The Daily Telegraph - Features
Sketches that buzz like bees in a hive
Exhibition
Michelangelo: The Last Decades
British Museum, London WC1
★★★★★
Michelangelo Buonarroti appears at the start of this exhibition – bearded and wrinkled, eyes narrowed, a little wary – in a sympathetic portrait of him as a septuagenarian by a friend. That’s not enough, though, for the British Museum, which also includes various recordings of a gruff actor muttering excerpts from his letters and poems, in a bid to present his “voice”.
I hope there’s still time to turn down the volume, because, my goodness, these distracting audio snippets are annoying. This Michelangelo sounds like a gravel-voiced baddie in a cartoon.
It’s a shame, because without the white noise, this intense and devout, potentially-reverieinducing show would be totally absorbing. Its minimalist design – admittedly reminiscent of a discreetly lit, high-end boutique – encourages close-up contemplation of the 50 drawings by Michelangelo on display.
The occasion is the unveiling of the recently conserved two-metre high “Epifania” (c.1550-53), one of only two surviving “cartoons” (large preparatory drawings for paintings) by Michelangelo, executed on 26 overlapping, off-white sheets.
Now more legible, and on view for the first time in six years, the drawing of the Virgin Mary, Christ Child and St John the Baptist is reunited with a vast painting by a follower for which it was the template.
This standout moment anchors the wider show, which focuses on Michelangelo’s final three decades following his move back to Rome in 1534, at the age of 59, to start work on what he called “the great task”: the Last Judgment on the altar wall of the Sistine Chapel – gamely represented, here, by a projection. Nearby, a preparatory figure study for a rising soul seen from behind within Michelangelo’s gargantuan,
tumultuous fresco is exquisite; in another, the musculature is so faceted it resembles something anatomically extra-terrestrial.
We also encounter sophisticated, erudite “presentation drawings” made by Michelangelo during the early 1530s for Tommaso dei Cavalieri, a beautiful young Roman nobleman with whom he was besotted (including one in which an eagle is about to tear into a stripling’s torso); and a stunning, black-chalk “Christ on the Cross” (c.1543), likely produced for his selfmortifying poetess friend Vittoria Colonna, in which the sinuous yet definitive outline of His body contains an infinitely subtle play of soft shading, evoking squishable flesh. More impassioned Crucifixions appear in a dark, chapel-like rotunda towards the end, as we watch Michelangelo – his hand growing ever more tremulous – confront his own mortality.
Throughout, sketches buzz with figures, like bees in a hive, and reveal his methods. The curators also contradict the “myth” of Michelangelo’s “isolated artistic genius”. Increasingly, as he grew older, he collaborated with younger artists, such as Marcello Venusti.
The atmosphere – aside from that un-library-like soundtrack – is a bit bookish: prepare for a history lesson in religious schism and literary taste. Various objects inspire admiration but not love. A section on architecture will appeal mostly to geeks.
Moreover, the ardour, even severity, of Michelangelo’s spirituality may shock a secular audience. Yet, the British Museum, which characterises him as an “unobjectionably devout Catholic”, doesn’t pander to an irreligious age by shying away from Christian content. If only other prominent museums today refrained from seeing everything through the interpretative lens of current preoccupations.