DRAWINGS OF MICHELANGELO

Drawings of Michelangelo

Drawings of Michelangelo

Introduction

Michelangelo, a compulsive drawer whose most exquisite creations are the subject of a major exhibition at the Courtauld Institute Galleries, was being typically Florentine when he asserted that "Design, which by another name is called drawing . . . is the fount and body of painting and sculpture and architecture and of every other kind of painting and the root of all sciences." The preliminary drawings of artists are here seen as essential to the advancement of learning as the technical drawings made or commissioned by mathematicians, engineers, doctors and scientists.

Discussion

The technical similarities between drawing and writing also added hugely to the former's allure and status. Florence had the highest literacy rates in Europe, and was justifiably proud that Dante, Petrarch and Boccaccio had established Tuscan as the pre-eminent Italian tongue. Artists wanted to share in that prestige, and establish the visual arts as a major liberal art. The two pre-eminent Tuscan draftsmen, Leonardo and Michelangelo, were also the most literate, and their sketches are interspersed with texts written in an elegant, calligraphic script. Michelangelo's drawings are interspersed with his own poems, and extracts from the Tuscan greats. Later collectors of drawings concurred: they bound them into books and kept them in their libraries. It is no accident that literature-loving England has the greatest collections of old master drawings, including those by Michelangelo.

Michelangelo furnishes us with the first and most famous "but can he draw?" anecdote. Vasari reports how they both visited Titian's temporary studio in Rome, and were confronted by a steamy nude painting of Danaë being inseminated by Jupiter in the guise of a shower of gold. Her pose derives from Michelangelo's sculpture Night in the Medici Chapel. Michelangelo, having praised Titian's colour and style, regretted that in Venice painters did not learn how to draw methodically from the start of their careers - what a great artist Titian would have been if only he knew how to draw! (Wallace, 2011)

Vasari smugly adds that if the artist "has not drawn a great deal and studied carefully selected ancient and modern works, he cannot by himself work well from memory or enhance what he copies from life". Here, priority is given to "intelligently" drawn line over "instinctively" painted colour, and this became an article of faith for all future art academies: the first director of the French Academia Royale, founded in 1648, asserted that, without drawing, painters would not rank any higher than colour grinders, the lackeys who prepared pigment.

Yet Michelangelo's attack on Venetian painting points to a serious flaw in the argument. One can compile an extremely impressive list of great (and mostly unliterary) artists who got by nicely without bothering unduly with drawing. They displayed not so much graphic ineptitude as indifference. Giorgione, Titian, Caravaggio, Hals, Velázquez and Vermeer seem to have painted directly on to the canvas, just incising or brushing in a few outlines. Indeed, drawing as a major art form has been in spasmodic but continuous decline since ...