The aptly titled “Michelangelo: Mind of the Master” is a bit like walking through the inimitable artist’s imagination, featuring 28 pages filled with sketches and preparatory studies spanning the course of his career and several rooms in the current exhibition at The Getty Museum. These drawings reveal the meticulous nature of his genius, or perhaps more aptly, they reveal the foundation upon which his genius was crafted. Michelangelo di Lodovico Buonarroti hardly needs an introduction—nearly half a millennium after his death he remains among the best-known artists in the Western tradition, with works such as the panoply of saints, sibyls and prophets that adorn the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel and the iconic, wary-eyed David providing a visual definition of the Renaissance era. The exhibition at the Getty brings us a more intimate view of the timeworn drawings, complete with scribbles, notes and stains where il terribilità once worked out his masterworks of sublime genius.
These drawings, largely culled from the collection of the Teylers Museum (Haarlem, Netherlands) and uniting with two of the Getty’s own and one on loan from The Cleveland Museum of Art, trace Michelangelo’s artistic development over 60-plus years. The Teylers collection, one of the most significant repositories of Michelangelo drawings outside Italy, traces its holdings back to Queen Christina of Sweden’s legendary collection, acquired by the museum in the 18th century. The earliest consist of straightforward figurative studies made while still learning by copying earlier masters (such as Masaccio)—whether it is refreshing to know he was once a student or more daunting when confronted by the genius of his earliest marks remains up to the viewer. From there, the exhibition progresses to the increasingly dynamic studies for mature commissions such as the Tomb of Lorenzo de’ Medici and Sistine Chapel Ceiling, to the bravura of those made in preparation for the epic Last Judgment fresco painting gracing the altar wall of the Vatican.
The exhibition gives the contemporary viewer a chance to appreciate both the artist’s monumental talent as well as the continual exploration of form that has earned respect from the centuries that have followed him. His style represents the apex of achievement of the Italian Renaissance, but refused to be confined to a historical period. The English painter and art theorist Jonathan Richardson, whose 1715 Essay on the Theory of Painting became the first significant treatise on art theory written in English, captured this duality when he wrote: “His style is his own, not antique, but he had a sort of greatness in his utmost degree, which sometimes ran into the extreme of terrible; though in many instances he has a fine seasoning of grace.”As Jonathan Richardson
in collaboration with the Getty Museum and the Cleveland Museum of Art.
The pairing of delicate original works in glass cases with full-scale reproductions mounted on nearby walls offers helpful context, though one can’t help but imagine a more immersive approach. Perhaps scaffolding to evoke the dramatic working conditions under which Michelangelo labored on the Sistine Chapel ceiling, or textured reproductions that convey the scale and physicality of the frescoes. Yes, it might verge on theatrical, but then again, this is Michelangelo—a bit of drama seems only fitting.
Devastatingly, we learn through the exhibition that Michelangelo had literally thousands of such drawings destroyed, up to 28,000 by some accounts, in an effort to hide his artistic process. This heartbreaking act was explained as a means to conjure the notion of spontaneous creation through divine inspiration, what might be thought of today as “artistic genius.” Ironically, viewing these works, essentially Michelangelo’s problem-solving/brainstorming sessions, does more to confirm than dissuade notions of the artist’s overabundant talent. Figures, rendered in ink and chalk, twist and turn as if trying to escape the flat surface of the aged pages. The detailed musculature of the figures and fragmented limbs not only confirms his talent but evokes his legacy and the debts owed by later artists—such wide-ranging figures as Raphael to Reynolds to Géricault, modernist Rodin, and contemporary painter Jenny Saville—for his refusal to accept the status quo, even from himself.
Editor’s note: I visited this exhibition twice. The first time was for the press tour, parking at the top of the hill, getting the inside scoop. When I returned a few weeks later, I was the instructor for a small group of talented MFA painters who actively sketched from Michelangelo’s sketches, huddling in small groups discussing his anatomical studies, absorbing centuries of accumulated knowledge from his charcoal to their sketchbooks. As we broke for lunch, however, the excitement soon turned to anxiety. For this was no ordinary day, but the Ides of March in the year 2020. This was our own tragic date, a day when the earth stood still and the “temporary” COVID closure began. In a very different way than Michelangelo’s genius influenced generations, or than we might regret those thousands of lost drawings, the world would be quite changed from that point forward.