Who is your favorite historical figure?
One person’s favourite ‘historical figure’ is most likely to be another person’s partial or total historical misrepresentation of the same figure. Michelangelo (‘in his last decades’) must have been awesome. According to some whose ‘favourite’ he is, we will not see that in the British Museum’s reconstruction of him in ‘Michelangelo: The last decades’? We see that exhibition on July 21st at 12.30. What should we expect? It convinces me however that having a ‘favourite historical figure’ is a fictitious and nonsensical belief.
Let’s put the word ‘favourite’ aside but not because of any failure of reverence in it. Museums as they reconstruct a person in their historical context work from the artefacts out, artefacts they often confuse with evidence of the real person. These artefacts include not just works of art – sculpture, painting, sketching, poetry and architecture – but family letters and letters to friends, patrons and even his own idols, like Vittoria Colonna, who looms large in the exhibition’s companion book by Sarah Vowles and Grant Lewis. But of course those artefacts are preselected by both historical accidents in their acquisition and through the filter of a curatorial view of the figure to be represented. Jonathan Jones writing for The Guardian clearly thinks that the accident of their acquisition explains a lot about the repertoire of evidence available to British curators but that this in itself does not exonerate a curation of that evidence that is deeply slanted and entirely loses from the view the historical figure of Michelangelo that Jones favours:
With all the masterpieces of world art that Britain’s rapacious collectors grabbed from hither and yon, couldn’t they have got their hands on a single statue by Michelangelo? No, the only original work in marble by the great sculptor, painter, architect and poet in a British collection is a circular relief owned by the Royal Academy. What we have instead are extensive holdings of his drawings in the British Museum and Royal Collection. Unfortunately, the BM’s hushed use of these works on paper to try to illuminate his later life shows what poor recompense they are.[1]
I read the book on which the exhibition is a companion and I found the Michelangelo in it compelling and his ‘life’ richly conveyed: not really comprehended by being described as a ‘hushed’ and approached over-reverently, though some critics did and found that approach appealing, such as Rachel Cooke in The Observer, whose review ends thus: ‘ By the time you reach the chapel-like recess at the exhibition’s end, you want to light a candle for him: a votive offering; a vow not to forget that he was a man as well as a god’[2]. Clearly for Rachel the reverence of the approach, and every critic describes the last room, called ‘Meditations’ in the book, as lit and with the feel of a place of ritual reverence, of divine silence if possible, not just ‘hush’. I also felt, before I read Jones, who expresses himself as a man let down by the curatorial misrepresentation of HIS ‘favourite historical figure’, so much so that he says of the same room Cooke felt her reverence of the man, and divine, in him at its height:
Still awake? If you are by this point in the exhibition, you’ve got me beat. I am obsessed with this artist, but I found it hard work. The exclusive focus on Michelangelo’s spiritual life short circuits not just his sexuality but also his artistry. Who is it aimed at? The Catholic Church may, I suppose, be happy.[3]
Rachel Cooke may overplay the reverence but Hettie Judah in The I Paper but she, and Rachel, if she’d tone down the reverence a bit, are still correct to see the reality of meditation on the ‘the body preparing to be raised from physical torment to spiritual eternity’ as he ‘fights against the frustration of his shaking hands and blurring vision’. [4]
After all, queer heroes age, and some queer heroes look to the beautiful redemption of the aged body. Nevertheless Jones is well known as a waspish writer but his take on the exhibition feels more personal in its venom against the recapture of the Catholic Church of his hero in relation to the model he gave of relatively open adoration of male bodies (even in his older age) , and of specific men, but also of the greatest expression of his plastic dynamics of his sculpture, poetry, architecture and painting art. In the second area he mentions I think Jones overstates, and so does even the laddish Eddy Frankel in Time Out who gives the exhibition 4 stars just for the insight of his frail but intensely moving Meditation drawings at the end and for work described by him, as ‘jaw-dropping, atmospheric, beautiful, powerful stuff’. With his usual man-on the street language however he does make the same point as Jones, if less waspishly – asking why the British Museum could not bring itself to celebrate how Michelangelo’s preferences for male bodies but speak of it as if something to kept under wraps and hinted at:
The first love explored is that for his friend Tommaso de’ Cavalieri, a young nobleman he met when summoned to Rome to paint the ‘Last Judgement’ in the Sistine Chapel. Michelangelo sent Tommaso drawings of gorgeous idealised male nudes, muscular bodies writhing and twisting. He wrote him letters filled with romance: ‘I am insensible to sorrow or fear of death, while my memory of you endures.’ Sure, they might have been just friends, but I’ve never said anything like that to my mate Gaz.
The implication is that there was more than just friendship at play here. Art historians have long speculated on Michelangelo’s sexuality – he died having never married or had children – but the British Museum is just awkwardly nudge-nudge wink-winking at it with these adoring letters and chalk nudes, rather than giving it a big celebratory exploration, which makes it all feel a bit too dark and secret to feel like a positive thing.[5]
Whilst I spared a moment for Gaz’s unnoticed pain for not getting Eddy’s adoration, Eddy has a point, and it’s the same as Jones’, that the downplaying of the connection to beautiful men. And its restriction here to an artistic collaborator and patron only is misleading and robs from why I love the ‘historical figure’ of Michelangelo, despite the frustrating bad temper, But the point is he and Hettie Judah both note that Michelangelo ‘had his head entirely turned in this period by the beautiful young nobleman Tommaso de’ Cavalieri. The older man expressed his love through poetry and the gift of exquisite drawings, among the finest in this exhibition, derived from dramatic episodes in Ovid’s Metamorphoses’.[6] Both Eddy and .Hettie acknowledge the expression of male love and see it as intended to come across from the curators and attach it to his best art, so is Jones merely having an extreme hissy fit about his hero being misrepresented. I surprise myself however by coming to Jones’ defence, for it is the disembodiment of the love for men described by the curators (in fact is hinted at throughout but is that any better) that gets the man, his art, and (perhaps) even his religion wrong. Here is Jones (my emphases) speaking of those drawings as:
ravishing, highly charged scenes from Greek myth he drew as love gifts for Tommaso de’ Cavalieri, a young man for whom he formed a passionate, public longing. That’s quite exciting, no? In the 21st century, Michelangelo’s eloquently expressed and philosophically defended love for another man should make him a pioneer. But that’s not how this show tells it. Instead, it describes them as “friends” and avoids any erotic interpretation of the drawings. Thus Tityus, a lushly shaded image of a mighty eagle settling on a naked youth, is interpreted as a “warning against lust”, when anyone can see it’s infused with desire.
Above it is a wall text selectively and misleadingly quoting one of Michelangelo’s letters to Tommaso. He tells Tommaso he is no more likely to forget his name than he is likely to forget to eat food: then a “dot dot dot” covers a crucial cut. What the ellipsis misses out is Michelangelo telling Tommaso he means more to him than food because while it only sustains his body, his beloved nurtures “both body and soul”.
Body and soul. You cannot have Michelangelo’s soul without his body. Take away the body from Michelangelo and you deaden him. It doesn’t even take on the Neoplatonist ideas that shape his drawings. According to these, the love of beauty can lead the soul upwards to heaven: they allowed Michelangelo to show men embracing and kissing in The Last Judgment itself, visible here in this show when you look hard enough at a print of it.
This is surely true, but it does not account entirely for Jones’ failure to see anything in this exhibition,(if it mirrors the accompanying book and I will see), that is not only beautiful but comes from the same ‘historical figure’ that obsesses him. Obsession is Jones’ word and it is no basis for evaluation of a man, however divine his art, who should be allowed to represent the contradictory of his own time. And there is a danger of over-reading the pedantry of the art historian, such as that of the curators. The y may use the same word (‘friend’) to describe two associates but that does not mean that they infuse that word with the same meaning – asexuality and / or chastity:
The exhibition is all too glad to move on from physical desire to theology. It makes much of Michelangelo’s friendship with the poet Vittoria Colonna. This relationship in letters and verse genuinely was chaste, as is pedantically set out. We are clearly meant to see Michelangelo’s friendships with Cavalieri and Colonna as exact parallels, equally asexual.
If they intended that, Sarah Vowles and Grant Lewis did not achieve it for me. And I don’t for a minute think they intended that, though I am no great friend of the kind of discourse that thinks sexuality is a matter of the private life only, as we know it was not for the artist and its blazoning in his art. In fact Rachel Cooke shows that the sexualised male body remains central to the show (although it remains uncertain if her sensuous appreciation is sensual) but that it can delight as a reading rather than as an instruction how to see the art. Look at the art and read this commentary, as luscious an appreciation of male muscle as I could make myself, but tinged too with the infinite meanings of what Michelangelo could have understood as ‘creation’ (as Judah sees it) or resurrection as I see it:
Michelangelo’s Study of a Man Rising (1534-6): ‘a metaphor for creation itself’. Photograph: © Trustees of the British Museum
I could, I think, stare at Study of a Man Rising (about 1534-36) for an hour – a day! – and not tire of it, though its anatomical precision (the artist used a life model) is not precisely the point. These shoulder blades and upper arms, their rippled sinews almost kinetic in effect, are a metaphor for creation itself (“So God created man in his own image…”). I looked at them and thought of a brook, fast water rushing over smooth stones. And beyond such treasures, the curators give us storytelling of the highest order, Michelangelo’s voice ever in our ear.[7]
However, all critics tend to be sniffy about the very collaborators with which Michelangelo chose to work as he became more infirm – too infirm to paint his own designs for instance, The exception is Hettie Judah who expresses what I felt but better about how we should see the difference between the Master’s preparatory sketches and the apprentices’ final products. She just admires the belief in collaboration, the forgiveness of less skills marring one’s vision. This helped me enormously and will when I see the exhibition:
The dramatic positioning of their figures and their twisting drapery derive from detailed preparatory drawings by Michelangelo. This was part of an ongoing collaboration between the two artists that allowed Michelangelo to satisfy the enormous demand for his work in the years where his health started to limit his output.
Even with Michelangelo laying the groundwork, such collaboration required extraordinary skill, and must have been based on great trust. One of the show’s most fascinating pairings is an enormous cartoon (preparatory drawing) known as the Epifania (c.1550-3), made in black chalk on 26 sheets of paper joined with flour paste. Michelangelo seems to have given the cartoon to the writer and painter Ascanio Condivi – perhaps as thanks for his “authorised” biography of the artist. Condivi’s finished painting is shown here side by side with the cartoon for the first time since it was made. It does not fare well by comparison, and certainly illustrates the skill required by Venusti and Michelangelo’s other collaborators.[8]
To give a taste of what she means compare below in the collage Venusti’s realisation of the preparatory master sketch of the drama of the cleansing of the Temple by Christ. Venusti is stiff, over-reduces his figures in contrast to temple architecture and in dressing the models loses the bodily dynamism of the sketch. But still collaboration and trust have worth in themselves, a poor realisation does not impoverish what Michelangelo recognises as his ‘invention’.
Judah too speaks with final authority on the last drawings and I cannot wait to see those, but not just the meditative crucifixions done for his own private contemplation not as preparation for another, lest the other be the Trinity. Any subject he took was ‘a poignant subject for an artist facing up to their own mortality’, in Judah’s words. And I will forever be grateful to Vowles and Lewis for their potent discussion of this work and its technique of constant layering to correct, with eradicating the pentimenti thus created, even if it meant the Virgin has three visible arms, so that the figures quiver, fade into obscurity rather than clarity. This description feel’s profound to me and will help me look at the original sketches, emphasising that ‘restless revisions and reinventions’ turn drawings ‘into conceptual’ (I would prefer the term (my own) ‘conceptual-emotive – sensual’) palimpsests in which Michelangelo’s changes tend to obfuscate, rather than clarify, the underlying forms’.[9] One I cannot wait to see is that known as the Warwick Pietà. Jones would probably, had he bothered to look, which it seems he didn’t, have thought the authors of the book’s take on this ignorant of its overt sexuality, one aligned mysteriously with felt bodily pain, that brought together the religious pathology that was his path to God; the adored male body accesses spirituality even in an aged Michelangelo. The authors say: ‘The Christ of the Warwick Pietà is strained and broken, his beautiful physique undermined by his ungainly pose, which draws attention to the frailty of his body’.[10]
Look as I may I do not see the ungainly or the ‘undermined’. Michelangelo the authors tell us, oft drew the dead body of Christ in the pit of his mother’s knees, as here, but surely this is an arcane showing of the return and rebirth from the Immaculate Mother’s womb, a return from her body, which is also fully realised in youthful breasts. The conception is beautiful but the pain of birth, death and renewal is all on the layers of drawing that disfigure Christ’s face. And look at that detail, the face that overlooks Christ’s with its eyes open in shocked horror. There are many nuances in this, not least the fact that the artist needed to express his own doubts that death may be final as in that face. Even Mary and (is it) Martha may be doubles mother – the one at the back supporting the despairing mother at the front. The authors point to the link of these private ‘meditations’ to the late poems, and quote this in order to read why the revisions in these pictures proliferate but remain as layered drama and nuance – in the external scene and in inner consciousness. In this section Michelangelo’s compares human Error (a word that could indicate sin) with faults in over-hasty drawing, considers it the rule of his former life and looks towards a more exact delineation of heavenly and human truth:
My innumerable thoughts, all full of error, Ought to be, in the last years of my life, Reduced to a single one, which then may act As a guide towards its serene, eternal days.
Despite the Platonism to which Michelangelo remained true (the belief in the One) this I read as quite ironic = I ought to see life as reduced and uncomplicatedly serene but I don’t, is what I hear, As long as it is lived, life is full of error, the pentimenti of doubt and uncertainty, and that goes too for a man in whom the dynamic and even sexual in the body, though he was told it was error was his way to salvation. That, after all, is the meaning of his The Last Judgement, of which I can’t wait to see more beautiful drawings, for it s of the beginning of these last decades. The Michelangelo of this period was no Victoria Colonna, though I don’t doubt his sincerity to that poet. When he wrote back a sonnet in thanks for her sending him a hand-written version of her volume, he used his sonnet to uphold her belief in ‘justification by faith alone’ (not yet a damnable offence awaiting inquisitional torture, but to show how unworthy he was. However he was writing to another Petrarchan sonneteer who knew such humility as a rhetorical device of the Petrarchan sonnet, usually found in sonnets not considered to be really unworthy at all by their authors and a common device in Petrarch himself, copied too by Shakespeare, Sidney, Henry Howard and Spenser in England. My thoughts ‘ought to be, what they aren’t, and I am glad they aren’t. Life must be rich till its very end. And indeed Michelangelo’s very late sculptures show us this reduced form. See the San Spirito Crucifixion for instance. It is not Michelangelo as we like to remember him, is it: (it is merely a devout icon, though beautiful it is conventional:
I know I will have more to say when I have seen this exhibition with hubby Geoff and friend Catherine and there is more to say of this lovely book. And, after all, if you genuinely have a ’favourite historical figure’ it ought be favourite in the multiplicities of what the figure is to many diverse people.
[9] by Sarah Vowles and Grant Lewis (2024: 217) Michelangelo: The Last Decades, London, The British Museum Press.
Here is Michelangelo as we like to remember him. It is a sketch for The Last Judgement.
With all my love
Steven xxxxxxxx
[1] Jonathan Jones (2024) ‘Michelangelo: The Last Decades is at the British Museum, London, until 28 July’ in The Guardian (Tue 30 Apr 2024 00.01 BST) Available at: https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2024/apr/30/michelangelo-last-decades-review-british-museum
[2] Rachel Cooke (2024) ‘Michelangelo: The Last Decades review – feels close to a religious experience’ in The Observer (Sun 5 May 2024 09.00 BST).
[3] Jonathan Jones, op.cit.
[4] Hettie Judah (2024) ‘Michelangelo: The Last Decades, British Museum review: Painfully mortal – and divine’ in The i Paper (April 30, 2024, 12:01 am(Updated May 1, 2024, 10:12 am). Available at: https://inews.co.uk/culture/arts/michelangelo-the-last-decades-british-museum-review-3030861
[5] Eddy Frankel (2024) ‘review’ in Time Out (Tuesday 30 April 2024) available at: https://www.timeout.com/london/art/michelangelo-the-last-decades
[6] Hettie Judah op.cit.
[7] Rachel Cooke, op.cit.
[8] Hettie Judah op.cit.
[10] Ibid: 209
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