculpture; directing; stone; contrapposto; Bruce Nauman; Old Masters; curatorship; Giorgio Vasari.

In the Italian Rooms

The impact of Italian Old Masters on Beckett's plays is a story not yet written in coherent and comprehensive terms, even if Beckett's deep immersion in the visual images of Italian Old Masters emerges in the pages of several scholars. It suffices here to mention James Knowlson, who reports that Beckett's first visit to Florence, in 1927, was ‘a breathtaking revelation:’ the Pitti Palace, ‘the sinister Uffizi’ gallery, the Academia with Michelangelo's David; the Church of Santa Maria Novella, the Brancacci Chapel of Santa Maria del Carmine with Masaccio's famous frescoes.

While writing that Beckett generally ‘preferred the Dutch and Flemish painters to the Italians’, the biographer argues he ‘was not insensitive to the wonders of the Florentine Tizianos, Giorgiones, Peruginos, Uccellos and Masaccios’. Insensitive he certainly was not, as is proved by the many references to Italian art scattered throughout his artistic oeuvre and in numerous letters.

Unlike the broken man C in That Time, for whom the National Portrait Gallery is merely a place to shelter from the rain and cold, Beckett was famously an assiduous and knowledgeable visitor and also a connoisseur of the Italian Old Masters. Sometimes he even rightly doubted what the curators and the official catalogues said about an artist. Notably, experts had to conclude Beckett was right when he observed that Giorgione's Venus Sleeping in Dresden's Gemäldegalerie was ‘in a mess’. As he suggested to his friend MacGreevy, ‘the putto with the arrow and the bright bird sitting at her feet (by Giorgione or Titian?) was painted over with senseless landscape in the 19th century and the whole line of the left leg is destroyed’.