{Ed. Note: Thank you to Peter Koch and Robert Bringhurst for assisting me by pointing out some embarrassing type-o’s and other items needing correction. I have always remarked that the editor of Books and Vines better never leave his day job!}
Michelangelo (1475-1564, full name Michelangelo di Lodovico Buonarroti Simoni) is synonymous with the High Renaissance and Mannerism. His influence on Western Art is beyond measurement. In his lifetime, he was called Il Divino (“the divine one”), and history thinks of him, along with his contemporary Leonardo da Vinci, as the definition of the ideal Renaissance man. In pondering Michelangelo’s astounding contribution to Western art, most tend to immediately think of his great works such as the sculptures of David and Pietà; or the paintings of Genesis scenes on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel, and The Last Judgment; or his architectural work such as that of St. Peter’s Basilica, and the Capitoline Hill. What most either simply do not know, or have not had exposure to, is that he was also one of the greatest lyric poets of his time. Thanks to a couple wonderfully done private press editions (a 2015 publication titled Hard High-Country Poems from Peter Koch Printers, and a 1991 publication from the great Allen Press titled Michelangelo: Sonnets), that exposure is addressed in a style Michelangelo would have appreciated! Both are reviewed here, starting with Hard High-Country Poems from Peter Koch Printers.
Even through translation from the original, the beauty and depth of Michelangelo’s passionate verse becomes clear. His poetry gives the reader a fascinating view into the man himself. The catalogue entry for Peter Koch’s recent publication of Hard High-Country Poems (which contains a selection of Michelangelo’s poems), tells us that:
He treated his poems casually – very much like sketches rather than finished works of art……They speak with great strength and tenderness of loneliness and love, of the power of art, and of the hard, high-country stone in which the artist loved to work.
Most of his poems that contemplate love come from two important relationships in Michelangelo’s later years of life. First was Tommaso dei Cavalieri (1509–1587), who was 23 years old when Michelangelo first met him in 1532, and from which much controversy exists over Michelangelo’s sexuality. Secondly, beginning in 1536 he began falling deeply in love to the accomplished Italian poet and noblewoman Vittoria Colonna. He retained a great love and friendship to Colonna until her death in 1547. Robert Bringhurst, who wrote the introduction, made the selections and provided new translations for Hard High-Country Poems, says of Vittoria Colonna that her:
…warmth, her grace, her moral insight, her ascetic inclinations, and especially her intellect made her not only the sculptor’s late, great love but in a sense his spiritual sister and perhaps his closest friend.
The depth of Michelangelo’s feelings towards Colonna are reflected in that at least fifty of the three hundred or so sonnets and madrigals that have survived are either addressed to her or about her. Hard High-Country Poems are made up of ten of these. The title of the book comes from Michelangelo’s many references in his poetry to stone, especially pietra alpestra e dura (the “hard, high-country stone“) which is that which Mr. Bringhurst tells us “Michelangelo loved to think both in and about.” The selection of poems in this edition shows how deeply Michelangelo interweaves his work with stone and his love of Colonna. For example, here you can feel his struggle trying to create beauty in stone when that in which he is reflecting is herself causing pain within him:
It sometimes happens, working in hard stone,
that, setting out to make the image of another,
you make a sort of image of yourself.
From time to time, I’ve made her image glum
and listless, as I am made by her,
forming a picture of myself
when she’s the one I meant to render.I might say that the stone
in which I try to make her likeness is just like her
in its absolute persistence,
yet all I can carve in it, while she pushes me away,
is my own dejected body.This though: art remembers beauty
year on year. To keep on being, she will
have to make me glad, so I can make her beautiful.
Human mortality may take her, but Michelangelo ensures that her image in stone will stand fast through history:
Art chooses that her face should live
in living stone
as long as seasons change.
Can heaven give her more? She is
His work, and this is mine: outside
mortality, not only in my eyes.Away she’ll go –she can’t last long —
her progress halted on its better side
while stone stands fast and death propels her on.Will anyone avenge her? Only nature can,
whose progeny are sluiced away by time
and leave their handiwork still standing.
Here, even more powerfully and beautifully, Michelangelo speaks of his art giving her immortality (as it has), while also causing us to contemplate how the gift of his poetry allows posterity to feel as he felt when he created such great works:
How can it be, my lady?
yet we learn it over and over:
living images in hard, high-country stone
outlive their maker, whom the years reduce to cinder.The cause gives way to the effect;
art wins the match with nature. This I know
because I’ve proved it in sweet sculpture.
Time and death cannot unmake what I have made.I can give both of us long life in either
medium: in pigment or in stone, depicting
one stance or another — and then, a millenniumafter we are gone, it can be known: you were
as lovely as you are, I was as downcast as I am,
and I was right — how right –to love you.
Hard High-Country Poems, from Peter Koch Printers, is a simply charming book, beautifully executed. It is private press done right, a very personal hand-made creation. Each poem is printed in Italian on the left, with the translation on the right. The Italian was composed by Michael Bixler in Monotype Arrighi, with hand refinements by Mark Livingston, and printed directly from the metal type. Bringhurst’s English translation was handset by Mark Livingston from original foundry Vicenza & Arrighi types cut in 1925-26 by Charles Plumet for Frederic Warde. The poems are letterpress printed on vintage Amalfi Amatruda handmade paper (nicely substantial, yet softly textured) using a Gietz Universal platen press. There is an insightful and penetrating frontispiece drypoint etching of Michelangelo by Joseph Goldyne, inspired by a drawing by Daniele de Volterra. The etching was printed by Robert Townsend (Master Printer, R.E. Townsend Studio) on British handmade paper. The 32 page, 9.5 x 5.75 inch book is bound in quarter leather and printed paper over boards by John DeMerritt Bookbinder. Michelangelo’s content (I only wish there was more of his poems in this edition), Mr. Koch’s excellent production, and Mr. Bringhurst’s captivating translation, make this a very desirable edition to have. Yet, there is more!
Hard High-Country Poems comes with a sister edition called The Typographic Legacy of Ludovico Degli Arrighi, also written by Robert Bringhurst. As mentioned, Hard High-Country Poems was hand-set in Arrighi type. Mr. Bringhurst tells at that Ludovico Degli Arrighi, a contemporary of Michelangelo, was one of the greatest of European calligraphers, and in all likelihood the first person in history that can rightly be called a type designer. The catalogue entry mentioned earlier tells us:
Typographic historians routinely mention Arrighi, but few have understood his real importance to the field. Bringhurst makes an excellent case for considering Arrighi to be the world’s first type designer in the modern sense of the word: the first skilled calligrapher who drew letters specifically for punchcutters to cut, just as Baskerville and Van Krimpen, Dwiggins and Zapf would do centuries later. Arrighi was also the first professional calligrapher to become a letterpress printer and publisher, and the only major type designer who devoted himself exclusively to italic.
It is likely that Arrighi and Michelangelo met, while being almost certain that he met Vittoria Colonna since it is known that he wrote for her, in 1517, on vellum, a copy of Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics, which can presently be found in the library of the University of Amsterdam. Arrighi’s story is truly interesting, as is the story of the tiny group of twentieth century fonts that descend from his own. This book would be well worth getting on its own, but it being paired with Hard High-Country Poems which is set in the original foundry Vicenza & Arrighi types (cut in 1925-26 by Charles Plumet for Frederic Warde) is a match made in private press heaven!
The Typographic Legacy of Ludovico Degli Arrighi is set in custom-made digital variants of foundry Monotype Arrighi and Centaur types and printed letterpress from polymer plates on Hahnemühle Biblio paper. The book is illustrated with two tipped-in photo-reproductions of the punches, from photographs by Amelia Hugill-Fontanel. Like its companion, this book is bound in quarter leather and printed paper over boards by John DeMerritt Bookbinder. The cover wrappers of both books are derived from photographs of standing type-metal forms used to print the poems. Both books are housed together in a slipcase covered in a reproduction of the rare Ludovico degli Arrighi Type specimen sheet (Vicenza : Tolomeo Janiculo, 1529) courtesy of the Book Arts Collection, Rare Book & Manuscript Library, Columbia University.
Before closing, I wanted to quote the following statement from Mr. Bringhurst concerning digital fonts, as I find it vey insightful:
Digital fonts, however, rarely escape from the flattened universe of computer displays, laser printers, and offset presses: a paper-thin domain in which fonts designed for letterpress are sapped of their cultural energy. The dignity of the underlying metal fonts is consequently missing from almost all typographic work produced by digital means. That underlying dignity is incarnate in physical substance. It becomes an intangible ghost, an unverifiable rumor, a fading memory, where two dimensions are substituted for three.
In some ways this kind of contemplation reminds me of explaining terroir to a wine novice. Like artisanal wine somehow reflecting its time and place, the use of real type gives substance to the words it conveys. The concept may sound somewhat ethereal and perhaps even fanciful, but it is real and it is meaningful.
Real type is better than imitation type because its own weight and substance tend to rhyme with the weight and substance of real poetry and prose. And real type, like reality itself, isn’t confined to two dimensions nor even to three. Its beauty leaps that barrier. This is something Arrighi learned, exploring the borderlines of manuscript and print, and something that he taught us by skillfully dismembering his hand, cutting it up into wisps of ink, turning the wisps into pieces of metal, and reassembling the pieces into a voice that could carry meaning across the oceans and deserts and gullies of space and time.
As Hard High-Country Poems left me looking for more verse from Michelangelo, it is a lucky thing for private press collectors that another beautiful edition exists to help satiate the appetite for more! However, before looking at the 1991 Allen Press edition Michelangelo: Sonnets, let’s enjoy some pictures of Hard High-Country Poems.
About the Edition (Peter Koch Printers)
Hard High-Country Poems
- Designed & printed on a Gietz Universal platen press by Peter Koch with the assistance of Jonathan Gerken
- Selection and translation by Robert Bringhurst
- Drypoint etching of Michelangelo by Joseph Goldyne, inspired by a drawing by Daniele de Volterra
- The Italian was composed by Michael Bixler in Monotype Aright, with hand refinements by Mark Livingston, and printed directly from the metal type
- Bringhurst’s translation was handset by Mark Livingston from original foundry Vicenza & Arrighi types cut in 1925-26 by Charles Plumet for Frederic Warde
- The preface and colophon pages were composed in digital Centaur & Arrighi and printed from photo-polymer plates
- The poems are printed on vintage Amalfi Amatruda handmade paper
- Etching printed by Robert Townsend (Master Printer, R.E. Townsend Studio) on British handmade paper
- Slipcase & binding in quarter leather and printed paper over boards by John DeMerritt Bookbinder
- 9.5 x 5.75 inches, 32 pages
- Signed by Robert Bringhurst, Joseph Goldyne and Peter Koch
The Typographic Legacy of Ludovico degli Arrighi
- Published to accompany Hard High-Country Poems
- Set in custom-made digital variants of foundry Monotype Arrighi and Centaur types
- Printed letterpress from polymer plates on Hahnemühle Biblio paper
- The essay is illustrated with two tipped-in photo-reproductions of the punches, from photographs by Amelia Hugill-Fontanel
- Slipcase & binding in quarter leather and printed paper over boards by John DeMerritt Bookbinder
- 9.5 x 5.75 inches, 36 pages
The Set
- Slipcase and chemise: 6 x 10 x 1 inches
- The edition is limited to 126 slipcased sets, 112 of which are numbered
- Sells for $900
Pictures of the Edition (Peter Koch Printers)
(All pictures on Books and Vines are exclusively provided, under fair use, to highlight and visualize the review/criticism of the work being reviewed. A side benefit, hopefully, is providing education on the historical and cultural benefits of having a healthy fine press industry and in educating people on the richness that this ‘old school approach’ of book publishing brings to the reading process. Books and Vines has no commercial stake or financial interest in any publisher, retailer or work reviewed on this site and receives no commercial interest or compensation for Books and Vines. Please note that works photographed are copyrighted by the publisher, author and/or illustrator as indicated in the articles. Permission to use contents from these works for anything outside of fair use purposes must come directly from the copyright owner and no permission is granted or implied to use photo’s or material found on Books and Vines for any purpose that would infringe on the rights of the copyright owner.)
Michelangelo: Sonnets, The Allen Press (1991)
The Allen Press edition of Michelangelo: Sonnets provides us with 87 of Michelangelo’s sonnets, which we are told were written only for Michelangelo’s friends, in manuscript and not for publication. The set here is from a 1900 edition designed by Bruce Rogers for the Riverside Press (it was also printed in 1922 by John Henry Nash), using the translations by John Addington Symonds written in 1878. Symonds was was the first to restore the original genders when he translated them into English (Michelangelo’s poems to Cavalieri, mentioned above, had the gender of the pronouns changed in their original publication in 1623 — to avoid hints of homosexual love — by Michelangelo’s grandnephew, Michelangelo Buonarroti the Younger).
Again, Vittoria Colonna shows her influence on the mind and soul of Michelangelo. Here is Symonds’ translation of one of the same poems, here titled The Artist and His Work, from the Bringhurst translation highlighted above:
How can that be, lady, which all men learn
By long experience? shapes that seem alive,
wrought in hard mountain marble, will survive
Their maker, whom the years to dust return!
Thus to effect cause yields. Art hath her turn,
And triumphs over nature. I, who strive
with sculpture, know this well; her wonders live
in spite of time and death, those tyrants stern.
So I can give long life to both of us
in either way, by color or by stone,
Making the semblance of thy face and mine.
Centuries hence when both are buried, thus
they beauty and my sadness shall be shown,
And men shall say, ‘for her ‘twis wise to pine.’
Another example of Michelangelo’s splendid imagery on love’s power:
Far more than I was wont myself I prize:
With you within my heart I rise in rate,
Just as a gem engraved with delicate
Devices o’er the uncut stone doth rise;
Or as a painted sheet exceeds in price
Each leaf left pure and in its virgin state:
Such then am I since I was consecrate
To be the mark for arrows from your eyes.
Stamped with your seal I’m safe where’er I go,
Like one who carries charms or coat of mail
Against all dangers that his life assail.
Nor fire nor water now may work me woe;
Sight to the blind I can restore by you,
Heal every wound, and every loss renew.
And in The Flesh and Spirit, yet another:
Well may these eyes of mine both near and far
Behold the beams that from thy beauty flow;
But, lady, feet must halt where sight may go:
We see, but cannot climb to clasp a star.
The pure ethereal should surmounts that bar
of flesh, and soars to where thy splendours glow,
Free through the eyes; while prisoned here below,
Though fired with fervent love, our bodies are.
Clogged with morality and wingless, we
cannot pursue an angel in her flight:
only to gaze exhausts our utmost might.
Yet, if but heaven like earth incline to thee,
Let my whole body be one eye to see,
That not one part of me may miss thy sight!
Love’s Justification is one of my favorites, especially the delineation between false love and true which the inevitable declining of beauty uncovers:
Sometimes my love I dare to entertain
with soaring hope not over-credulous;
since if all human loves were impious,
Unto what end did God the world ordain?
For loving thee what license is more plain
That that I praise thereby the glorious
Source of all joys divine, that comfort us
In thee, and with chaste fires our soul sustain?
False hope belongs unto that love alone
which with declining beauty wanes and dies,
And, like the face it worships, fades away.
That hope is true which the pure heart hath known,
which alters not with time or death’s decay,
Yielding on earth earnest of Paradise.
This collection also shows Michelangelo’s devout Roman Catholic religiosity and the inner turmoil created as his piety clashes with his self-reflection. Like many, as he aged, thoughts of death and God became predominant. Here, Michelangelo offers A Prayer for Aid:
…
Thou gavest me on earth this should divine;
And thou within this body weak and frail
Didst prison it — how sadly there to live!
How can I make its lot less vile than mine?
Without thee, Lord, all goodness seems to fail.
To alter fate is God’s prerogative.
On the Brink of Death provides the wisdom of a contemplative man in his final days, realizing that so much of what we strive for on earth, is ultimately nothing more than vanity. He turns to God, ready to leave this world for the next.
Now hath my life across a stormy sea
Like a frail bark reached that wide port where all
Are bidden, ere the final reckoning fall
of good and evil for eternity.
Now know I well how that fond phantasy
which made my soul the worshipper and thrall
of earthly art, is vain; how criminal
Is that which all men seek unwillingly.
Those amorous thoughts which were so highly dressed,
What are they when the double death is nigh?
The One I know for sure, the other dread.
Painting nor sculpture can now lull to rest
My soul that turns to His great love on high,
Whose arms to clasp us on the cross were spread.
Like the Peter Koch edition above, the Allen Press edition uses a typeface originally cut by Francesco Griffo for a book from a contemporary of Michelangelo, that being Pietro Bembo (humanist, poet, cardinal of the Roman Catholic Church, and influential in the creation of the madrigal musical form often used by Michelangelo). Note that when this type was revived by the Monotype drawing office at the urging of Stanley Morison, it was given the name Bembo (despite the fact that Bembo himself was not involved in any way). It was also changed in many respects from Griffo’s original. With that background in mind, Michelangelo: Sonnets is done using handset Bembo (the first stanzas were set by Monotype by M&H Type, then distributed and set by hand). The display typeset is Solemnis, also set by hand. Perhaps the nicest element of this edition is the paper, all-rag Barcham Green ‘Dover’ handmade paper. The Allens mention that the paper was created in 1980 for book conservators, and therefore a significant proportion of flax and jute were added for strength. As such, despite being relatively light-weight, the paper is highly durable. It is beige in color, which provides a nice soft palate for the black and medium blue type that graces every page. Like pretty much all Allen Press publications, the paper was dampened prior to printing on an 1882 Albion hand press. The book was bound by Cardoza-James Binding Company in a “costly” Fortuny ‘lion’ print that was handmade in Venice, Italy, with a cloth spine imported from Paris and stamped in gold. Simply beautiful.
This was the second to last publication from the Lewis and Dorothy Allen, published 51 years after their first. In their elder years, the scale of the books became smaller, and some quirks sometimes comes through, but their works remain very reflective of the beauty and importance of the crafts so vital to the private press movement. Everything hand-done, reading this edition helps shine light on the truths mentioned by Bringhurst above about the dignity of metal type, and its ability to blend with and even supplement the weight and substance of the work itself.
About the Edition (Allen Press)
- Designed and Printed by Lewis and Dorothy Allen
- Translation by John Addington Symonds
- 87 sonnets from a 1900 edition designed by Bruce Rogers for the Riverside Press; and also printed in 1922 by John Henry Nash
- Handset Bembo (first stanzas were set by Monotype by M&H Type, then distributed and set by hand)
- Display typeset is Solemnis, set by hand
- Printed on dampened all-rag Barcham Green ‘Dover’ handmade paper using an 1882 Albion handpress
- Printed in two colors on about every page, black and a medium blue
- Bound by Cardoza-James Binding Company in a “costly” Fortuny ‘lion’ print that was handmade in Venice, Italy and a cloth spine imported from Paris and stamped in gold
- 11″ x 7″, ~100 pages
- Limited to 115 copies
- Originally $275 on release, now runs $400-500 for a fine copy
Pictures of the Edition (Allen Press)
(All pictures on Books and Vines are exclusively provided, under fair use, to highlight and visualize the review/criticism of the work being reviewed. A side benefit, hopefully, is providing education on the historical and cultural benefits of having a healthy fine press industry and in educating people on the richness that this ‘old school approach’ of book publishing brings to the reading process. Books and Vines has no commercial stake or financial interest in any publisher, retailer or work reviewed on this site and receives no commercial interest or compensation for Books and Vines. Please note that works photographed are copyrighted by the publisher, author and/or illustrator as indicated in the articles. Permission to use contents from these works for anything outside of fair use purposes must come directly from the copyright owner and no permission is granted or implied to use photo’s or material found on Books and Vines for any purpose that would infringe on the rights of the copyright owner.)
