| The relationship between artist and work has long been recognized as a powerful force, its potent nature recalling the connection between lover and beloved as it was described in the Renaissance both by the poets of the Petrarchan tradition and by the conventions of Neoplatonic love theory. These strategies had realized that such amorously-based alliances were dissimulative in nature, and had recognized the mutability of the self in love. They had perceived that the individual finds, as well as loses, his identity through his involvement with the Other. It is this self-affirming and self-alienating cycle that is rehearsed in the relationship between maker and made. This reality was articulated by Michelangelo himself and finds equivalent expression in Antonio Persio's account of Titian at work. But while such a phenomenon is readily attested to in literary sources, it is in the objects themselves that the complex relationship between artist and work can most clearly be read. This is particularly true of the unfinished works of Michelangelo and Titian.;The present thesis consists of two case studies. The first explores the significance of Michelangelo's dedication to the art of sculpture; the second investigates the meaning of Titian's intense relationship with pictorial form. It argues that for both the process of making was a highly charged and subjectively-based endeavor and contends that their unresolved works reflect the dialectical and irreducible nature of their own self-structures. It maintains that both artists implicitly realized that the finished image no longer served a dynamic function and that, as a result, they sought to prolong their affiliations with their own creations. In this manner, they rehearsed the lover's existential need for his beloved, seeking fulfillment through an intense and continuing involvement with representational form. |
