ABSTRACT
Among the Old Masters Michelangelo Buonarroti is by far the most popular and the most studied. On the one hand, the artist's fame has the potential of attracting a ready audience to any exhibition focusing on him. The only catalogue-like publication made on occasion of the events of 1875 was Cesare Guasti's small booklet about the show he curated at the State Archive. Politicians of the mid-1960s shared with their late-nineteenth-century counterparts a Romantic approach to Michelangelo, an emphasis on the 'struggle behind the creation' of his works. In the Florence exhibition, established Michelangelo scholar Paola Barocchi applied a systematic rigor and avoidance of interpretation that characterised the austere Florentine intellectual environment of her generation. The show and its catalogue offered scholars and the general public insights on a range of topics addressed in exhibitions, involving authorship and collaborations among artists, the notion of ideal female beauty, and production of contemporary copies as a measure of success of an artwork.
