Abstract
Throughout his career, Michelangelo used the mask to insert personal ruminations about his life and art into his most important commissions. The mask of the figure of the Night in the New Sacristy is here connected to his earliest recorded sculpture and his relationships with the Medici family and identified as an allegorical self-portrait. This and other masking imagery in Michelangelo's drawings and in copies after his now lost works suggest that the motif was a profoundly revealing and wittily elusive device for self-construction within the artist's work and official biography.
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Notes on contributors
John T. Paoletti
John T. Paoletti is the author of articles on Italian Renaissance painting and sculpture and of articles and exhibition catalogues concerned with art in Europe and the United States since 1960 [Wesleyan University, Middletown, Conn. 06459].