Resumen de True Light Shining: vs. Obscurantism in the Study of Michelangelo's New Sacristy
Despite a 1981 essay by Trexler and Lewis, art historians continue to follow the Varchi/Vasari misidentification of Michelangelo's captains in the New Sacristy of San Lorenzo, Florence. The present article restates and strengthens the Trexler-Lewis arguments for those captains' re-identification and for seeing in the chapel an innovative and triumphant Adoration or Journey of the Magi. The author surveys the published and epistolary reactions (or non-reactions) to the earlier article, calling attention to the low intellectual level of some criticisms. He calls on such Italian art historians to bring a careful study of historical context back into their scholarly equations. As things now stand, he concludes, some art historians still imagine 'their' artists as unrestrained by the formal, social and political behavioral conventions within which humans pass their lives, which in turn permits these scholars to write as if they themselves need not be restrained by established scholarly discourses.
