Editor’s Note

Abstract

The new Met Breuer opened in 2016 with an exhibit called Unfinished: Thoughts Left Visible, a collection of paintings, drawings, and sculptures from the fifteenth through the twenty-first centuries. It featured Rembrandt, Turner, Rodin, Louise Bourgeois, and contemporary artists, as well as Dürer, Perino del Vaga, and Francesco di GiorgioMartini. The exhibit convincingly demonstrated that since the Renaissance, there has been something of a cult of the unfinished, especially in art—as though, as Leah Whittington puts it in the opening essay of this volume, there is something powerful in being able to see the “ultima mano” of the artist, allowing us to situate ourselves at the heart of the creative process. Michelangelo’s “non finito” has become one of the most compelling aspects of this artist’s legacy, and Leonardo’s Adoration of the Magi, recently returned to the Uffizi after extensive restoration, offers a tantalizing peek into Leonardo’smodus operandi, with its etching of characters in the background who seem to carry with them the specter of a pagan past that Jesus’s birth put to rest. At the same time, while the unfinished work may have acquired an aura of its own thanks to the very Renaissance with which the exhibit opened, early modernity experienced no little anxiety in its desire to exact completeness where it found something wanting. One can speak of the stigma as well as the fascination of the incomplete. This is, in fact, the focus of the four essays that have been selected as part of this issue’s cluster, “Unfinished Renaissances.”Whether it is the apparently (to a modern eye) misguided attempt to finish what seems to be the most perfect of poems from classical antiquity, Virgil’sAeneid; Angelo Poliziano’s attempt to render an authentic, integral self even as he left his poetic masterpiece, Stanze per la giostra, incomplete and whose quote “As if art were always something begun and unfinished” was featured in the Met Breuer catalogue; the ambitious desire of a Claudio Tolomei to formulate an educational project leading to the complete mastery of ancient architecture; or the equally ambitious desire of the polymath Athanasius Kircher to crown his distinguished career with a work that would unlock the secrets of Etruscan language and culture: there is, in all of these projects, a discomfort with the incomplete, a desire for totalizing texts and structures of thought, not least because of what was perceived as antiquity’s fragmentary nature. Or as Whittington notes in her opening pages, which could easily have served as the introduction to the