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#102 Soul and Body in Michelangelo: A Conversation with Rab Hatfield

Writer's picture: paola50122paola50122

Saturday, April 26th Live on Zoom

7pm Italy, 10am Los Angeles, 1pm New York


A renowned Michelangelo scholar, Rab Hatfield will explore Michelangelo’s understanding of the human body and how this changed towards the end of his very long lifetime. We today tend to view the human body as an incredibly complex organism that is the product of a long evolution. We think of our thoughts and emotions simply as aspects of this organism. And, often heedless of what we are doing, we tend to worship this body in beauty contests, bodybuilding, beach culture, and so on. But for Michelangelo the human body was merely a formless piece of matter that was shaped, made to live, and guided by an independent force or power that had entered it from without. This power or force was the body’s soul, which also constituted its “inner life”—its thoughts and feelings—and was, he believed, immortal, whereas the body as such was doomed to perish.

This different understanding of the human body and its relationship to its soul of course meant that Michelangelo “saw” or conceived of the marvelous figures in his sculptures and paintings differently from the way we tend to view them now.  If we really want to understand Michelangelo’s great figures, we should therefore make an effort to “see” them the way he did, that is, in numerous cases, as images or “reflections” of people with extraordinary spiritual qualities and not merely as people with amazing physiques.

Rab Hatfield received both his B.A. and his Ph.D. from Harvard University. After a brief assistant professorship at Yale University, he taught for forty-one years at the Syracuse University in Florence program.  He has been a Fellow of Villa I Tatti (three times) and a Member of the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton.  His best-known books are The Wealth of Michelangelo (2000) and The Three Mona Lisas (2014).  His Soul and Body in Michelangelo will be published later this year.


Minimum suggested donation: $28

This talk is free for Friends of Paola's Studiolo!


Look forward to seeing you on Zoom!



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