Bartolomeo Ammanati's religious crisis and his self-condemnation of his works depicting nudity in 1582  

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Bartolomeo Ammanati's religious crisis and his self-condemnation of his works depicting nudity in 1582

Late in his life Bartolomeo Ammanati had a religious crisis, influenced by Counter-Reformation piety, which resulted in condemning his own works depicting nudity in 1582 in a letter to the members of the Academy of Drawing in Florence. He left all his possessions to the Jesuits.

"Ammanati, in a letter addressed to the Florentine Academy of Design, date August 22, 1582, says that "Michelangelo once spoke to me as thus : Good Christians always make good and beautiful figures. "Letters Pittoriche, vol. iii. p. 539. The letter in itself is very interesting, since Ammanati vehemently attacks the indecency of the nude, and expresses the strongest remorse for his own fountain of Neptune on the Piazza della Signoria, master who modelled the Christ of the Minerva and painted the Christ and Madonna of the Last Judgment. Yet we must remember that, at the exact period when these dialogues took place, Buonarroti, under the influence of his friendship with Vittoria Colonna, was devoting his best energies to the devout expression of the Passion of our Lord. It is deeply to be regretted that, out of the numerous designs which remain to us from this endeavour, all of them breathing the purest piety, no monumental work except the Pieta at Florence emerged for perpetuity. " --The Life of Michelangelo Buonarroti by John Addington Symonds

The letter is reproduced in Bottari.

See also

• Annibale Mariotti