Swan-like ease: the British Museum's exhibition of Michelangelo drawings admirably balances imaginative display and scholarship, says David Ekserdjian

Apollo, May, 2006 by David Ekserdjian

Fishermen are not the only people who go on and on about the ones that got away. Indeed, it could be argued that those of us who care about Britain's national heritage run them a very close second. In an extensive and lamentable catalogue of disasters, which is very far from being complete, the spurning of Sir Thomas Lawrence's peerless collection of drawings ranks extremely high, although the fact that at least some of them are in this country's museums is obviously a considerable consolation for their dispersal. Now, for a matter of weeks, the cream of his Michelangelo holdings is reunited at the British Museum.

This brings together sheets from the British Museum's collection with others from the Ashmolean Museum, but these have been combined with drawings from the Teyler Museum in Haarlem, which have a different provenance, and once belonged to Queen Christina of Sweden. The reputation of the Italian holdings of the Teyler, and above all of their Michelangelos, is old news to drawings buffs, but will prove a revelation to non-specialists, for two principal reasons. The first is that these works include major studies for Michelangelo's most important commissions, such as the Sistine Chapel ceiling and the Medici tombs, but what makes them even more exciting is the fact that so many of them are in sparklingly fresh condition (Fig. 2). Moreover, alongside these pinnacles of the draughtsman's art are wonderful glimpses of the paddling beneath the surface that allowed Michelangelo to maintain an illusion of swan-like ease, notably in the form of the spidery scribbles in the Oxford sketchbook (nos. 20-23). Equally fascinating are those sheets where Michelangelo endeavours to teach various pretty clueless pupils how to draw (nos. 60, 62, 66), and throws in sundry seemingly autograph lavatorial drolleries worthy of a Carry On film for good measure. One of these vignettes (no. 66, verso) shows a man defacating, while another (Fig. 1) is copied from a ubiquitous Paduan bronze oil-lamp model associated with the circle of Severo da Ravenna, in which a so-called acrobat with his legs over his shoulders is seen spreading his thighs. When the oil repository was lit it would have appeared that the flame was issuing from his anus, which gives the lie to any assumptions that Michelangelo was relentlessly high-minded.

The exhibition follows the example of the BM's 2002-2003 Durer show in being located near the museum's main entrance and not in the Department of Prints and Drawings. This allows for the display of both rectos and versos of double-sided sheets, which is wonderfully instructive even when the alignment of the respective drawings is not the same. More generally, the way the space is divided into a sequence of compact 'rooms' makes the sheer wealth of material less daunting, and allows major commissions to be treated as isolated unities. The greatest innovation, however, is a series of space-age consoles that allow one to see how particular sheets relate to the frescoes on the Sistine vault in mesmerising style: it is a considerable tribute to the magnetism of Michelangelo's draughtsmanship that visitors are not distracted from the originals by this miracle of technology. Other attractions include a prelude in the form of a group of drawings by Michelangelo's master, Domenico Ghirlandaio, which underline how independent his pupil was from the outset, portraits of Michelangelo in various media, and a number of letters, both to and from the artist. The latter reveal that even his calligraphy was beautiful.

Only the most naive or jaundiced art historian ever assumes that there is nothing new to say about individual items, but it has to be admitted that Michelangelo's drawings have been exceptionally thoroughly studied from what might be described as the forensic point of view. It was therefore an inspired decision on the part of Hugo Chapman, the exhibition's curator and the author of its catalogue, to treat us to a continuous narrative, which combines a helpfully cross-referenced checklist of the 111 exhibits with what is in effect a new monograph on the artist. For obvious reasons, the focus of the text is more detailed when it comes to the paintings, sculptures and buildings related to the drawings on show, but it is rare for the author to steer clear of any major works (the exceptions are the late frescoes in the Cappella Paolina). Michelangelo's whole career, from his beginnings in Florence in the 1490s to the evanescent black chalk Crucifixion drawings of the 1550s and 1560s (Fig. 3), is comprehensively surveyed.

[FIGURE 3 OMITTED]

Chapman is one of the greatest authorities on Italian drawings alive, and his close attention to the detail of particular sheets is an education in the value of sustained and close looking, which not infrequently allows him to challenge the wilder speculations of less visually acute scholars. Before starting out on this project, he would not have claimed to be a Michelangelo specialist, and what is even more impressive, in consequence, is the way he has mastered the daunting corpus of Michelangelo's works in a multiplicity of media, not to mention his poetry and correspondence, as well as the elephantine secondary literature that his genius has inspired. In the case of most renaissance artists, we know pitifully little about their lives, whereas with Michelangelo we almost run the risk of losing track of what matters amidst the mass of information we possess (as Chapman tellingly notes, we even know about the broad beans, peas and lettuce growing in his garden in Rome in 1517). Here, happily, meticulous scholarship and page-turning eloquence join forces to create a passionate portait of the artist as a devout and often tormented, but above all profoundly human, personality.