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NYT Syndicate
'Michelangelo: Divine Draftsman and Designer' at the Metropolitan Museum of Art with more than 200 works, and a core group of 133 drawings by the beyond-famous artist on loan from some 50 front-rank collections is an art historical tour de force: a panoptic view of a titanic career as recorded in the most fragile of media ” paper, chalk, and ink.
Giving a full account of anyone's art means giving a sense of where it came from, and we get that here. Although Michelangelo would have been the last to tell us ” he liked to present himself as a parthenogenetic wonder ” he did have some art training. Born in 1475 into a line of minor Florentine nobility, he entered the workshop of Domenico Ghirlandaio as a pupil-apprentice at age 13. From that fastidious painter he may have learned the practice, uncommon at the time, of making preparatory drawings for work in more permanent mediums.
Yet Michelangelo's self-starter claims may still stand up to scrutiny. According to dates assigned to drawings by him, he could have been sketching figures in frescoes by Giotto and Masaccio in local churches as early as age 10. A small oil-and-tempera painting called The Torment of Saint Anthony, based on a print by Martin Schongauer, may also predate his Ghirlandaio stint. And it's impressive: the possibly preteen artist not only skillfully edits Schongauer's midair tangle of demons-and-saint, but sets it against an invented seascape.
By 1490, he seems to have come under the tutelage of Bertoldo di Giovanni. A significant older sculptor, Bertoldo was also curator of an antiquities collection that Lorenzo de' Medici had amassed to enhance the social status of his family. For Michelangelo, this interlude was formative. It confirmed that sculpture was the medium he cared about most deeply; it exposed him to a classical tradition that he would emulate and transform; and it initiated a lifelong Medici connection that would be a boon and a curse.
But questions of what-came-first centred on a marble sculpture called the Young Archer. For many years, this figure of a youth had stood, barely noticed, in the Cultural Services of the French Embassy on Fifth Avenue, across the street from the Met. Then in 1996, an art historian identified it as a Michelangelo. The call was hotly debated, but the attribution has stood. And the"circa 1490" date now attached to the work makes it altogether possible that Michelangelo carved the figure at age 15, making him the prodigy he claimed to be.
With this sculpture, he had found what would be his favourite subject, and the one that would make his name: the heroic male body. Approximately a decade after the Young Archer came the colossal David, and with that Michelangelo was a star, a Medici darling, and on his way to becoming the new kind of public celebrity he aimed to be: not just a highly skilled maker of things, but a multitasking, miracle-working aristocrat of creativity called a genius. If Michelangelo didn't coin the term, he (with a reluctant nod to Leonardo da Vinci) coined the type.
Prestigious commissions, in painting, sculpture and architecture, piled up. In 1504, he was asked to do a fresco for the Council Chamber of the Palazzo della Signoria, the seat of the Florentine government. Leonardo, more than 30 years his senior, and no friend, was assigned the opposite wall. The idea was that they both would paint a historic battle, Michelangelo's being one in which a troop of 14th-century Florentine soldiers interrupted a swim in the Arno to take an enemy by surprise.
He turned the scene into a polyphonic chorale of pumped bodies: abs, pecs, lats, glutes, buns. We know the image well, though the fresco ” thanks to the first of what would be endless Medici interventions ” never got beyond the full-scale cartoon stage. Ink and chalk sketches on paper of the individual figures exist. So does a drawing of the whole composition, now so smudged it looks like a puff of smoke. The most vivid piece of evidence is a large 1540 oil painting by Bastiano da Sangallo, who saw the finished cartoon before it was whitewashed out.
All of this material, now scattered among museums ” the Louvre, the Uffizi, the Albertina in Vienna ” has been brought together at the Met. This is how the exhibition, organised by Carmen C Bambach, a curator in the museum's department of drawings and prints, works. It ingeniously reconstructs Michelangelo projects by assembling related designs in dense, connect-the-dots clusters.
This is, of course, the only way to present architecturally scaled art, or long-vanished things. The show is as close as we can now get to seeing the massive sculptural tomb of the Medici Pope Julius II in its many aborted iterations; it was this"urgent" commission (years before Julius' death) that pulled Michelangelo off the battle fresco. And a selection of plans ” scribbled on paper scraps, spread across pasted-together sheets ” for the facade of the Medici parish church of San Lorenzo adds up to a beguiling archive of thinking-in-progress. Rarely has architectural design felt more expressively personal, moody, painterly, calligraphic.
It's in drawings that I start to feel close to this art and its maker. One chalk-sketched titan has an oddly lumpy, imperfect, maybe-not-young body; and he's sleeping. Clearly, he's a studio assistant who's been roped into posing at the end of a day. And while the mood of the Last Judgment fresco is full-orchestra cataclysmic, ink sketches for it can be light, almost tender. In one, the resurrected dead float in space, specklike and weightless, like birds lifting off from a foggy lake.
And then there are drawings generated by tenderness itself. This is true of a gallery devoted to fanciful"divine heads," including one of a doleful Cleopatra, that the middle-aged artist made as gifts for young male aristocrats ” Gherardo Perini, Andrea Quaratesi, Tommaso de' Cavalieri. His black chalk portrait of Quaratesi, who was 37 years his junior, as a somber dreamboat with plush lips and faraway eyes is an eye-stopper. So are several discretely erotic mythological drawings he gave as Valentines to Cavalieri who became a lifelong friend. He was at the artist's bedside when he died at 88 in Rome in 1564.
The artist makes a sketch, rotates it to make a second, turns it over and adds yet another. Images on any given sheet might include bodybuilders, saints, architectural elevations, a man screaming, a verse from Petrarch, a beloved face. To a genius, monuments are made of any and all of these.
