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