At the same time, the self-representative “fault” exposes the artist’s self as a protean non-identity, in endless interplay with the other. It opens the work structurally and semantically, rendering it an endless aesthetic game. This dissertation reads Michelangelo’s practice of the non finito as a successful failure. Incompletely released from marble, the non finito eludes full revelation, revealing instead that which should not be revealed: the process of artistic excavation and the medium bearing the imprinted trace of the artist. His unfinished statuary renders this failure visible. In the same sonnet, however, Michelangelo deplores his failure to liberate the hidden statue. The sculptor must disappear from the surface of the finished work along with the marble dust, to let the pure concept emerge. The excellence of such artistic maieutics is commensurate to its effacement. According to it, the greatest artist is the one who, guided by an inner concept of beauty, extracts the ideal statue hidden in marble through the removal of the occluding excess of stone. In a famous sonnet, Michelangelo articulates an aphaeretic theory of sculpture (from aphairein, to remove, to withdraw, to abstract).
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