Michelangelo Is Not a White Supremacist: Fighting Woke Culture in Art History

A new superstition haunts university chairs, editorial boards, conference halls, and the opinion pages of the Anglophone media: the ideological delusion of political correctness—or, to use the philosophically precise terminology it deserves, its post-capitalist mutation into a repressive and self-immunizing Newspeak, as Costanzo Preve would put it. A secular cult without theology, a linguistic taboo disguised as emancipation.

In the overabundant expression of its ideological fury—both pathetic and disturbing—the politically correct flood tide has even turned its blunt ignorance against a subject dear to this blog: I refer to the grotesque accusation leveled against Michelangelo Buonarroti by the latest high priestess of woke ideology, American sociologist Robin DiAngelo, made famous by her compendium of guilt-laden platitudes known as White Fragility.

According to DiAngelo, The Creation of Adam, frescoed on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel, would be “a symbolic expression of the convergence between patriarchy and white supremacy.” A claim as absurd as it is revealing: it says nothing about Michelangelo, but everything about the epistemological collapse of contemporary Anglo-American culture, which has lost—or more likely never possessed—any real contact with history, art, or philosophy. The “white-bearded God” in Michelangelo’s fresco, in the delirium of the woke mindset, becomes the herald of a colonial power that existed neither in the artist’s thought nor in his historical, philosophical, or cultural context.

To ascribe to Buonarroti—a Renaissance artist of the early 16th century—a consciousness of “white supremacy” is to commit an ideological manipulation so glaring it borders on intellectual pornography. The category of “white supremacy,” as it is currently used, is the product of American history—not the Italian Renaissance. In Italy in 1511, there was no concept of a “white race,” nor a symbolic system that placed “whiteness” as an axis of ethnic power. The symbolic reference to light skin in European art was tied to luminosity, spiritual purity, and the Neoplatonic transfiguration of the body—not to any racial hierarchy. Substantively, it referred to a society that was essentially white, in which race was not a salient or operative category.

DiAngelo’s monstrosity is not only historiographical, but epistemic: she retroactively projects her ideology onto epochs that never contemplated it. As Kayla Bartsch insightfully noted in National Review, this is a perverse form of reductionism: turning all cultural production into a script of oppression. Thus are lost all historical understanding, all complexity, all internal tension within the work. What remains is merely the narcissistic reflection of the dominant ideology of America’s academic elites.

Costanzo Preve foresaw it decades ago: political correctness is the secular ideology of the global empire, its civic religion. Its function is not to emancipate but to fragment: replacing class struggle with identity competition, making every subject a prisoner of their own “protected category.” It is the post-Fordist version of divide et impera: no longer proletarians against bourgeoisie, but gays against straights, Blacks against whites, women against men—and in this case, the woke against Michelangelo.

American neoliberal hegemony has understood that in order to sustain itself, it must culturalize conflict—shifting it from the material to the symbolic realm. Thus, while wages stagnate, wars multiply, and monopolies consolidate, the intelligentsia obsesses over the skin color of God in the Sistine Chapel. What was once mysticism is now semiotics—but the effect is the same: to forbid, to excommunicate, to discipline.

Michelangelo was neither a patriarch nor a supremacist, but a tragic artist, tormented and immersed in a metaphysical vision of the human being. The Creation of Adam does not represent the hegemony of a race, but the metaphysical instant of the spark between being and consciousness. It is the Aristotelian-Christian gesture that separates man from the animals, placing him within the divine order. It is not biology; it is theology. It is not domination; it is yearning.

Robin DiAngelo’s statements are not merely wrong: they are delirious nonsense. Not because they offend art, but because they offend reason. They are the epiphenomenon of a culture that has replaced analysis with reaction, history with ideology, meaning with resentment. We must call them by their name: nothing but woke superstition—a pseudo-theology of a ruling class that has forgotten how to think, but not how to shame.

In this cultural battle, Michelangelo must be defended not only as an artist, but as a final bulwark against the obliteration of history. Let him rest in peace in his frescoes, far from the rants of contemporary fanatics. One may even imagine that Michelangelo, with his candid and biting Tuscan wit and his deep knowledge of Dante, was the first and only artist in history to paint the butt of God as the ideal response to modern-day nonsense: a comforting image of God, like the devil Barbariccia in Canto XXI of the Inferno, blowing a fart like a trumpet with his buttocks in answer to the idiocies of political correctness; a divine, trumpeting, biblical fart sweeping every fanaticism and ideological delusion into the deepest bolgia of Dante’s hell.