Michelangelo / Revelations is a condensation of John Vedder Edwards' much larger volume on the artwork and significance of Michelangelo. Seven key insights from that primary work, extracted into this ninety-page volume, address issues that have not yet been fully incorporated into the common body of knowledge about the artist. Beginning in Rome, while looking at Michelangelo's Last Judgment in the Sistine Chapel, Edwards found that the artist activated his vast composition by first boldly signing the surface with his initial M, and then building the complex arrangement of apocalyptic churning figures around it.In an early morning, headache-induced insight into the placement of Michelangelo's thunderous sculpture of Moses in the church of San Pietro in Vincoli, Rome, Edwards identified a feature of the Moses that has baffled observers for over five hundred years. During a visit to the National Gallery in Washington, D.C. Edwards discovered that the strange Michelangelo sculpture Apollo/David is in fact neither a statue of Apollo nor David and may originally not have been male at all. In his two-part section on Michelangelo's statue "Victory" in the Palazzo Vecchio in Florence, Edwards argues that this astonishing work of art deserves its own dedicated space.
He then mounts a complex argument for the real meaning of the Victory group casting back to a mysterious religious cult of the Roman empire. This fuels Edwards' suggestion that a specific ancient Roman statue may be the inspiration for much of Michelangelo's most audacious and breath-taking sculpture. Edwards' knowledge of Roman mystery religions comes into play next as he presents his support for Dr. Paul Joannides' conjecture that a small bronze statue in London's Victoria and Albert Museum is a copy of Michelangelo's lost Hercules, an eight-foot tall marble masterpiece created when the artist was only seventeen years old and which has been until now lost to history. Looking even earlier into the artist's boyhood Edwards locates paintings still intact and in plain sight in the Church of Santa Maria Novella created when the boy was perhaps fourteen and which prefigure the artist's life's work. Edwards agrees with the late art historian Leo Steinberg and artist David Hockney that works of art are primary sources in and of themselves, fully equal to written historical evidence in aiding us in understanding what a work is, who created it, and what it means. Steinberg comments on the sad fact that most of what we think we know about Leonardo da Vinci's Last Supper painting comes from an essay written by Goethe, not as he contemplated the painting (he'd only seen in briefly on a quick stop-over in Milan on his way home) but rather by examining a poorly produced etching of the painting which misled Goethe into the tenacious misunderstanding of the picture. Even today claims are made of the object in the hand of Michelangelo's David which would be cleared up if only art historians would look at the sculpture.
Other drastically incorrect commentary has arisen about the figure of God Separating Light and Darkness on the Sistine Ceiling by writers either failing to look at the art about which they write or by refusing to see anything but what they intend to see. These are some of the examples of what is meant when we say that a work of art is--IS--a primary source. Edwards is both a sculptor and a writer. His experience working with civic organizations, city councils, and museum directors provides insight into the frustrations and successes of an artist pitching his personal artistic vision to potential patrons. He is uniquely positioned to explicate art as the amalgam of cultural, historical, and personal forces that shape it. With ninety color illustrations this short book compresses a lifetime's worth of study, travel, and sculpture.