Biography

Carolina Mangone is Associate Professor of Early Modern Art and Architecture at Princeton University. Her scholarship explores concepts and practices of imitating, copying, and faking; the materials and techniques of art across medial and professional boundaries; the cross-cultural and cross-linguistic traffic in art theoretical concepts; and the afterlives of artists in text and image. In Bernini’s Michelangelo (2020), she examined the contentiousness of canon formation in its early modern foundations by studying how Bernini’s emulation of Michelangelo’s oeuvre constituted a newly relevant theory of Roman baroque art. She also co-edited with Evonne Levy, Material Bernini (2016), exploring Bernini’s sculptural production on paper and in clay, marble, and bronze, from material and intermedial perspectives.

Project Summary

Unfinishedness pervades Michelangelo’s sculptural production—from his first work through his last—constituting a heterogeneous corpus of about 24 of 44 statues and reliefs in various states of making and unmaking. Their roughed condition (non-finito) contravened period expectations of mimesis, completion, and perfection. Yet they were nonetheless preserved, discussed, imitated, collected, and displayed in their imperfect states. Rather than position these objects as unintentional, idiosyncratic, and beyond historical contextualization, this project situates the production and reception of Michelangelo’s non-finito sculpture within an expanded period view that in turn accommodates unfinishedness as purposeful and disruptive. It shows that their imperfection—understood as both physical lack of finish and category instability—is imbricated in a wide network of emergent and established artistic concerns, genres, practices, media, and realms of knowledge. By underscoring the phenomenological boundlessness of the sculptural non-finito, this project offers an unwritten chapter on the art and aesthetics of imperfection in early modern Italy.