Michelangelo’s perfection of the embodied mind
MICHELANGELO The last decades British Museum, until July 28
MICHELANGELO The last decades
SARAH VOWLES AND GRANT LEWIS 256pp. British Museum Press. £35.
MEDIEVAL MYSTICS WENT INTO RAPTURES over the “sweet lean” of the crucified Christ’s head. No one did head-leaning, tilting and turning more momentously and unexpectedly than Michelangelo Buonarroti (1475–1564). As well as the astonishingly varied heads of his dead and dying Christs, we have only to think of wobbly Bacchus, languid Adam, the Anglepoise Slaves, Medici Chapel Dawn and Madonna, St Peter … Thanks in large part to Michelangelo, “How to tilt heads” would become a standard exercise in the first art academies.
His copyright in this field is established with the opening work at the British Museum’s Michelangelo: The last decades, a largely chronological display of autograph drawings and related paintings, prints, letters, poems and books, focusing on the final Roman period. We are greeted in the first room by the arrestingly grizzled drawing of the by then biblically old Old Master (Michelangelo was in his late seventies) by his pupil Daniele da Volterra. A life-size cartoon, pricked for transfer, the drawing was the basis for the head of a gesturing, outlooking bystander in Daniele’s fresco of the Assumption of the Virgin (1555) for a Roman chapel. Daniele makes his master’s head lean so sharply away from the action that a doctor might diagnose acute torticollis. The lean underscores not only how the weight of the
Catholic world rested on this melancholic head (Michelangelo was architect of the new St Peter’s), but also how he had perfected the embodied mind, suspended between rise and fall, waking and sleeping, life and death, triumph and tragedy.
Michelangelo moved permanently from Florence to Rome in 1534, aged fifty-nine, after being commissioned to paint the Last Judgment by the Medici Pope Clement VII, leaving behind the still unfinished Medici Chapel. Clement had pardoned him in 1530 for his participation in the short-lived Florentine Republic, established after the opportunistic expulsion of the Medici regime when Rome had been sacked in 1527 by Spanish-led troops, many of them Protestant mercenaries. Added incentives were Michelangelo’s blossoming relationship with the handsome and cultivated young nobleman Tommaso de’ Cavalieri, whom he had met in Rome in 1532, and the installation of the tyrannical Alessandro de’ Medici as Duke of Florence.
Michelangelo sent Cavalieri, who was learning how to draw, a celebrated series of highly finished chalk drawings of mythological subjects, some taken from Ovid, others of his own devising. They were accompanied by overwrought letters and love poems, some of which
