
Michelangelo was never enamored of his own drawings. He viewed them as preparatory studies – the visual equivalent of a rough draft. Towards the end of his life, he burned as many as he could locate. His biographer, Giorgio Vasari, implored him to stop. According to Vasari, Michelangelo was determined to erase all evidence of the labor and forethought that went into sculptures and paintings. He wanted to foster the impression that his monumental works – the Pieta, the David, the Moses with his endless beard – were a function of nothing but unadulterated, instantaneous genius.
Despite the artist’s reservations, Michelangelo’s drawings are thrillingly beautiful, and the Metropolitan Museum has rounded up an unprecedented number of them for an epic show opening on Monday. “Michelangelo, Divine Draftsman and Designer,” as it is called, contains more masterpieces-per-foot than we might ever see in New York again, and proves that Michelangelo’s drawings are no less potent than his large-scale sculptures. Most of the drawings, which are done in brown ink or red and black chalk, show the male nude in a state of motion. Whether he is depicting a religious subject (Jesus resurrected) or a classical one (Hercules wrestling a lion), Michelangelo depicts the male figure twisting at the waist, or raising an arm, or balancing on one foot. His figures feel amazingly present. Their curvy silhouettes and expressive postures set them apart from centuries of medieval figures who stood rigidly with hands at their sides, like wooden dolls. Michelangelo’s figures, by contrast, seem to say, “Come on baby, let’s do the twist.”
The show is being billed by the Met as the largest-ever exhibition of Michelangelo drawings, an oddly braggy claim. Size, in itself, is not a measure of excellence. You can even say the show is too sprawling for its own good or, rather, has been installed with not enough thought about the viewer’s experience. The wall labels are verbose when they should be incisive. More benches would have helped. Although the exhibition winds through 14 galleries, there’s no “reading room” where you can pause to peruse the catalogue or escape the inevitable throngs.
Instead, we get such educational trappings as a lit-up replica of the Sistine Ceiling hanging over our heads in a central gallery and emitting the sort of light that makes you feel as if you are standing in a 7-Eleven in the middle of the night. And a massive piece of wooden scaffolding intended to hint at Michelangelo’s up-in-the-air labors looks like a playground jungle gym.
Despite such missteps, the show is chock-full of masterpieces and required viewing for anyone interested in art. The drawings range widely in character, from dashed-off studies of a hand or a foot to intricate compositions that come with a narrative. I was mesmerized by “The Dream of Human Life,” a polished pencil drawing in which a young man is awakened from his deep, dream-drenched slumber by a trumpet-blowing angel. Who will the man become? A box of theatrical masks lying at his feet hint at a proto-Freudian sense of multiple selves. He leans on a globe, which can put you in mind of the giant eyeballs that would later float through the work of Odilon Redon. All in all, the drawing could pass for a Surrealist fantasy, and reminds us that Michelangelo is modern in ways we have yet to fully grasp.