The show is the culmination of intense coordination by curator Adriano Marinazzo, and some luck.
Dozens of drawings Michelangelo made while planning the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel will go on view at the Muscarelle Museum of Art after a monumental feat in networking and logistics by the Williamsburg, Virginia museum ahead of the Renaissance master’s 550th anniversary.
Curator Adriano Marinazzo, an architect and Michelangelo expert, has organized a show that offers an extremely rare chance to see 25 drawings that were used to plan for the celebrated ceiling and another fresco in the Sistine Chapel known as The Last Judgment.
Of those drawings, seven have never traveled to the United States. Most have never been shown together. In total, some 38 objects are going on view, including a famous portrait of Michelangelo in the time between his work painting the ceiling and The Last Judgment by his contemporary Giuliano Bugiardini.
“What he likely did, and this is a typical fresco sort of process, is make large drawings, putting them up on the ceiling and likely poking holes at various inflection points in the drawing,” museum director David Brashear said in a video call.
All of those “cartoons” were probably destroyed at the time they were used. In advance of those cartoons, he likely did hundreds, maybe thousands, of miniature drawing studies to work out compositional elements.
“He destroyed almost all of them before dying because he was feeling sick. He knew he was dying. He never created them for public display,” Marinazzo said. “Now less than 50 survive and we have almost half of those, and four in preparation for The Last Judgment.”
Brashear said the survivors, mostly preserved by Michelangelo’s nephew, are locked in dark boxes and only sanctioned by Italian authorities to leave for 12 weeks every few years. So Marinazzo painstakingly coordinated with Italian institutions and authorities to ensure the drawings would be available and not promised to another museum.
One drawing Marinazzo sought could not be loaned for this show, Brashear noted, because it had already been promised to the British Museum. Nevertheless, he commended Marinazzo’s effective coordination in securing notable examples for the College of William & Mary museum.
Earlier in his career, the Italian curator worked with the Casa Buonarroti, a museum dedicated to Michelangelo in the home he bought for his family when he found success. Marinazzo became close friends with Casa Buonarroti’s late director, Pina Ragionieri.
“You have to make sure that you can reassure the lenders that all of the best museum practices will be in place as you have them in your custody,” Brashear said. “Then, of course, they travel with couriers and are guarded all the way. It’s a complicated process. It’s very different from collecting and hosting an exhibition on, say, Cézanne paintings.”
Brashear added that the exhibition will include massive recreations of scenes from the Sistine Chapel ceiling, a showcase that came about because of the Muscarelle’s partnership with the Vatican Museums. “We’re not getting any drawings from them,” he said, “but we are getting their highest level of detail image files that we’re allowed to use in the exhibition.”
“That’s where it’s really going to become powerful for viewers,” Brashear added. “Like, ‘this is the head of one of the figures in the Sistine Chapel ceiling frescoes’ and ‘this is what it looks like in the final form, as Michelangelo put it up on the ceiling.’”
The idea for this exhibition was born in 2012, while he worked in Casa Buonarotti’s dusty archives, Marinazzo said. As he read Michelangelo’s letters, he spotted a sonnet with a sketch underneath that the artist likely sent to his friend Giovanni da Pistoia.
Visit artnet to read the full story!
Images:
Michelangelo, The Creation of Adam (1511). Courtesy of Vatican City, Sistine Chapel.
Adriano Marinazzo is pictured in 2012 at Casa Buonarroti studying Michelangelo’s original drawings. Courtesy of the Muscarelle Museum of Art.
Michelangelo Buonarroti, Study for the Prophet Zechariah (1508). Courtesy of Gallerie degli Uffizi, Gabinetto dei Disegni e delle Stampe, via the Muscarelle Museum of Art.
