Deconstructing Michelangelo,

The AGO dissects the genius of Michelangelo

In a career that spanned a fairly mindboggling 77 years, Michelangelo left behind some of the definitive works of Renaissance art. Almost as impressive as what he made, though, is the huge list of projects that languish unfinished: his was a genius that wasn’t just profound, but prolific.

“We estimate about half of his projects were never fully realized,” Lloyd Dewitt, curator of European Art at the Art Gallery of Ontario, says. “A lot of that was because of political pressures ... everyone loved what he was doing. He was Michelangelo.”

In his newest exhibit, Michelangelo: Quest for Genius, Dewitt has brought together sketches from Michelangelo’s notebooks, including some of the highlights of his unrequited works, as a way of investigating what it is, exactly, that made Michelangelo such a singular talent. (As the exhibit itself reminds us on the way out, “There are many kings, but there is only one Michelangelo.”)

The exhibit takes the form of the Neoplatonic philosophy that Michelangelo and his Renaissance contemporaries held so dear, tracing the path from initial confusion to illumination, purification and finally true wisdom. In the exhibit, the middle steps are represented by Michelangelo’s worldly struggles to get his art actually produced.

“It speaks to the title of the exhibit; it really is a quest,” Dewitt explains. “His high level of achievement — the struggle isn’t inimical to that, it’s instrumental to that. He wouldn’t have reached where he did without those obstacles.”

One of the pieces that died in the struggle was part of the Laurentian Library in Florence, designed by Michelangelo as both a place to house “the Medicis’ kick-ass collection,” Dewitt puts it, and as a formal representation of Neoplatonic ideals about wisdom and perfection.

Never complete, but recreated digitally for the current exhibit, it’s a bit of a skeleton key for Michelangelo’s philosophy and importance. Below, Dewitt takes us through the careful symbolism of the library, an architectural work that was like little before it, but which, sadly, only exists in sketches now.