October 4, 2019

INDEXES ON
Newsstand Rate $2.00 Published by The Bee Publishing Company, Newtown, Connecticut PAGES 36 & 37

MIND
Of The
MASTER
BY JAMES D. BALESTRIERI
CLEVELAND, OHIO — As the exhibitions, essays and reconsidera-
tions mount in the quatercentenary of his birth, it seems to me that
Leonardo Da Vinci approached and solved artistic problems scientifi-
cally and scientific problems artistically. This is what is troubling
about the orb in the legendary (and now apparently invisible) “Salva-
tor Mundi” — the optics are unscientific and the handling of the reflec-

( continued on page 8C )
AT THE CLEVELAND MUSEUM OF ART

“Male Nude, Turning to the Right (study for the Battle of

Cascina fresco)” by Michelangelo Buonarroti (Italian, 1475- “Study of a Striding Male Nude (study for the Battle of Cascina fres-
1564), circa 1504 or 1506. Black chalk, 40.4 by 22.5 centime- co)” by Michelangelo Buonarroti (Italian, 1475–1564), 1504 or 1506.
ters. Teylers Museum, purchased in 1790. ©Teylers Museum, Black chalk, 40.4 by 25.8 centimeters. Teylers Museum, purchased in
Haarlem. 1790. © Teylers Museum, Haarlem.
8C — Antiques and The Arts Weekly — October 4, 2019

MIND Of The MASTER

“Three Draped Figures with Hands Joined” by Michelangelo Buonarroti

(Italian, 1475-1564), 1496-1503. Pen and brown ink, 26.9 by 19.4 centimeters.
Teylers Museum, purchased in 1790. ©Teylers Museum, Haarlem.

AT THE CLEVELAND MUSEUM OF ART

“Seated Male Nude (study for the Sistine Chapel ceiling)” by Michelangelo
Buonarroti (1475-1564), circa 1511. Red chalk with highlights in white lead,
27.9 by 21.4 centimeters. Teylers Museum, purchased in 1790. ©Teylers Muse-
um, Haarlem.

( continued from page 1C )
tion seems inartistic. By contrast, Leonardo’s con-
temporary and rival, Michelangelo — who is not to
be denied even in Da Vinci’s big year, as we shall see
— seems to approach and solve artistic and scien-
tific problems anatomically. That is, he sees and
measures the world’s phenomena in terms of and
against the architectonics of the human form.
Building on the recent blockbuster Michelangelo
drawing exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum of
Art, “Michelangelo: Mind of the Master,” now on
view at the Cleveland Museum of Art, presents 28
works from its own collection and a breathtaking
selection on a rare loan from the Teylers Museum in
Haarlem, the Netherlands.
The catalog contains a brief essay on the history of
the Teylers museum and another describing the
provenance and wanderings of the Michelangelo
drawings that are housed there. A true product of
the Enlightenment first opened to the public in
1784, the Teylers is a veritable “museaum,” a seat of
the muses, a collection of objects of art, science and
natural history that is meant not only to teach and
amaze, but to inspire. The muses live there, inhabit-
ing the objects, and those who enter are meant to be
charged with their energies as they go back out into
the world. The Michelangelo drawings themselves
were once owned by Queen Christina of Sweden, a
highly educated patron of the arts and sciences who
eventually abdicated the throne, converted to
Catholicism, moved to Rome and became a vital part
of the city’s artistic and political life. Carel van
Tuyll van Serooskerken’s essay on the history of the
drawings suggests that they were passed down from
artist to artist after Michelangelo’s death until they
reached a Dutch merchant who offered them to the
queen. Bequeathed to one of the Cardinals in Rome,
they passed from hand to hand until they entered
the Teylers collection in 1790. From a book that had
contained perhaps 100 drawings, only 32 remained.
Michelangelo believed that humankind was God’s
most perfect creation. To imitate the human body
was, therefore, the artist’s highest calling, and was
the nearest art could get to God. But this notion of
imitatio, as the Italian Renaissance masters under-
stood and practiced it, came to have a specific mean-
ing that transcends the concept of imitation as copy-
ing. In her catalog essay “Michelangelo: The Human
Form in Motion” exhibition curator Emily J. Peters
explains imitatio as she discusses two of Michelan-
gelo’s studies for the never completed “Battle of Cas-
cina” fresco. “Study of a Striding Male Nude” and
“Male Nude, Turning to the Right,” demonstrate, as
Peters writes, that whether the artist worked from
live models or not, he surely exceeded and idealized
what was in front of him: “The bodies of these fig-
ures pulse with life, but it is life poured into a sculp-
ture: stone enlivened. These monumental figures
embody the artist’s unique talent for assimilating
classical sculpture and nature’s primo modello (the
human body made in God’s image) in a process com-
bining memory and invention. Like a glorious decla-
ration of his own ambition, the figures not only imi-
tate nature, but attempt to improve upon it, a
process called imitatio (imitation), for which Michel-
angelo would become the paradigm among his con-
temporaries.”
Looking at these two drawings, seeing how the fig-
ures would have fit in the overall mural composi-
tion, which only survives in copies and prints, you
have to picture the scene: Michelangelo, the upstart,
working on one wall of the Sala del Gran Consiglio
in Florence’s Palazzo della Signoria while Leonardo,
the elder statesman, on the opposite wall, labors on
his commission depicting the Battle of Anghiari.
That this battle of titans striving to capture and
depict famous military triumphs ended without
issue when Michelangelo was summoned to Rome
and Da Vinci was called to Milan seems thoroughly
unjust.
For both Da Vinci and Michelangelo, representing
the torsion of the human body in motion, twisting in
space, was a paramount concern. The body under
stress, to them, expressed the inner life of the sub-
ject, the emotion of the moment, time stopped in an
instant of revelation. For Da Vinci, gesture and pose,
and the sfumato technique that blurs the edges
between things locates the body in nature. This, in
turn, expresses the psychology of the subject. For
Michelangelo, strain and sinew just as they are
about to burst from the skin, and the lines that then
define the subject’s limits — we might call this anat-
omy against nature — are what ultimately external-
ize and express that subject’s inner humanity.
The preparatory drawings that Michelangelo and
Da Vinci did for the Palazzo della Signoria proved to
be a primer for artists throughout Europe. How
inspiring would the finished frescos have been? We
can only imagine.
As opposed to Da Vinci, who valued — and sold —
his drawings and sought to preserve his notebooks,
Michelangelo was determined not to let the world
see his process. He believed that his reputation
would be enhanced if it seemed that his work was
almost divinely inspired, that it sprang whole, a
final product in its ultimate form, like Athena from
the head of Zeus. Some 600 extant drawings — out
of what must have been tens of thousands — are
now attributed to Michelangelo. He appears to have
shared most of these, generously, with other artists
who used them for study and as design ideas for
their own works. Others appear to have been pur-
loined, snatched from the flames to which he often
consigned his studies.
The exhibition stresses the newness of drawing as
paper became available as a cheaper alternative to
vellum and parchment. Red and black chalks became
part of the artist’s toolkit and the idea of disegno,
meaning both drawing and design, enters the aes-
thetic vocabulary. To cherish drawings, as Da Vinci
seemed to do, might have made him the outlier in
his time. For Michelangelo, the disegno is a tool, a
means to a greater end, something to be used and
discarded. His drawings are almost always double-
sided, scrawled on and over. He would take scissors
to parts of his drawings that didn’t please him, glue
new paper over the gaps, and press on with his work.
When we see his drawings, we truly are looking into
the mind of a master who didn’t want us to see his
mind at all.
Like all artists of the Renaissance, anatomy was a
key component of instruction. But Michelangelo
pushed further into the study of the human body
than most of his peers — Da Vinci excepted — antic-
ipating Rembrandt and others in his belief that sci-
entific understanding of what we call biomechanics
was essential to the practice of art. Vasari, the con-
 October 4, 2019 — Antiques and The Arts Weekly — 9C

“Study of a Male Nude (study for the Last Judgment fresco in the Sistine Cha-
pel)” by Michelangelo Buonarroti (1475-1564), circa 1537-38. Black chalk on
buff paper, 24.2 by 18.2 centimeters. Teylers Museum, purchased in 1790.
©Teylers Museum, Haarlem.
“Study for the Nude Youth over the Prophet Daniel (study for the Sis-
tine Chapel ceiling)” by Michelangelo Buonarroti (Italian, 1475-1564),
1510-11. Red chalk over black chalk; 34.3 by 24.3 centimeters. The Cleve-
land Museum of Art, gift in memory of Henry G. Dalton by his nephews
George S. Kendrick and Harry D. Kendrick.

“Study of a Left Leg (Study for the sculpture Day

in the Medici Chapel, Florence” by Michelangelo
Buonarroti (Italian, 1475-1564), 1524. Black chalk,
20.7 by 24.7 centimeters. Teylers Museum, pur-
chased in 1790. ©Teylers Museum, Haarlem.

temporary and great biographer of the Italian

Renaissance masters, asserts that “Michelangelo
took part in a human dissection at the Santo Spirito
hospital in the 1490s, writing, ‘in flaying dead bod-
ies, to study anatomical matters, [Michelangelo]
began to perfect the great sense of disegno that he
later acquired.’” “Studies of a Left Arm and a Shoul-
der,” a drawing executed circa 1515-20, shows that
the artist maintained a keen interest in the struc-
ture of human body throughout his career.
The ceiling of the Sistine Chapel needs no intro-
duction. In its magnificent panels, the central epi-
sodes of the Judeo-Christian narrative of creation
and salvation is expressed in terms of the human
body in space. Michelangelo’s masterpiece accommo-
dates the architecture of the chapel, fusing the story,
his “telling” of it, and the space into a single, unified
vision. Figures strain against and burst from the
curvature of the rectangles, spandrels and penden-
tives, springing directly from Michelangelo’s belief
that the pinnacle of beauty and harmony is to be
found in the human body. Peters writes, “Michelan-
gelo himself made the epistemological connection
between the human form and architecture, writing
in a letter around 1550 that ‘it is a certain thing,
that the members of architecture derive from the
members of man. Who has not been or is not a good
master of the human body, and most of all of anato-
my, cannot understand anything of it.’ For Michelan-
gelo, shape, proportion, and space were always root-
“Studies of a Left Arm and a Shoulder” by Michel-
angelo Buonarroti (Italian, 1475-1564), 1515-20.
Red chalk, partly retraced with pen and brown
ink, 46.3 by 20.1 centimeters. Teylers Museum,
purchased in 1790. ©Teylers Museum, Haarlem.
ed in the human body.” A number of extant drawings,
including “Section through the Dome of Saint Peter’s
with Alternative Designs for the Lantern and Fig-
ure Sketches,” demonstrate Michelangelo’s precept.
The scaffolding over the drawing of the male nude
at the bottom of the page seems to inspire the view
of the edge of the dome. Michelangelo transmutes
the outline of the head, shoulder and knee of the fig-
ure into the corner, cornices and ornaments on the
dome.
One last look, “Seated Male Nude (study for the
Sistine Chapel ceiling),” an ignudo painted near the
“Persian Sibyl” but perhaps is more closely connect-
ed to the panel depicting the “Separation of the
Earth from the Waters.” In red chalk heightened
with white, Michelangelo exposes every muscle and
bone; the strain on the body does not simply repre-
sent the rending of elements, it is the rending of ele-
ments: solid bone and supple muscle and skin is
solid rock and supple earth, compelled by God to
“Section through the Dome of Saint Peter’s with
Alternative Designs for the Lantern and Figure
Sketches” by Michelangelo Buonarroti (Italian,
1475-1564), 1547-54 or 1558-61 (architecture) and
1556-59 (figure sketches). Black chalk, some lines
drawn with a stylus, 39.9 by 23.5 centimeters.
Teylers Museum, purchased in 1790. ©Teylers
Museum, Haarlem.
tear themselves from flowing blood and the fluids of
the body that are the flowing fresh and salt waters
of the world. Here, for Michelangelo, the human
body is the universe, and the universe is the human
body.
The Cleveland Museum of Art is at 11150 East
Blvd. For more information, www.clevelandart.org
or 1-877-262-4748.