Giorgio Vasari, whom scholars have called “the first art historian worthy of the title,” wrote that one of his 16th Century contemporaries was sent by God to perfect the arts of painting, sculpture and architecture.
That artist was Michelangelo do Lodovico Buonarroti Simoni, and in the nearly 450 years since Vasari proclaimed his idolatry, there have been few periods when viewers failed to agree with it.
Michelangelo’s originality and execution were so great, in fact, that even those who disliked the example they set — many blamed him for the mannered muscle-bound figures dominating later 16th Century Italian painting — still had to acknowledge his strength, integrity and aesthetic value.
Any discussion of Michelangelo’s influence in sculpture and painting might well stretch from the 17th through the 20th Centuries, taking in such different artists as Gianlorenzo Bernini, Joshua Reynolds, Eugene Delacroix and Henry Moore. But the exhibition that just has opened at the Art Institute of Chicago — “Michelangelo and His Influence: Drawings From Windsor Castle” — simplifies matters by staying close to his own time (1475-1564) and presenting 73 superb examples of what Vasari called “the father of the three arts.”
This is appropriate because it was in the studios of Michelangelo and his rival, Raphael, that drawing took a key place in a systematic approach to developing images in frescoes, tapestries and paintings on canvas. Most of the great painters in 16th Century Italy were also great draftsmen, but it was not until the second decade of the century that they used drawings in the preparatory stages of large-scale commissions.
Before then, drawing was accepted as a means of education, both through copying ancient architectural prototypes and exploring human anatomy. Such drawings tended to stay in the workshops that produced them. But in the first half of the 16th Century some drawings also started to circulate outside of workshops, thus beginning a trade that eventually led to the formation of collections.
Michelangelo excelled at all kinds of drawing, from rapid pen sketches to the most detailed studies in chalk, which he frequently bestowed as special gifts and, hence, are called presentation drawings. The exhibition offers 22 of his works on paper and vellum that show a good range of purpose; the remainder are by contemporaries, who either have produced copies of Michelangelos or have adapted motifs to different ends.
His means were surprisingly few: pen and ink, black and red chalk and, in late drawings, rubbed black chalk and white heightening applied one over the other. Unlike other artists of the period, he did not use colored papers.
Only two portrait drawings by Michelangelo are known (neither is in the exhibition). Biographer Ascanio Condivi said he loved natural scenery, though Michelangel
o’s drawings do not show it. His anatomical investigations were always of human, not animal, forms. He primarily used drawing for professional reasons, not the kind of speculative research carried on by Leonardo da Vinci, an artist he publicly dismissed but privately studied.
Michelangelo did not create drawings from any particular system. Nor did he teach or produce an aesthetic treatise, despite an effort by Giovanni Lomazzo that pretended to be one. He was deeply reflective in drawings but seldom shared his thoughts about them. Practical advice seems not to have extended beyond “Draw Antonio, draw and do not waste time,” written to a young assistant.
Instead, it was Vasari who proposed him as one of the paradigms in the artistic controversy of the age that set the merits of drawing (disegno) against color (colore). Florentine painting depended on preparatory drawings, Venetian paintings were created directly on the canvas surface. Thus the Florentines, led by Michelangelo, were supposed to be more intellectual; the Venetians, exemplified by Titian, more spontaneous.
Those who argued for disegno eventually interpreted it to mean a state bordering on the spiritual. Which doubtless served to confirm the high seriousness found in the works of Michelangelo, raising his reputation to the degree that during his lifetime even his slightest sketches became prized by collectors.
The controversy continued into the 17th Century, spreading to Great Britain by way of an English translation of Lomazzo’s treatise. Some of the Michelangelo drawings on view may have been collected in the last quarter of that century by King Charles II; the rest were acquired at the end of the 18th Century by George III, if not to make up for losing colonies across the Atlantic, certainly consolation.
The nude male figure was Michelangelo’s central preoccupation, and there are exquisite examples among the drawings on mythological and allegorical subjects — “Fall of Phaeton,” “Tityas,” “The Archers,” “The Three Labors of Hercules” — he presented to a young friend, Tomasso de’ Cavalieri.
These and the late finished drawings on sacred subjects, particularly the hazily indistinct Crucifixions, are the richest for both aesthetic and psychological examination. But the show also presents rapid anatomical studies, finished drawings of idealized heads and two depictions of the Risen Christ that transmit a staggering, almost pagan sense of unbridled power.
Several themes proceed directly from Michelangelo drawings to treatments by contemporaries — major, minor and anonymous. However, many more Michelangelos that are lost or in other collections are memorialized by artists whom they influenced; primarily through them we see the legacy of his sculpture and late frescoes for the Sistine and Pauline chapels.
There are wonderful sheets by Annibale Carracci, Giulio Clovio, Giovan Ambrogio Figino, Sebastiano del Piombo, Francesco Salviati and — by no means least — Raphael. Even in a couple of instances Michelangelo influences them, they take his influence in another direction and, in turn, give him back something new to feed on.
His work alone would, of course, be occasion enough for prolonged viewing. But the thrill this time is in the clarity of comparison and contrast. It’s one thing to read about Michelangelo’s impact on those around him but quite another, better thing to be able to see it for oneself.
Harold Joachim, late curator of prints and drawings at the institute, used to lament the public’s unreasoned preference for exhibitions of painting. Drawings for the casual viewer just never seemed enough. Here is an exhibition to set that right.
Go. And go again.
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“Michelangelo and His Influence: Drawings from Windsor Castle” will continue through June 22 in the Daniel F. and Ada L. Rice Building of the Art Institute of Chicago, 111 S. Michigan Ave.
