'Michelangelo: The Last Decades' (British Museum until July 28 2024): Strength and Fragility

Michelangelo, The Punishment of Tityus, c.1533, Royal Collection Trust, UK

Drawing exhibitions are by their nature quiet, sombre affairs. Curators can accept it or fight against it. The British Museum’s Michelangelo show goes for the latter approach: the first rooms are dominated by moving screens and an exaggeratedly halting voice reading out the artist’s words. The sound follows you round like a death knell. Mortality hangs in the air. And yet this is an exhibition of thirty productive years. It seems counter intuitive and slightly dismissive to downplay all that industry and invention. 

It’s the most obvious mis-step in an exhibition which pulls in too many disparate directions. We see Michelangelo the spiritually inquisitive, the friend, the businessman, the architect, the power-player, the family patriarch, the poet, and coyly hinted at only, the lover. We see a man frustrated by competing demands or a man who couldn’t say no. We see an artist happy to have his drawings turned into second rate potboilers - and the exhibition gives far too much time Marcello Venusti's stolid paintings. Perhaps the curators just wanted some colour? They don’t really explore the motives behind the collaboration. Maybe he had an eye on the market, or maybe, after the initial invention, Michelangelo just lost interest - he was already moving on to the next drawing, the next idea. 

The exhibition is at its best when it takes the time to explore how Michelangelo planned out those ideas. The first room is dominated by his Sistine Last Judgement. Sketches worked and reworked, from overall compositions down to individual figures, some just scribbles on paper, visual notes. Frustratingly, a moving representation of the finished fresco never allows you to see these ideas in fruition - it would be far better to have seen small images alongside the drawings. This is where Venusti's paintings have some value. Wooden and gaudy as they are, it still helps to see the final intention alongside the preparatory works. Where this approach fails spectacularly is in the display of the Epifania - the only extant cartoon in existence, recently conserved by the British Museum and arguably the whole point of the show. In a generally cluttered space, it is difficult to stand back and view it, and when you do it is impossible not to have the Mannerist extravagences of Ascanio Covidi in the corner of your vision. Why? The cartoon should be allowed to speak for itself.

Michelangelo, Christ on the Cross between the Virgin and St John, 1555-64, British Museum, London

All this fades into insignificance in the last room, a dark-walled inner sanctum dominated by a series of crucifixions, repeated meditations that re-make a familiar theme anew. There is frailty here, spidering lines of thin black chalk which suggest perhaps fading vision, fading motor skills, but there is also resilience and strength. Michelangelo works and reworks, imagines and reimagines, explores nuance, subtle change, restless and unsatisfied right to the end. These works buzz with life even as they are about death, they celebrate the creative drive even when they are full of mourning and sorrow. They illustrate, just as all the drawings on display, precisely what gives a Michelangelo his unique intensity. He eschews the High Renaissance concept of perfection, for all the beauty of the musculature and the clarity of the modelling, for all the idealisation of his figures. There is always a sense of the human, a striving for something more. 

This is such a frustrating exhibition. It gets so much wrong, not least the poorly designed display plinths which clutter the floor and have the information text on an indented slant which is only readable when you stand directly in front of it. It gets so much wrong but it's a rare chance to see some of the most inspiring, life-enhancing, 'rage against the dying of the light' drawings ever produced. See them and weep. 

Guercino at Waddesdon: King David and the Wise Women (Waddesdon Manor until Oct 20 2024): Deceptive Ease

Guercino, The Cumaean Sybil with Putto, 1651, National Gallery, London

Guercino is not a household name. If you like Italian Baroque painting then he will be familiar, but whether he is enough to tempt the casual visitor to travel to Waddesdon Manor and pay the not inconsiderable (for non National Trust members) entrance fee is debatable. Certainly, on the day I went, the house was heaving to the point where you felt inexorably carried along in the crowd, but the single room devoted to Guercino was a haven of calm and relative emptiness. Credit then, arguably, to Waddesdon for putting on this mini exhibition of his works but at the same time, it was disappointing to see them penned into such a small space. 

The exhibition is based around Waddesdon's own King David, now shown with two National Gallery Sybils and one from the Royal Collection, but by happy coincidence, the unexpected star is a recent acquisition. Moses was bought by the Rothschild Foundation after it came to light in Paris in 2022: it is the sort of quality Old Master which British institutions can rarely afford to bid for. It stands as a quiet yet potent reminder amid all the flashy bling of the Manor, of the lingering wealth and influence of the Rothschild family - a poignant reminder too after the recent death of the 4th baron. Arguably out of place in the company of David and his Sybils, the Moses is on a much more intimate scale and belongs to Guercino's earlier tenebrist style. It feels a little swamped by the red damask richness of the room and by its neighbours' weighty calm. But ultimately its presence proves that Guercino is an artist of greater complexity, variety and emotional heft than the exhibition might otherwise have shown.

Guercino, Moses, c.1618-19, Waddesdon Manor

Giovanni Francesco Barbieri (1591-1666) has come down to history as Guercino, 'the little squinter', cross eyed, poor born, self taught. He worked mainly around the vibrant Baroque artistic centre of Bologna, but also spent a few years in Rome. Aside from some almost Giorgione-esque landscapes, his focus was religion and the human figure. I first came across his work at the Fitzwilliam Museum in Cambridge where his small, intense Betrayal of Christ has a dark, dramatic claustrophobia which immediately recalls Caravaggio's treatment of the same subject. Guercino's early work is full of movement, confusion and crowded figures exaggerated by dark shadows and anguished expressions. The single figure of Moses is like a close-up from one of these scenes, his hands raised protectively as he looks towards the light, uncertain how to react in the presence of god. Head and arms disembodied by a geometry of deep folds so that we focus entirely on gesture and expression. 

The other works in the exhibition could almost be by a different hand. On two metre plus canvases, carefully posed, authoritative figures inhabit classical architectural settings, surrounded by attributes of wisdom. There is a deceptive simplicity in Guercino's late work, which renders awkward poses easy, conveys an airy depth lightly and models form with subtle softness. In these works Guercino is a Baroque Raphael, wearing his skill with casual insouciance, almost convincing the viewer that there is nothing to see here. Set up together in a confined space, it is too easy to sweep your eye across the room, note the similarities and think him a lesser artist than he is, churning out sybils on autopilot. In truth, the Samian Sybil was a repeat order, after the initial pendant for King David, the Cumaean Sybil was snapped up by another buyer. 

Guercino, The Libyan Sybil, 1651, Royal Collection, UK

Don't be fooled, however. Guercino is no pot-boiler. The canvases breath with life. Poses are chosen to convey body and movement: the thrust of David's sandalled foot, the backward curve of the Cumaean's head. Draperies catch the light, gentled rumpled like waves on a calm day, so that large blocks of colour become instead objects of interest. The embrace of pink around the Libyan Sybil, the inner swirl of three centrifugal colours creates the mood of  introverted contemplation. Tonal highlights are balanced: open books resonate cross the canvas, reflected in exposed flesh, white headdresses, all signposts on a visual journey. And the same applies to Guercino's characteristic palette, limited, cool colours, worked through with repeated effect. Even pinks and oranges have a restraint, maintaining the intellectual seriousness of his female prophets. All this and you haven't begun to take in the little details - the ruffled pages, the lace edges, the strands of hair.

Waddesdon take their art seriously  - all their artworks, for instance, are beautifully lit - and it perhaps seems churlish to criticise the effort which has gone in to secure these loans and present the show, but I wish they given the paintings a little more space, a slightly more sympathetic hang, perhaps sought out another loan which would have offered a companion to the Moses. That said, Guercino is a marvellous, underrated and unfamiliar artist and any opportunity to see a gathering of his work is to be welcomed. Once you know about the little squinter, you will not forget him.