Michelangelo’s genius revealed in ‘Mind of the Master’ at Cleveland Museum of Art

CLEVELAND, Ohio – It’s hard not to feel sneaky when you view the magnificent new exhibition of drawings by Michelangelo that opens today at the Cleveland Museum of Art.

After all, Il Divino, the “divine one,’’ didn’t want you to see what the museum is serving up. He destroyed as many of his drawings as possible so as to avoid having contemporaries, not to mention posterity, peering over his shoulder, which is exactly what the exhibition enables you to do.

Michelangelo’s finished works, whether sculptures or the Sistine Chapel murals, or buildings he designed, have the magisterial inevitability of musical compositions by Beethoven.

But Michelangelo’s drawings allow you to see how he got there. Seeing them is like eavesdropping on a great composer at the keyboard, without his knowledge and certainly without his permission.

Limited supply

With 28 individual sheets, the show comprises nearly 5% of the world’s supply of Michelangelo drawings. Most sources agree that some 600 individual sheets survive out of the thousands or tens of thousands he is likely to have created.

Twenty-eight drawings may not sound like much for a show with a $15 admission, but 23 sheets are double-sided, so in reality, there are 51 individual sides to inspect. That’s plenty for an artistic experience of the kind that would normally require foreign travel.

Michelangelo Buonarotti (1475-1564) burned his drawings by the bushel for many reasons, including a desire to prevent imitators from ripping off his ideas, and to assert the primacy of his finished projects.

The exhibition’s catalogue underscores the point by quoting European nobles who begged the artist and designer for examples of his drawings, to no avail.

A sense of Michelangelo’s obdurate, pugilistic personality comes across in a portrait drawing of the master at age 75, by his protégé, Daniele da Volterra, showing the bump where Michelangelo’s nose was broken in a fight with another artist many years earlier.

The exhibition was organized by curators Emily Peters of the Cleveland museum and Julian Brooks of the J. Paul Getty Museum in Los Angeles, where it will travel next year after closing here Jan. 5.

Big lender

The show focuses on all 25 Michelangelo drawings from the Teylers Museum, founded in 1784 in Haarlem, the Netherlands, as the country’s first and oldest museum in continuous operation. The exhibition marks the first time this group of drawings has been shown in its entirety in the U.S.

Once owned by Queen Christina of Sweden (1626-1689), the collection was acquired by the Teylers in 1790 from Livio II Odescalchi of Rome. It is one of the largest hoards of Michelangelo drawings in the world.

In essence, the show enables you to watch the Italian High Renaissance unfold from the early to middle decades of the 16th century through studies by one of the greatest artists who ever lived for some of the most famous and universally admired artworks in existence.

The drawings traverse Michelangelo’s career from his early maturity as an artist in late 15th-century Florence to detailed anatomical studies of dissected corpses, and sketches for works completed at the height of his powers, including sculptures for the Tomb of Giuliano de’ Medici in Florence and the fresco murals in the Sistine Chapel in Rome.

The show is organized roughly in chronological manner in rooms with selected walls covered by massive photomurals of major finished works by Michelangelo, including the Sistine murals and the dome of St. Peter’s, shown in a panorama rising over the Roman skyline.

The drawings themselves occupy frames, most of them double-sided, set atop free-standing bases in front of the photomurals. The installation gives the drawings a commanding physical presence, while enabling viewers to circulate around them to see both sides easily.

Easy comparisons

The installation also enables you to compare the human figures in the drawings to those in the photo murals of completed works. The museum makes such comparisons easy with informative labels and graphic illustrations that highlight where to look in the photomurals to see how Michelangelo translated his drawings into finished works.

In its first room, the show provides context for Michelangelo’s pathbreaking style by displaying a small group of Italian Renaissance drawings from the museum’s own collection.

They include a “Saint Sebastian,’’ drawn circa 1493 by the Umbrian artist Pietro Perugino, who depicted the saint’s gracefully attenuated body with a tenderness bordering on androgyny, a style popular in the late 15th century.

Ambushed while skinny dipping

None of that for Michelangelo. The show’s second room climaxes with two vivid drawings from 1504-06 in black chalk depicting the muscular, twisting male bodies of Florentine soldiers caught skinny dipping while being ambushed by an invading force from Pisa.

Florence won the ensuing “Battle of Cascina,” and Michelangelo was commissioned by the city fathers commemorate the victory in a grand mural intended for the Palazzo Vecchio that he never finished because he was called away to assignments in Rome.

A large-scale copy of Michelangelo’s lost preparatory drawing for the battle scene, by Sebastiano da Sangallo, is displayed in a photomural behind Michelangelo’s astonishingly fresh Cascina nudes.

Other highlights include a radiant 1511 drawing in red chalk for the Sistine Ceiling, depicting a seated male nude leaning back with his left leg bent sharply and his weight bearing down on a perfectly drawn big toe.

The figure is one of the monumental nudes, or ignudi, whose twisting poses ornament the trompe-l’oeil architectural framework surrounding the Old Testament scenes that form the backbone of the ceiling.

Ripped

In today’s argot, Michelangelo’s ignudi are ripped. They have virtually zero body fat, and their poses enable them to show off their rippling abs, pecs and glutes. The result is a sense of embodied spiritual energy, communicated with a sense of power and awe that is lightyears apart from the delicacy of Perugino. Michelangelo’s contemporaries called this quality his terribilità.

As the drawings show, Michelangelo worked out the imaginative poses for his figures piece by piece.

The point is made clear by the sheets in which Michelangelo sketched the legs, arms and right hand of God as he appears on the Sistine ceiling, stretching out to give the reclining Adam the spark of life.

He drew and re-drew the separated parts of God’s body, elucidating how light would sculpt the muscles of a shoulder, the tendons of a forearm, or the sinewy complexities of a knee or an ankle.

It comes as a shock to see that the famous “Hand of God” is just one of five studies on its particular sheet, that it measures barely three inches across, and that it was cut out and glued to another page for some unknown reason before the Teylers restored it in 1952.

The hand is bent at the wrist, creating a break in the outward thrust of God’s life-giving gesture before it culminates in the regal uplift of his index finger, a final gesture of divine resolution and willpower.

The complexities of such gestures are a vital component of Michelangelo’s genius. Thanks to the show in Cleveland, you get to see how that creative spark ended up on delicate scraps of paper that have survived for centuries.

Preserved against Michelangelo’s will, they’ll display the masterful touch of his hand as long as paper and museums last.

REVIEW

What’s up: “Michelangelo: Mind of the Master.”

Venue: Cleveland Museum of Art

Where: 11150 East Blvd., Cleveland

When: Today through Sunday, Jan. 5.

Admission: $15 for adult non-members. Call 216-421-7340 or go to clevelandart.org.