Leo Steinberg on Modern Appropriations of Leonardo and Michelangelo

Leonardo’s Last Supper and Michelangelo’s frescoes in the Sistine Chapel represent two emblematic examples of the visual fortunes of an image in the history of art. They are the turning points of a secular iconography. The activities of copyists and engravers began early in the sixteenth century and increased, during the nine- teenth century, until today, when photographers, cartoonists, advertising artists and filmmakers offer many examples of “visual translations” and interpretations of these famous works. They have initiated a never-ending phenomenon which has transformed these and other works into media and popular icons, particularly in the case of the Mona Lisa of the Louvre. This phenomenon has developed in sev- eral ways and for several reasons. The social applications of these images, as well as their distortions of the originals, have been studied by H. Focillon, A. Chastel, E. Battisti, and in particular by L. Steinberg. In the digital age the process of re-mediation and re-location led to a further acceleration of this phenomenon, giving new meanings to these images. The relationship between the original and the reproductions, creative translations, falsifications and distortions as expressions of implicit criticism, will be considered here from a methodological point of view. Steinberg worked extensively around these issues – in his book, Leonardo’s Incessant Last Supper (2001); and, among other places, in two essays concerning the interpretation and fortunes of the Sistine Chapel frescoes: The Line of Fate in Michelangelo’s Painting (1980), and Who’s Who in Michelangelo’s “Creation of Adam”: A Chronology of the Picture’s Reluctant Self-Revelation (1992). Steinberg focused his attention chiefly on the famous two- handed gesture in the Creation. For nearly forty years, he collected these modern appropriations of the subject, intending some day to publish an essay on them; nonetheless the project was never realized. The rich visual materials, along with extracts from some unpublished lectures – preserved in Steinberg’s papers – give evidence of his unceasing interest. This paper will analyze how the famous Sistine frescos was adapted and appropriated, from advertisements to lampoons, in the light of critical, theoretical and methodological questions.