We often speak about Michelangelo’s influence on other artists as an active force to which later artists merely yielded. Morten Steen Hansen’s In Michelangelo’s Mirror turns the equation around, making Michelangelo’s work the object that later artists use for their own varied purposes. He focuses on three artists—Perino del Vaga, Daniele da Volterra, and Pellegrino Tibaldi—who knew each other in Rome, but this intelligent study is not about their connections to each other. Rather, Hansen considers their references to Michelangelo’s art as part of the discourse about the older artist’s work that took on particular urgency after the unveiling of the Last Judgment (1536–41). Hansen uses keen observation to tease out how each artist imitated Michelangelo and to what purpose that imitation was done. None, according to Hansen, imitated him simply because his work was fashionable or the peak of artistic development (as Giorgio Vasari would have it). Instead Perino, Daniele, and Pellegrino refer visually to Michelangelo’s work with polemic intent—either to set his manner against Raphael’s, to defend it against critics, or to parody it. Sophisticated viewers were called upon to recognize ironic commentary or to interpret works through complex cross-readings.

Hansen begins by considering what imitation meant to sixteenth-century artists. Whereas a traditionally trained artist in the fourteenth or fifteenth century would adopt a master’s style within the workshop setting and only gradually develop her or his own distinctive style, by the sixteenth century imitation was more self-conscious. Some artists imitated their models to the point of excess or attempted to combine styles into one perfect whole. Both of these forms of imitation have been seen as defining characteristics of Mannerism. However, Hansen’s review of the historiography of Mannerism and his analysis of other examples reveals that much more is at work.

Perino’s paintings give Hansen ample opportunity to demonstrate how style could be modified for particular purposes. In the Visitation (1526) from the Pucci Chapel in Trinità dei Monti, the figures of Mary and Elizabeth clearly cite Andrea del Sarto’s figures from the Annunziata in Florence, but they are surrounded by agitated figures (irrelevant to the story) that imitate Raphael’s Stanze frescoes. Their poses, Hansen argues, are symptomatic of the movements of their souls as they understand the import of the scene: “Divine presence is experienced as a startling and possessing force” (25). Imitation is carried further in the framing arch of the Pucci Chapel, where Perino quotes Michelangelo for his images of Old Testament prophets—the terribilità of Michelangelo’s art was chosen to express the Old Testament, while Raphael’s style was chosen to represent the era under grace. Perino’s Fall of the Giants (1535) in the Doria Palace in Genoa shows a similar contrast of Raphaelism and Michelangelism. The more graceful figures in the realm of the gods are derived from Raphael, while the nude giants below quote figures from the Sistine ceiling. In this case a more pointed commentary is being made, since the Raphaelesque figures are triumphant, and the Michelangelesque figures are collapsed in defeat. Ludovico Dolce’s dialogue, L’Aretino (1557), published more than two decades after the Palazzo Doria frescoes, set Raphael and Michelangelo against each other as binaries: Raphael, graceful and able to do all things well; Michelangelo, difficult and overly focused on the straining male nude. But as Perino’s frescoes demonstrate, the contrast existed before Dolce’s dialogue was published, and Michelangelo himself probably cast Raphael as his opposite.

Daniele presents a much different type of artist, one who sought to imitate Michelangelo exclusively—who indeed fashioned himself as the next Michelangelo. Vasari’s negative assessment of Daniele’s work is based in part on the impossibility of reaching such heights, but also on the lack of wisdom in imitating one model. Still, Daniele’s relationship to Michelangelo does seem extraordinary, whether or not he achieved his goal. Michelangelo gave him drawings which he used as starting points for his own inventions. This is a different kind of collaboration than the kind that Michelangelo had with Pontormo or Sebastiano del Piombo, where Michelangelo provided the design, and the others provided the color. The fact that Daniele was called upon after Michelangelo’s death to repaint offending areas in the Last Judgment is evidence that Pope Pius IV not only respected Michelangelo enough to hire a compatible painter for this task, but also that he saw Daniele as someone worthy of the charge.

Hansen makes the case for Daniele’s Deposition (ca. 1545) in the Orsini Chapel in Trinità dei Monti as a direct visual defense of Michelangelo’s Last Judgment, even if he responded to specific criticisms of the recently completed fresco by clothing figures more fully, giving Christ a beard, and so on. The composition was inspired by a Michelangelo drawing, and Daniele elaborated it into a complex, impassioned scene full of vigorous movement and sharp foreshortenings, some derived directly from the Last Judgment. Daniele’s defense of Michelangelo continues in the stucco reliefs that once surrounded the Deposition. These lost reliefs, first published by David Jaffé (“Daniele da Volterra’s Satirical Defence of His Art,” Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes 54 (1991): 247–52), are among the strangest products of Daniele’s career and represent (among other things) satyrs weighing limbs taken from the altarpiece. They create an ironic defense of the judgment displayed in Michelangelo’s art. Other instances of Daniele calling upon the authority of Michelangelo within his own works are seen in the Assumption of the Virgin (ca. 1550) from the Della Rovere Chapel (also in Trinità dei Monti) where Michelangelo is portrayed as an apostle, and in the Sala Regia of the Vatican Palace where references to the Medici Chapel sculptures take on a different life as symbols of abundance and peace under Paul III, their eroticized proportions reacting to criticisms that Michelangelo was incapable of sensuality.

Daniele’s imitation goes beyond merely quoting motifs or style. Like Michelangelo, he created paintings, sculpture, and architecture; and in direct imitation of him, he signed a sculpture with the words “DANIEL VOLATERRANVS PICTOR.” His use of sculptural models, which he turned and bent for his painted figures, was learned from Michelangelo. Daniele’s melancholic personality encouraged his identification with Michelangelo, although this connection seems circumstantial rather than a chosen point of imitation (Perino more consciously imitated Raphael’s courtly manner). Daniele even wanted his identification with Michelangelo to carry on after his death, since he was buried at Santa Maria degli Angeli (redesigned according to Michelangelo’s plans) beneath a statue of St. Michael.

With Pellegrino, imitation of Michelangelo is witty and sensuous. Clear references to figures from the Sistine ceiling and the Last Judgment are found in the two rooms decorated with scenes from the Odyssey (ca. 1550) in the Poggi Palace in Bologna. Others have interpreted the frescoes as allegories based on Neoplatonic thought or moralizing references to the patron’s character, but Hansen sees them as commentaries on the hubris of an artist who attempts to imitate so god-like a figure as Michelangelo. Understanding the frescoes this way turns them into personal expression: the wandering Ulysses becomes a stand-in for Pellegrino whose name means “pilgrim.” But the humor in the frescoes is directed at Michelangelo, too. His magnificent creations on the Sistine Chapel turn into their inverse: Adam’s creation becomes the blinding of Cyclops, and the elegant ignudi become wildly gesticulating giants teetering on a towering colonnade.

Hansen’s last chapter begins with a close examination of Tibaldi’s frescoes in the Poggi Chapel in San Giacomo Maggiore in Bologna. On one wall, St. John baptizes a crowd that includes Africans and Arabs; above, St. Michael puts the devil in chains in a magnificent aerial struggle. On the opposite wall, the full-grown St. John the Baptist swoops down from heaven at the moment of his own conception. Hansen’s apocalyptic interpretation is complex and convincing. It draws on patristic sources as well as more recent papal actions, but perhaps most in keeping with his larger theme, he sees the forms that imitate Michelangelo as keys to a reading that relies on analogy and cross-reference. The strikingly foreshortened figures that recall Michelangelo’s work on opposite walls of the chapel break the narrative and signal that the images should be interpreted figuratively. In sympathy with Michelangelo’s ideas as stated by his supporters, the deliberate obscurity in the Poggi Chapel is a sign that divine knowledge is not revealed easily.

Tibaldi’s overt imitation of Michelangelo’s art diminished after 1555 when the threat to destroy the Last Judgment was at its peak. Other artists like Girolamo Muziano imitated Michelangelo’s art in a way that caused little distress to Counter-Reformation critics. The heated debate that surrounded Michelangelo’s art cooled to academic positions. Hansen’s In Michelangelo’s Mirror is a vivid reminder that these debates were once more vital, and that artists as well as writers could take nuanced positions in the discourse.