In this collection of ten essays—six in Italian, four in English—the authors attempt to add nuance to the ways in which Michelangelo’s influence lived on in Rome after his death. The authors take different approaches, but all focus on the distinctiveness of the Roman response as opposed to the Florentine tendency to make him an academic model.

Steven F. Ostrow summarizes the many ways that writers and artists responded to Michelangelo’s work in Rome, beginning with the famous controversy over the Last Judgment. Michelangelo’s sculpture in Rome received a similar range of responses, from high praise to ridicule. Ostrow ends with the Strozzi chapel in S. Andrea della Valle, commissioned by the Florentine Leone Strozzi. Michelangelo’s influence is seen in the architectural framework, but it is even more obvious in the sculpture: bronze casts taken from Rachel and Leah flank the Pietà, which was modeled on Michelangelo’s work in the Vatican. This chapel, constructed around 1615, is as much an homage to Michelangelo as a space dedicated to worship.

The repainting of the Last Judgment made it an example to other artists in Rome, according to Peter M. Lukehart; if the great Michelangelo’s work could be revised, so might theirs. Lukehart convincingly argues that Cherubino Alberti’s engravings, Nuda Veritas and Petit Aethera, are responses to this threat of censorship. Alberti’s prints are statements about decorum, and their dedication to Cardinal Alessandro de’ Medici (a supporter of both the Counter-Reformation and Michelangelo) is a plea for support of the artistic ideals that Michelangelo and the Accademia di San Luca espoused. Lukehart’s discussion of prints is complemented by Alessia Alberti’s, which shows how the arrangement of prints after Michelangelo in Antonio Lafréry’s Speculum Romanae Magnificentiae is itself a response to his work.

Michelangelo’s drawings play a central role in several essays. Furio Rinaldi sees Daniele da Volterra as the artist who passed on Michelangelo’s drawing style to later artists in Rome, although it might be better to say Daniele transmitted one of his styles, since Michelangelo himself used different drawing styles for various purposes throughout his career. Lothar Sickel’s essay precisely defines the way drawings were passed down to artists. Jacopo Rocchetti received drawings from the aging Michelangelo and eventually owned perhaps a hundred drawings by Michelangelo, which inspired many of his paintings. Tommaso de’ Cavalieri played an important role in getting Rocchetti and his partner Michele Alberti commissions where their devotion to Michelangelo’s work could be put on display. Patrizia Tosini points to Giovanni de’ Vecchi’s access to the drawings owned by Cardinal Alessandro Farnese. A connection to Tommaso de’ Cavalieri is important here as well: de’ Vecchi’s Michelangelesque work in the Oratorio del Crocifisso was commissioned by Cavalieri’s son. Finally, Simone Bolzoni’s essay deals with Giuseppe Cesari (Cavalier d’Arpino) and his brother Bernardino who owned drawings by Michelangelo and had access to others like those in the Farnese collections. Giuseppe’s use of Michelangelo’s forms in the Olgiati Chapel in S. Pressede helped his patron, the Lombard Bernardo Olgiati, to establish himself as a man of culture in Rome.

Only the essay by Enrico Parlato concentrates on architecture, or rather the “micro-architecture,” of three tomb monuments erected around 1570 in Rome. Incorporating motifs from the Porta Pia and the Tomb of Julius II, they range from relatively sedate to wildly colorful, but all share the free approach to classical rules for which Michelangelo was famous and sometimes criticized. In the realm of sculpture, Gregoire Extermann and Fernando Loffredo consider the work of Nicolas Cordier and Camillo Mariani, respectively. When he first arrived in Rome from Lorraine, Cordier acquired a block that Michelangelo had begun carving; Cordier’s Saint Gregory shows similarities to sculpture for the Tomb of Julius II, but his own interest in colored marbles and angular drapery is also evident. Cordier’s other works capture Michelangelo’s monumentality, but are less complexly posed and more modestly dressed—qualities that would have been approved in Counter-Reformation Rome. Camillo Mariani worked with Cordier in the Aldobrandini Chapel in S. Maria sopra Minerva, and there he similarly reimagined Michelangelo’s forms in an acceptable Counter-Reformation manner. But Mariani was a reluctant follower of Michelangelo; his stucco and bronze pieces are livelier and more painterly.

These essays demonstrate that Michelangelo’s legacy was very much alive in the later sixteenth and early seventeenth century. Since the artists discussed here were paying tribute to Michelangelo or reusing his inventions to appeal to patrons, it is no wonder that they are not in the forefront of artistic development. But these artists should be better known, not because they are a step in a larger trajectory, but because they are artists responding to changing social forces in their own time.