The Drawings of Michelangelo and His Followers in the Ashmolean Museum

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266 WHOLLY OR PARTIALLY AUTOGRAPH SHEETS CATALOGUE 55

aediculed niche on the first landing of the Conservatori’s

stairway, and noted a faint figural outline in the central

aperture in the present drawing, suggesting that the niche

was planned for statuary. He concluded that it should be

dated to c.15 6 2– 3.

Nevertheless, while Morrogh’s observations seem to

the compiler wholly accurate, his conclusion does not

necessarily follow. The refined detail of the decoration,

fully appropriate to Palazzo Farnese, is quite alien to the

mode that Michelangelo adopted in the Conservatori,

where he employed broader and heavier forms. The style

of the chalk underdrawing, with firm thin lines ruled in

black chalk, with the fine detail of masks, guttae, garlands,

etc., inserted in precise and fully controlled freehand

drawing, strongly suggests a date no later than c.155 0.

What seems to have happened is that a drawing made

in the late15 4 0swas re-worked – and simplified – by

Michelangelo shortly before his death, in order to serve

as a model for the tabernacle on the main staircase of the

palace (a conclusion also reached by Elam, 2001 ). As the

facsimile copy of the recto in the Fogg Museum shows,

this was originally drawn with a thin line and sharp chalk –

and, like CB 65 A, without wash. Michelangelo then re-

worked the image with a thicker chalk, partly freehand,

partly roughly ruled, and added wash. This is particularly

evident at the base, where three parallel lines have been

extended across the drawing, and at the inner sides of the

niche, where he extended the elaborate moulding into a

flat flange, thin on the right and quite wide on the left.

This narrows the central aperture in relation to the axial

vertical, more so at left than right. At the left, the wider

inner flange seems to break forward at capital level into a

rectangular undecorated block, quite close to the style of

CB 97 A. At upper right he also sketched the outline of a

triangular pediment to cover the segmental one, a solu-

tion that looks back to the inner door of the reading room

of the Laurentian Library. Indeed, although this design

was initially made for a window frame and was finally

employed as a statuary niche, Michelangelo also consid-

ered employing it for a door, since he sketched steps at the

bottom. Furthermore, although it is not easy to descry, he

seems to have indicated two columns or pilasters, one on

either side, with bases. These were drawn after the new

framing and would further have simplified the forms. The

copyist who made the drawing now in the Fogg Museum

clearly indicated a column on the left side. Although the

draughtsman obviously had difficulty understanding fully

Michelangelo’s original, it was no doubt more legible

when he copied it than it is now.

The present drawing would not have been used for

constructing the tabernacle; a fair copy would have been

prepared under Michelangelo’s supervision by an assistant,

probably Tiberio Calcagni.

It is interesting to compare the present drawing with

one made in preparation for the aedicule in the entrance

hall of the Conservatori. This sheet, CB 97 A, carries

on its recto sketches for the Porta Pia and, perhaps, the

revised attic of St Peter’s, which implies aterminus post

quemof early 1561 .CB 97 Averso for the aedicule, made

with a straight edge with minimal freehand re-working,

is precise and exact, with little indication of a shaking

hand. The technique is entirely Michelangelesque, and

there is no justification for the commonly held view that

it is by an assistant. It seems improbable that it should have

been made more than a year or two before the beginning

of the construction of the Conservatori in June 1563

and, like some of the initial drawings for the Porta Pia,

it shows that when using a straight-edge, Michelangelo’s

handling exhibits fewer signs of his age. In contrast, in

the re-working of the present drawing, one senses that

manual command is departing. Concerned, in his last

months of life, to maintain control over the forms of his

building, now being erected, but finding new invention

hard if not impossible, Michelangelo re-worked old

designs, either unused, or used in modified form, rather

than creating new ones. Indeed, much of the architectural

detail of the Conservatori is backward-looking. Thus,

the doors that run along the front of the building are

virtual repetitions of that designed by Michelangelo

exactly thirty years earlier for the first-storey cloister of

the monastery of San Lorenzo, through which the visitor

enters the corridor leading to the Reliquary Tribune in

the church (see Cat. 38 ), a beautiful invention but one

so relatively little known that Michelangelo probably felt

few qualms in re-using it.

Verso

The verso is complicated. Some of the sketches are for

St. Peter’s, as de Tolnay first noted, others seem to have

been done in preparation for San Giovanni dei Fioren-

tini, and still others, for the staircase in thericettoof the

Laurentian Library.

The difficulty of interpreting such abbreviated sketches

is exacerbated by the fact that forms planned to be perpen-

dicular to one another in reality were drawn by Michelan-

gelo as though they were in the same plane, and that he

drew curved forms as though they were straight (the last

is also a feature of his full-size constructional drawing for

the wooden model of the drum of St. Peter’s, CB 31 A; see

Cat. 56 ). The most important of the sketches is A, which

represents two bays of the drum in elevation: de Tolnay

did not recognise this, but Morrogh may have done so;