THE UNFINISHED RENAISSANCE: STAGING RUPTURE IN EARLY MODERN LITERATURE, ART AND ARCHITECTURE

Unfinished literature, art and architecture form a vital part of early modern aesthetics. Through a close analysis of unfinished works by Petrarch, Boccaccio, Brunelleschi, Michelangelo and Vasari, this dissertation shows how unfinishedness challenges conventional notions of artistic and literary unity and highlights the complexities of early modern notions of cultural achievement. Chapter one shows how Petrarch develops the unfinished as a literary device that aestheticizes the contingencies of textual production. I argue that some of the texts that Petrarch is most self-conscious about, the epic Africa, the vernacular poetry and his epistolary collections, ending with the Letter to Posterity, are left strategically unfinished in order to address problems of authenticity and literary continuity. Chapter two studies Boccaccio’s ideas of rupture and unfinishedness that form a line of thought that has been largely neglected by the scholarship. In his writings about Dante, Boccaccio pays particular attention to moments of interruption and the risk of textual fragmentation, dramatizing Dante’s ability to triumph over fragmentation. He pushes against Dante’s idea of the cosmic and permanent fragmentation represented in Inferno 13 and cultivates an idea of the fragment as something generative, an invitation to continue, refashion or translate old texts into new contexts. This argument is developed through readings of the unfinished novelletta in the Decameron’s Introduction to Day Four, the Elegy of Lady Fiammetta and through Boccaccio’s philological work on the Priapeia. Chapter three brings art history into conversation with the literary world. I look at three artists, Brunelleschi, Michelangelo and Vasari, and argues that the aesthetic category of the unfinished is a site where problems of historical self-consciousness, art theory and classical reception are thought through. Fifteenth-century authors describe Brunelleschi as exceptionally able to finish technically difficult works and as one who authoritatively articulates the nature and value of finishedness in art. A generation later Michelangelo employs the artistic “non finito” to challenge contemporary theories of art. Finally, Vasari seizes on unfinished art and architecture to develop the methodological questions of his art historical project.