Dreaming of Michelangelo Jewish Variations on a Modern Theme [Hardcover]

Dreaming of Michelangelois the first book-length study to explore the intellectual and cultural affinities between modern Judaism and the life and work of Michelangelo Buonarroti. It argues that Jewish intellectuals found themselves in the image of Michelangelo as an unrequited lover whose work expressed loneliness and a longing for humanity's response. The modern Jewish imagination thus became consciously idolatrous. Writers brought to lifeliterallyMichelangelo's sculptures, seeing in them their own worldly and emotional struggles. The Moses statue in particular became an archetype of Jewish liberation politics as well as a central focus of Jewish aesthetics. And such affinities extended beyond sculpture: Jewish visitors to the Sistine Chapel reinterpreted the ceiling as a manifesto of prophetic socialism, devoid of its Christian elements. According to Biemann, the phenomenon of Jewish self-recognition in Michelangelo's work offered an alternative to the failed promises of the German enlightenment. Through this unexpected discovery, he rethinks German Jewish history and its connections to Italy, the Mediterranean, and the art of the Renaissance.

Biemann breaks ground on the new interest in Jewish aesthetics in the context of German Jewish culture and German aesthetic thought . . .Dreaming of Michelangelorecommends itself as a go-to book in the field of modern Jewish Studies as it relates to art, German Jewish culture, and Jewish philosophical aesthetics. Asher Biemann'sDreaming of Michelangelo: Jewish Variations on a Modern Themeengages the intellectual history of the modern Jewish experience in late nineteenth-and early twentieth-century Europe . . . [T]hrough a study of the German-Jewish experience of Italy,Dreaming of Michelangeloprovides a powerful and compelling example of how an engagement with aesthetics can and should be the work of twenty-first-century Jewish thought. Biemann takes the reader into the vibrant intelll½