This catalogue accompanied an exhibition of twenty-eight drawings by Michelangelo, organized by the Cleveland Museum of Art and the J. Paul Getty Museum in conjunction with the Teylers Museum in Haarlem. The exhibition was cut short by COVID-19 pandemic restrictions, closing just weeks after it had opened in Los Angeles. Thus comments here are restricted to the publication—now all the more valuable as record of an abbreviated display. The Teylers's Michelangelo sheets appeared in other exhibitions, notably the British Museum's 2005 Michelangelo Drawings: Closer to the Master, but this is the first presentation to American audiences of the entire group of twenty-five. The curators address the daunting prospect of contributing new information about an artist who “represents the pinnacle of Italian draftsmanship” (xv) and whose drawings have long been considered foundational to the High Renaissance. Further, it is now impossible to consider an exhibition catalogue of Michelangelo drawings without comparing it to Carmen Bambach's formidable 2017 catalogue Michelangeo: Divine Draftsman and Designer.
In its focused format, however, the current publication offers a digestible primer that does not require the reader to have an intimate familiarity with the works or their leviathan scholarship. Instead, it provides an overview of Michelangelo's draftsmanship through a close study of the Teylers cache of drawings, which constitute “a rare peak of outstanding importance” (xv). Diverse examples span the artist's exceptionally long career, including an early sheet reflecting his training in the studio of Ghirlandaio (cat. no. 1); anatomical studies (cat. nos. 9–12); designs for large-scale commissions, like the Battle of Cascina (cat. nos. 3–4), the Sistine frescoes (cat. nos. 5–6, 8, 22), and the tomb sculptures for the New Sacristy of the Medici Chapel (cat. nos. 14–17); and architectural designs for the Laurentian Library (cat. no 17v) and St. Peter's Basilica (cat. no. 27). Moreover, their ownership by a single institution, which acquired them en bloc in the eighteenth century from a remarkably cohesive line of prior owners, underscores their resonance in the history of collecting and the pedagogical role of drawings.
Solid catalogue entries explore the material nuances and aesthetic brilliance of the individual sheets, and the essays reflect the many ways that Michelangelo drawings have been considered over the centuries: as revered objects capturing an astounding range of creativity; as precious acquisitions signaling the owner's erudition and wealth; and as part of a museum's collection, preserved for study and enjoyment for current and future generations. Emily J. Peters outlines Michelangelo's extraordinary ability to interpret the male body in motion through drawing—whether rendered as an anatomical examination, as a serpentine line rippling with trademark musculature, or even as anthropomorphized architectural details—as the interpretive key to his creative process and the foundation of his outsized contribution to the Italian Renaissance.
Julian Brooks presents an intriguing alternating theme of adulation and obliteration that runs through the history of Michelangelo's drawings. The fervor for collecting them, even in his own lifetime, was heightened by the fact that the artist himself burned untold numbers of sheets to keep them out of the hands of would-be imitators and forgers. About six hundred examples of his drawings survive, which nevertheless have given rise to a persistent tradition of attribution scholarship, which Brooks helpfully recounts. Two additional essays situate the Teylers drawings in the context of its home institution, the oldest museum in the Netherlands. Marjan Scharloo relays the proclaimed democratic and educational intentions behind the founding of the museum in Haarlem in the eighteenth century. Carel van Tuyll van Serooskerken tracks the drawings’ ownership history back through the Roman Odescalchi collection to Queen Christina of Sweden, who seems to have obtained them via a series of Dutch entrepreneurs and collectors, likely originating with the German artist and biographer Joachim von Sandrart.
In its capable delving into the drawings’ material and aesthetic aspects, this catalogue contradicts, as Brooks aptly notes, the intentions of their creator who seemed dead set against anyone accessing them. One could fault the catalogue for failing to reflect recent scholarly investigations that problematize the notion of the lone (male) genius at work, but that approach is undermined in this case by an artist who fueled this enduring myth through his antisocial behavior, secretive nature, and destruction of his own drawings. Part of the appeal of Michelangelo's drawings is that they resist attempts to consider them on par with those of his contemporaries, upholding the very narrative that Vasari put forth in his hagiographic cultivation of the artist as Il Divino, a godlike figure who stood apart in every way, during his lifetime and for centuries thereafter.
