Generation and Ruination in the Display of Michelangelo's Non-finito

Michelangelo Buonarroti left nearly half of the many sculptures he carved in his lifetime unfinished, their rough surfaces transgressing early modern norms of finish and decorum. Nonetheless these objects (called non-finito/i) were preserved, collected, and displayed in their incomplete states. This paper examines the sites in which Florentine and Roman collectors exhibited Michelangelo’s unfinished statues and demonstrates how the display strategies implemented within these sites sought to offset the expectation of finish that the non-finito failed to meet. By situating roughed sculptures within frameworks that evoked natural forces of accretion and generation or conjured archaeologies of ruination and restora- tion, collectors strategically blurred artistic, natural, and, temporal agency and fundamentally shaped how the viewer perceived and evaluated Michelangelo’s most anomalous works.