I focus in this article on Florentine texts from the sixteenth century in which the authors describe intense affective responses to the Last Judgment (and Michelangelo the artist), and the relationship these responses bear to Michelangelo’s powerful expression of art and beauty as part of the epic genre in which the painting was conceived and given form. These responses by Giorgio Vasari and his fellow Florentines, Niccolo Martelli, Anton Francesco Doni, Benedetto Varchi, and Lionardo Salviati, which also constitute formal gestures of praise, reveal that they are essential partners in the recognition and definition of pictorial expression and content. I also suggest that the language in some of these responses evoke literary strategies indicative of an early sixteenth-century reception of Longinus’s Peri Hypsous (On the Sublime), while others draw parallels between the effects of Michelangelo’s art and literary defenses of the genre, language, and stylistic effects of Dante’s Divine Comedy.

These responses drew upon the critical and descriptive language associated with the affective power of poetry in casting the Last Judgment as a visual exemplar of the epic genre and Michelangelo, an analogous poet in paint. Claims that the painting elicited intense affective responses, described as if the authors were standing before it, located some of these critiques outside the act of physical viewing and instead emphasized what this painting and Michelangelo could do for the viewer and for the culture and politics of Florentine art.