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.
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