William & Mary’s Muscarelle Museum of Art presents an illuminating exhibition of the Renaissance master’s drawings for the Sistine Chapel ceiling and ‘The Last Judgment.’
By Lance Esplund
The overwhelming grandeur, scope and vision of Michelangelo’s miraculous Sistine Chapel ceiling and “The Last Judgment” frescoes transcend reason and defy human capability. Comprising more than 600 figures, violent foreshortenings, and confounding, conflicting viewpoints, the paintings deliver such whirlwind frontal force, such sensuality, sublimity and nobility, that they can seem to have arrived fully formed—not from the hand of an artist but from that of a god. Still, we well know that Michelangelo Buonarroti (1475-1564) sweated, cussed and toiled. “Michelangelo: The Genesis of the Sistine,” a revelatory research exhibition at William & Mary’s Muscarelle Museum of Art, lets us peek behind the artist’s curtain.
Organized by Muscarelle curator of special projects Adriano Marinazzo, “The Genesis of the Sistine” celebrates the 550th anniversary of Michelangelo’s birth and is the first major presentation at the newly expanded museum (its sole venue), which reopened in February after a two-year renovation. But the genesis of “Genesis” goes back to 2012, when Mr. Marinazzo identified the enigmatic sketch on a Michelangelo-autographed sonnet (1506-08) as a diagram for part of the Sistine ceiling—likely the earliest surviving drawing for the chapel.
“Genesis” boasts only 38 objects—predominantly sheets from Florence’s Casa Buonarroti, home to the largest collection of Michelangelo’s drawings. But aesthetic excellence, daring scholarship and deft showmanship elevate “Genesis” to monumental scale. Michelangelo produced hundreds of preparatory sketches for the Sistine Chapel—most of which he burned, especially during his final days. Fewer than 50 drawings for the ceiling (1508-12) and roughly 15 for “The Last Judgment” (1536-41) are extant.
Twenty-five of those rarely exhibited sheets (studies for the ceiling, “The Last Judgment,” and/or the never-realized freestanding “Tomb of Pope Julius II”) constitute the heart of this enlightening show. Among its several sublime drawings are Michelangelo’s “Study for a Resurrected Christ, Recto” and “Study for a Christ the Judge, Verso” (both c. 1533), created in preparation for “The Last Judgment.” But their cinematic flurries of searching lines, elisions and pentimenti, though clearly by the Renaissance titan, evoke modernist, existential drawings by Paul Cezanne and Alberto Giacometti.
Michelangelo’s muscular “Resurrected Christ,” his arm raised as if wielding a hammer, seemingly extracts himself from stone. He occupies a mysterious realm between sitting and standing, between restraint and freedom. In the frenetic “Christ the Judge,” superimposed heads conjure a Lernaean Hydra. Christ stumbles forward, as if drunk or blind. These and other astounding studies serve as intimate chronicles of Michelangelo’s acts of probing, discovering, revising. But they also illumine the origins of the Sistine Chapel figures, which appear to be making and remaking themselves on the page, working out their own fates.
Mr. Marinazzo has thoroughly mined and reinterpreted Michelangelo’s drawing studies, which are tastefully installed in galleries painted a heavenly sky blue or sanguine red. The drawings are augmented by related artworks and artifacts, including Giuliano Bugiardini’s oil “Portrait of Michelangelo” (1522); prints by Giorgio Ghisi, Francesco Barbazza and Gustavo Tognetti; and a bronze portrait medal of Pope Julius II, who commissioned Michelangelo to sculpt his tomb and then demanded that the sculptor, instead, paint his Sistine Chapel ceiling.
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Image:
Installation view of “Michelangelo: The Genesis of the Sistine” at the Muscarelle Museum of Art. Photo: Adriano Marinazzo/Muscarelle Museum of Art