The Brooklyn Rail

Surveys of the later careers of important artists are often risky affairs. For every exhibition that rightly redresses the neglected late work of a particular artist, there is another that unwittingly confirms the impression of stagnation or decline. Yet, in the case of one of the most famous of all artists, the sculptor-painter-poet-architect Michelangelo Buonarroti (1475-1564), who lived until he was nearly 90, we must modify our usual expectations of apex and trajectory. Never neglected by art history, Michelangelo busily chiseled and painted canonical works well into his 60s. One can hardly wonder that, after a parade of stupendous courses, few pause to consider whether the mignardises are equal to les plats principaux of the feast of his heroic lifetime.

Michelangelo’s very late work—again, his fairly late work’s greatness is taken for granted—has generally been overlooked and undervalued by non-specialists. Beyond a clutch of more ambitious works, such as the disturbing Rondanini Piétà, whose oddity is occasionally explained as a sort of supra-prescient foray into Modernism, the vast majority of these later creations are poems, drawings, and designs intended for the contemplation or profit of close associates and intimate friends; there is a reason for this. Beyond the physical hindrances of advancing age, the very late Michelangelo was consumed with redesigning and building New St. Peter’s. He did not have time for much else.

What, then, is a curator to do when representing Michelangelo’s latest stage? Given that the Vatican does not lend its basilica, and large-scale mural paintings and marbles are notoriously hard to move, it was probably inevitable that the current exhibition at the British Museum, Michelangelo: The Last Decades, focuses on the artist’s drawings. It was perhaps less obvious that the curators should do what they did with that fact: make a strength of Michelangelo’s full-bodied embrace of paper as his working medium, bringing numerous drawings into conversation with manuscript examples of his letters and poems.

It is not that the famous projects of the aging master are entirely ignored. Grounding the exhibition is a room dedicated to preparatory drawings for the iconic Last Judgment (c. 1534-41), a commission that marked the older Michelangelo’s permanent removal from Florence to Rome. Yet, beyond surveying these and other drawings made for his last frescoes in the Pauline Chapel (c.1542-1550), the exhibition explores the older artist’s changing relationship to patronage and medium, offering an especially rich account of Michelangelo’s growing, if complicated, embrace of collaboration.

The burdens of work and age did not mean that Michelangelo was not ambitious about everything. Whether depicting mythological allegories for his young crush, Tomasso dei Cavalieri, or devotional dramas for his poet-friend, Vittoria Colona, the aging artist helped pioneer the development of the “presentation drawing” (so-called because such drawing was not preparatory but rather conceived as a finished work of art). Taking advantage of the relative ease and economy of drawing, not to mention the open-endedness of the medium, he created works with few equivalents in his time. These included devotional works like a Christ on the Cross (c. 1543) for Colonna that circumvented many of the conventions of orthodox sacred art at a moment when some more free-wheeling religious thought was still allowed (soon it would not with the arrival of the Counter-Reformation). These chalk drawings are so subtle and fine that it is hard to imagine how they were made: one contemporary remarked that the modeling looked as if it was rendered with the artist’s breath.

The exhibition also shows how these drawings were often entwined with Michelangelo’s epistolary and poetic efforts. After all, he was one of the leading poets of his age, and his life as a writer of letters and poems is also conveyed by pertinent examples from his manuscripts. All these works on paper—drawings, poems, and letters—were borne back and forth by trusted servants between Michelangelo and his friends. They facilitated a strange quasi-solitary contemplative community. Michelangelo’s was a special republic of letters whose boundaries encompassed both visual and textual expression.

A particularly fine feature of this show is its display of some of Michelangelo’s preparatory drawings and cartoons alongside the finished works derived from them. Seeing that many patrons in the period were happy with an image designed by Michelangelo but executed in paint by someone else, Michelangelo put his stamp on more creative work than his physical strength and scarce time would otherwise allow. Judged side-by-side in this way, the works of collaborators, above all Marcello Venusti, can be considered in a sympathetic light as effective realizations of Michelangelo’s ideas. Less successful, but utterly fascinating, is another pairing of one of Michelangelo’s two surviving full-scale cartoons called the Epifania with the painting made using it by Michelangelo’s pupil and biographer, Ascanio Condivi. The two works have not been seen together for centuries. Presented side by side, one illuminates the other, the painting allowing us to understand parts of the cartoon obscured by its condition. Although the ancient title Epifania (“Epiphany”) has often seemed ill-suited to describing the cartoon’s presentation of the Holy Family with unidentified onlookers, the title may make more sense when the work is seen with its painted companion. The man who enters on the left questioning the Virgin appears to want to know more about Christ’s paternity. With her left hand, Mary simultaneously singles out the brooding Joseph while separating herself and her child from him. The other onlookers appear invested in what she tells the man, each registering her answer differently.

It bears saying that Michelangelo’s total division of invention from execution was far from common, and the exhibition’s focus on this tactic aligns with questions about authority and authorship in our time. Even so, the climax of this exhibition comes in a round gallery near its end featuring things that were entirely Michelangelo’s own, his last drawings of the Crucifixion (c.1555-1563). Here the artist obsessively probed this seminal moment in the salvational history of humankind, attempting to come to terms with what, for a sincere Christian, was an infinite subject. Again and again, Michelangelo hung his Christ, varying his apparent weight and physical comportment on the cross. Approaching Christ from different angles, Michelangelo traced and retraced boundaries, deepened shadows, and reimagined the reaction of Christ’s spectators, their affliction undoubtedly mirroring his own. Ungainly as they are moving, these Christs often make no logical sense: their relationship to the cross, to space, and other figures being far from certain. Michelangelo appears to have been searching for something unfathomable in these works. There is no resolution in sight. Rather they stand as the scattered outcome of acts of personal devotion that paralleled or provoked the artist’s contemplation. Collectively, they appear as forceful attempts to substantiate the insubstantial, to continuously secure the actualities of Christ’s dying. We leave the arc of art history behind here: Michelangelo’s sense of time was different than ours. In advance of old age, Michelangelo had worked for others; his terminal accomplishment—the only one that ultimately mattered—was to comprehend what Christ’s death meant for his own.