The Drawings of Michelangelo and His Followers in the Ashmolean Museum

P 1 : KsF
0521551331 c 01 -p 3 a CUNY 160 /Joannides 052155 133 1 January 11 , 2007 10 : 18

CATALOGUE 53 WHOLLY OR PARTIALLY AUTOGRAPH SHEETS 251

and too long for a scroll, and it may well be the side

of a coat of arms, in which case this figure would be

one of a pair of supporters. Such arrangements are com-

mon in Roman painting and sculpture of the155 0s and

15 6 0s, and Michelangelo might have devised several: The

forms of coats-of-arms appealed to him and he devoted

much attention to those of the Medici placed below

the reliquary chamber in San Lorenzo, and to those of

the Farnese above the central window of thepiano nobile

of their palace. In his last years, he was planning the

Porta Pia, which displays the centrally placed shield bear-

ing the arms of Pope Pius IV, supported by a pair of

angels. The shield, carved by Jacomo del Duca and one

Luca, no doubt from Michelangelo’s design, was paid for

in May15 6 2; the supporting angels were executed only

three years later, after Michelangelo’s death, by Nardo

de’Rossi, but they are sufficiently Michelangelesque in

type to make it plausible that they too reflect the master’s

ideas, and it seems plausible, if no more than conjec-

tural, that the figure drawing on the verso of the present

sheet could have been made in preparation for one of

them.

The architectural drawings, confined to the verso, were

drawn over the figure study. The main one is obviously

fragmentary. It shows two columns or half-columns – the

treatment of the bases indicates toruses – flanking a round-

topped shell-headed niche. Above the niche, truncated,

there seems to be a rectangular, perhaps square, panel.

In the later155 0s and early15 6 0s, Michelangelo was

engaged in planning several buildings and, in their var-

ious transformations – whose number no doubt much

exceeded those that we now know – some of these

included columns and others columns with niches.

Among those for which drawings survive are the Porta

Pia – the interior gate facing the new via Pia, situated

at the city side of a compound extending inwards from

the walls proper and intended to be complemented by an

exterior gate, actually set into the walls – but no com-

parable columns are indicated in any of the preparatory

drawings, and there are none in the structure as finally

built. The fac ̧ade of the Palazzo dei Conservatori finally

included columns in a subsidiary role, but at one stage in

the preliminary process paired columns were planned to

be more important (see Cat. 56 verso); however, niches