A Historical Tour of Michelangelo’s Genius
“Michelangelo: Divine Draftsman and Designer” at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York is a monument to a monument. With more than 200 works, and a core group of 133 drawings by the beyond-famous artist — the largest number ever assembled — on loan from some 50 front-rank collections, it’s a curatorial coup. More important, it’s an art historical tour de force in the most fragile of media — paper, chalk, and ink.
It’s a show with demands: It requires that you be fully present. Snapping it with smartphones won’t do.
The fame of Michelangelo Buonarroti may last long, but this Met-built monument to him, which opened on November 13, will not. It’s a one-stop event with a non- extendable three-month run, which is the maximum exposure to light, even at dusk-level, that the drawings can safely stand. Once the show’s done, the likelihood of there being another on its scale within the lifetime of anyone reading these words is slim. 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 apprentice at age 13.
According to dates assigned to drawings near the beginning of the show, he could have been sketching figures in frescoes by Giotto and Masaccio in local churches as early as 16.
Questions of what came first arise, centered on a marble sculpture called the “Young Archer.” For many years, this figure of a nude youth had stood, barely noticed, in the Cultural Services of the French Embassy 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 1496- 97” date now attached to the work makes it altogether possible that Michelangelo carved the figure at age 21, making him the prodigy he claimed to be.
With this sculpture, he had found what would be his favorite 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: 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.
The exhibition 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.
Michelangelo benefited mightily from the elevation of the artist from workshop drone to deity (and brand). In his later megastar years, people actually referred to him as God. The Sistine Chapel ceiling is a work of disegno in excelsis: the story of the Creation told through superhuman craft. The exhibition’s long central gallery is given over to the ceiling.
Michelangelo can be a visually aggressive artist. But he isn’t that — quite the opposite — in the meltingly sinuous red-and-black chalk “Dead Christ Held by His Mother” from the late 1530s, or in the great black chalk “Pietà” from around 1546.
But in other essential ways he didn’t change. In late career, he was still a workaholic, overbooking on commissions, pacifying popes and writing poetry.
Hand and mind were never still. Images on any given sheet might include bodybuilders, saints, a pornographic doodle, a man screaming, a verse from Petrarch, a beloved face. To a genius, monuments are made of any and all of these.