Creating the divine artist from Dante to Michelangelo

Turning a skeptical eye on the idea that Renaissance artists were widely believed to be as utterly admirable as Vasari claimed, this book re-opens the question of why artists were praised and by whom, and specifically why the language of divinity was invoked, a practice the ancients did not license. The epithet \u27\u27divino\u27\u27 is examined in the context of claims to liberal arts status and to analogy with poets, musicians, and other \u27\u27uomini famossi.\u27\u27 The reputations of Michelangelo and Brunelleschi are compared not only with each other but with those of Dante and Ariosto, of Aretino and of the ubiquitous beloved of the sonnet tradition. Nineteenth-century reformulations of the idea of Renaissance artistic divinity are treated in the epilogue, and twentieth-century treatments of the idea of artistic ingegno in an appendix