Michelangelo Buonarroti completed the famous works of his youth within an intense period that commenced in 1501, with the start of his monumental sculpture David, and concluded in 1512 with the completion of the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel.
He was already a Renaissance triple threat – sculptor, architect and poet – but before the Sistine Chapel commission he protested that he wasn’t much cop as a painter. Once the vast fresco – with its central motifs describing the stories of the Book of Genesis – was finished, nobody paid attention to such protestations. At the age of 37 his fame was assured and popes and princes fought to commission him. For great men, the route to eternal glory came via a monument or fresco by Michelangelo that would carry their name down the generations.
The masterworks of Michelangelo’s early career are known around the world. Now a new exhibition at the British Museum delves into his less explored final decades. While there are finished paintings here, Michelangelo’s own work is largely represented through drawings and manuscripts. In part this is because his great frescoes and architectural interventions are physically attached to buildings in Rome.
It is also a result of the conflicting demands of success and age. One of the most fascinating phenomena revealed by this exhibition is Michelangelo’s close collaboration with younger artists, who created paintings (sometimes in multiple editions) based on the master’s meticulously worked designs.
A highly unusual composition of the Annunciation (c. 1545-50) by Marcello Venusti shows the Virgin startled by the angel descending from above as she reads her prayerbook at a table. She turns towards him in astonishment, tilting her face up to the angel and to the radiance of the Holy Spirit hovering above him in the form of a dove. The whole scene is tightly crammed into a vertical panel: this was a work designed for private worship and contemplation rather than public display.
The dramatic positioning of their figures and their twisting drapery derive from detailed preparatory drawings by Michelangelo. This was part of an ongoing collaboration between the two artists that allowed Michelangelo to satisfy the enormous demand for his work in the years where his health started to limit his output.
Even with Michelangelo laying the groundwork, such collaboration required extraordinary skill, and must have been based on great trust. One of the show’s most fascinating pairings is an enormous cartoon (preparatory drawing) known as the Epifania (c.1550-3), made in black chalk on 26 sheets of paper joined with flour paste. Michelangelo seems to have given the cartoon to the writer and painter Ascanio Condivi – perhaps as thanks for his “authorised” biography of the artist. Condivi’s finished painting is shown here side by side with the cartoon for the first time since it was made. It does not fare well by comparison, and certainly illustrates the skill required by Venusti and Michelangelo’s other collaborators.
The whole of Michelangelo’s adult life played out against a backdrop of political and religious turbulence, with the great families of Florence and Rome tussling for supremacy, and the Catholic church in crisis. In the early 1530s Michelangelo moved from Tuscany to Rome. He was in his late 50s, and would remain there until his death, in 1564, at the age of 88.
The reasons for the move were political and pragmatic, but also romantic. Michelangelo lost his beloved brother Buonarroti in 1528, and his father in 1531. He was now the family patriarch and adopted responsibility for his nephew Leonardo. Correspondence between Michelangelo and Leonardo shows great devotion. There is also, however, some entertaining irascibility on the part of the older man.
In one letter Michelangelo begs Leonardo to find himself a suitable wife. “All you need have an eye to is birth, good health and, above all, a nice disposition,” he writes. “As regards beauty, not being, after all, the most handsome youth in Florence yourself, you need not bother overmuch …” Ouch!
It was all very well for Michelangelo to instruct his nephew to ignore beauty: he himself had his head entirely turned in this period by the beautiful young nobleman Tommaso de’Cavalieri. The older man expressed his love through poetry and the gift of exquisite drawings, among the finest in this exhibition, derived from dramatic episodes in Ovid’s Metamorphoses.
In Tityus (1532) the titular giant appears naked, muscular and writhing against the chains that bind him to a rock, as an enormous vulture stands poised to rip out his liver. Michelangelo is in full force as a storyteller – we feel not only Tityus’s terror, but also the anticipation of pain. A subsequent set of drawings illustrate the Fall of Phaeton (1533) – the story of the son of Helios, god of the sun, who arrogantly tries to fly his father’s chariot.
Michelangelo presents the drama at its apex, as Jupiter descends wielding his thunderbolt, and Phaeton and the twisting horses plummet toward the ground. Cavalieri did not keep these gifts to himself – indeed both designs were copied and circulated and did a great deal to bolster Michelangelo’s reputation in Rome.
As a young prodigy Michelangelo had encountered Giulio de’ Medici as a student in Florence. Fast forward to 1532, and Giulio was now Pope Clement VII, keen as mostarda to have his papal glory burnished by his old associate. He and his papal successors were to become Michelangelo’s most important patrons in Rome.
In those same years that he was composing sonnets and scenes of classical drama for Cavalieri, Michelangelo was also planning the complex composition of another vast fresco – Last Judgement (1536-41) – for the altar wall of the Sistine Chapel. Working in fresco is demanding. A water-based paint compound is applied to damp plaster (hence “fresco” – “fresh”) so that the pigment bonds with the surface as it dries. Frescoes had to be meticulously planned, and the creation of each section executed swiftly, in a race against drying plaster.
Painting the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel (which he did standing on a scaffolding platform) had really taken it out of Michelangelo when he’d been young and vigorous. Now coming into his 60s, suffering from kidney stones and feeling his age, he faced another huge fresco project with apprehension.
The final work is a writhing masterpiece of drama – human and divine. At the foot, the dead rise from their tombs, their bodies ascending toward the figure of Christ. He appears on high surrounded by saints and martyrs, each bearing the grisly emblem of their torment: St Lawrence with the gridiron on which he was roasted, St Bartholomew carrying his own skin, St Catherine bending over her spiked wheel.
On display here are detailed preparatory sketches, their position in the finished scheme illustrated through a clever projection that blends the drawn figures into a detailed view of the finished fresco.
It is a poignant subject for an artist facing up to their own mortality. With age, Michelangelo was becoming more devout. The finale of this show is like a chapel, lined with the devotional drawings of his last years. Oh, my heart! He returns again and again to the crucifixion, and the body preparing to be raised from physical torment to spiritual eternity. As he fights against the frustration of his shaking hands and blurring vision, the form becomes ever simpler, eventually reduced to its bare, expressive form. So painfully mortal, and yet so divine.
‘Michelangelo: The Last Decades’ is at the British Museum, London, from 2 May to 28 July
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