“Unless our reading takes us far away from the pictures, it will not lead us properly back to them.”

So Edgar Wind (1900–1971) reflected in an early and abandoned draft of his introduction to Pagan Mysteries in the Renaissance (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1958). Wind aptly encapsulated his method, which, it is sometimes forgotten, derived much of its Olympian energy and original character from deep attention to the language of form. “Iconography,” he continued in his draft, “is nothing if not what Focillon regretfully called un détour. The divergences should be pursued, the convergences distrusted until they force themselves upon us against our expectation” (xviii of the volume under review).

The Religious Symbolism of Michelangelo: The Sistine Ceiling, a comprehensive and superbly edited collection of Wind’s published and unpublished writings on the Sistine Ceiling, brings us closer to his ideas than any single book could possibly have done. The compilation takes its name from Wind’s own title for a work that would have brought together his investigations from 1948 to 1952, all of which are published here, together with his draft for the table of contents. With incisive, introductory essays by the volume’s editor, Elizabeth Sears (“Edgar Wind on Michelangelo”), and by John W. O’Malley (“The Religious and Theological Culture of Michelangelo’s Rome, 1508–1512”), as well as the newly annotated writings themselves, we have the best of all worlds, and much more than a simple collection. As Sears herself expresses it: “The volume is, in a sense, a study in scholarly process: it presents a book in its dynamic evolution. The aesthetic of the non-finito might even be called into play: here we can, on occasion, detect the chisel marks and trace the gestures of the hand” (xxxix). Complementing this intention to reveal the operations of an extraordinary mind is the concluding sequence of black-and-white illustrations (Wind believed that color reproduction was misleading) that conforms to the layout he would have preferred. How tantalizing it is to speculate about how he would have reacted to the Sistine Chapel’s recent restoration and its reception.

Following meticulous research among archival sources and personal papers, Sears gracefully explicates in her introductory essay the context of Wind’s writings, charting his intellectual trajectory. Around 1920, within the first years of their arrival at the University of Hamburg, Ernst Cassirer and Erwin Panofsky became Wind’s advisors. In 1927, he met Aby Warburg. After Wind was dismissed from Hamburg in 1933 (for reasons of his “non-Aryan” status), he played a major role in resettling the Warburg collections in London. Perhaps less well known is his debt to Charles Sanders Peirce, whose work he probably encountered in the 1920s in the United States, well before the American philosopher was known in Europe.

The genesis of Wind’s work on the Sistine Ceiling was a series of public lectures on “Michelangelo’s Religious Symbolism” given in London in 1936, followed three years later by a second series, also in London, on “The Renaissance Encyclopedia in Raphael’s Frescoes.” Invaluable here is Sears’s mapping of later hermeneutic debates that Wind foreshadowed: his prophetic structuralism, for example, which must have grown from his admiration for Peirce; his sensitivity to iconographic anomaly and contradiction; and, above all, his grand and simple interpretation: that, from its smallest details to its grandiose template, the Ceiling describes, as he put it, the “anticipation of salvation” (xxxix).

O’Malley, who has delineated the Messianic nature of the Ceiling’s program and its typological resonance elsewhere (“The Theology Behind the Sistine Ceiling,” in The Sistine Chapel: Michelangelo Rediscovered [London: Muller, Blond, and White, 1986], 92–148), offers here his sovereign perceptions on the historiography of Renaissance theology in Rome. He brings Wind back into the fold, as it were, reminding us of what remains timely in his method and conclusions. Wind’s fundamental assumption that “the two greatest theological monuments of the Renaissance” (xliii) were the Sistine Ceiling and the Disputa might seem less provocative now than it was in 1947—in large part due to O’Malley’s own groundbreaking discoveries—while Wind’s historical long view and his inclusiveness with respect to evidence follow from his reluctance to identify himself with any one discipline. With characteristic clarity and erudition, O’Malley posits four strands in Rome’s religious and theological culture that illuminate Wind’s perspective:

(i) a new rhetorical theology manifested in a new style of preaching; (ii) a renewed enthusiasm for the discovery and study of sacred texts, Christian and other; (iii) a continuation of the late medieval tradition of eschatological speculation and prophecy; (iv) a special, new cultivation of the theology of Thomas Aquinas. (xlv)

Wind’s studies are, then as now, profoundly consequential.

In The Religious Symbolism of Michelangelo, we are privy as well to two hitherto unpublished and extended meditations for another uncompleted book, conceived shortly before his death in September 1971, to be entitled The Theological Sources of Michelangelo. The first of these, “In the Beginning,” is a brilliant interpretation of the broader Augustinian underpinnings of the Ceiling. Here, Wind looks deeply into Augustine of Hippo’s views on Creation and addresses the theological conception of the Divine articulated by Michelangelo’s Neoplatonic contemporaries. He asserts, quite plausibly I think, a shared argument about the nature of the angelic and about the Fall of the Angels, which, Wind thought, the artist always intended to be continued on the altar wall in the Last Judgment. This chapter supplies perhaps a more inclusive reading of the sources than those of Esther Dotson (“An Augustinian Interpretation of Michelangelo’s Sistine Ceiling,” The Art Bulletin 61, 1979: 223–56, 405–29) and of Frederick Hartt (“Lignum Vitae in medio Paradisi: The Stanza d’Eliodoro and the Sistine Ceiling,” The Art Bulletin 32, 1950: 115–45, 181–218), and we can only lament that Wind’s text has not been available before.

“Michelangelo’s Progress among Theologians,” a second chapter intended for Wind’s later book, reconstructs with persuasion and historical acuity the influence on the artist of Girolamo Savonarola, Fra Mariano da Genazzano, Angelo Poliziano, and Cardinal Raffaele Riario. In light of recent scholarship, these themes might seem less remarkable at first, and certainly less incendiary than Wind’s ideas were once perceived to be. Propositions such as whether it was the Dominican, Sante Pagnini, who shaped the Ceiling’s program, as Wind theorized, or whether it was Marco Vigerio, as Hartt argued, might seem less inflammatory today. Yet then, as now, the definition of artistic context remains vigorously contested across the field of art history, as does the question of a given artist’s cultural formation and the associative dialogue between formal imagination and literary exegesis.

There are very many joys to be had from this masterful and masterfully produced volume. Not only can we read all of Wind’s work on the Ceiling, including his analyses of Sante Pagnini, prophecy, the typology of salvation, the ark of Noah, Adam and Eve, and the Maccabean histories and the Malermi Bible, but in the appendices, further, we can see Wind applying his mercurial intelligence to Michelangelo’s early works, including the Battle of the Centaurs, the Madonna of the Stairs, the Santo Spirito Crucifix, the Vatican Pietà, and Siena’s Piccolomini Altar. Though some hypotheses, such as his discounting of the early Crucifix and his chronology of the Pietà, have been disproved or modified, these colorfully drawn sketches show Wind at his opinionated best: emboldened by a hint from Carl Justi, he ponders the sculpted Virgin’s inscription and juxtaposes Ovid, Angelo Poliziano, and the Battle of the Centaurs relief with passionate and poetical élan. Thanks to Sears’s exemplary editing, we also learn of topics ranging from slide lists for lectures to epistolary skirmishes with other scholars.

We can still relate to Johannes Wilde’s dry response in 1950 to Wind’s offprint of “The Ark of Noah”: “The problem arises: how many of the connotations you are able to point out were actually thought of by the artist, how many only by his theological advisors, and how many, perhaps, by neither. I am afraid this question will remain unanswered” (xxxvi). The philosopher and historian of ideas, George Boas, however, could be more generous:

My dear Wind…I am always impressed with the desire of critics to impoverish the works of art which they study and to leave out everything but the “aesthetic surface.” What impresses me still more…is the persistence of certain iconographical traditions up to the invention of printing when verbal symbols began to take the place of visual. (The result is that people no longer really look at pictures.) (xxxvi)

We still worry about these questions. Rarely, though, are we given such privileged insight into the circumstances that led one individual to wrestle with them so courageously. We observe, too, through the prism of one monument, the tenacity and consistency of his interpretations.