41 Survivors

By A. T. Baker

Michelangelo at the Morgan

All his life, Michelangelo drew indefatigably--from models, from cadavers, from memory. Yet, according to his friend Giorgio Vasari, "so that no one should ever know the extent to which he had struggled to achieve perfection," Michelangelo burned nearly all the drawings he still owned just before his death at 88.

No U.S. museum has ever been able to muster even half a dozen for a show. Thus Manhattan's Morgan Library scored something of a coup when it persuaded the British Museum to send 41 Michelangelo drawings for an extended show.

Superbly mounted with the understated elegance that is characteristic of the Morgan's style, the show is far and away the largest single display of Michelangelo drawings ever seen in the U.S.

The drawings were selected to display Michelangelo's progress from young prodigy to grand old master. He was only 24 when he completed the Piet`a now in St. Peter's, only 26 when he began his famed David for Florence. The sketches done at this time demonstrate his incredible instinct for monumentality, acquired, as he said, with the milk of his wet nurse, the wife of a Tuscan stonecutter.

Michelangelo's next challenge was to produce a fresco in the huge new hall of the Palazzo della Signoria, to match a similar fresco to be done by his great rival, Leonardo da Vinci. Though neither painting was ever finished, the cartoons for them became, as Benvenuto Cellini recorded, "so long as they remained intact ... the school of the world"; Michelangelo's surviving sketch for a bathing soldier demonstrates why.

In mid-labor, Michelangelo was peremptorily summoned to Rome by Pope Julius II to design his tomb and later to paint the vaulted ceiling of the Sistine Chapel. "The place is wrong, and no painter I," grumbled Michelangelo, who considered himself first and foremost a sculptor. Three superb drawings of torsos show the pains he took over the huge scheme, which cost him four years of neck-straining labor.

By the time he was 60, and despite his success and fame, Michelangelo had turned moody, irascible, feeling himself harassed by worry and his powers waning. Yet he was already launched into the six-year labor of creating the Last Judgment on the altar wall of the Sistine Chapel. It was a tumultuous design, here embodied in a sketch dynamic with the swirl of falling bodies and tortured shapes of the agonized damned; his earlier calm, idealized nudes were transformed into the twisted forms expressive of his own brooding sense of sin and death.

But his intimations of mortality were lightened by a series of passionate attachments to beguiling young men, chief among them Tommaso de' Cavalieri, to whom he sent one of his rare "presentation drawings." This depicts the fall of

Phaethon at the moment the overweening hero is struck down by Jupiter's wrathful thunderbolt. On it, Michelangelo wrote:

"Master Tommaso, if you don't like this sketch tell Urbino [Michelangelo's servant] in time for me to make another by tomorrow evening, as I promised; and if you do like it and want me to finish it, send it back to me." Michelangelo also had his visions of idealized womanly beauty. The Morgan has a sketch of one such vision, perhaps (as some romantics would have it) a portrait of the only wom an he ever loved. She was Vittoria Colonna, the Marchesa di Pescara, a woman 17 years younger than he, and their "love" seems to have been merely one of "in tense spiritual friendship."

Fittingly, the show ends with drawings for the project that filled the last years of his life, the construction of St. Peter's Basilica topped by his triumphant dome. The Morgan has added memorabilia from its own stores, including maps and contemporary books. But it is the drawings that bring close that miraculous moment when Michelangelo's own hand touched paper and gave first reality to a vision.

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