The Drawings of Michelangelo and His Followers in the Ashmolean Museum

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

272 WHOLLY OR PARTIALLY AUTOGRAPH SHEETS CATALOGUE 56

half garlands tie the top corners of the tablet to the outer

sections of the pediment, which break forward slightly.

That motif is deconstructed and re-distributed here, tran-

formed into a garland that hangs above the tablet and two

volutes, one either side of the table, which act as support-

ers. Michelangelo modified his old design in other ways.

He included, rather faintly, a segmental pediment outside

the triangular one, a doubling that he had first undertaken

in practice in the interior door of the Laurentian reading

room. Within this tablet, Michelangelo has written the

phrase “chi no[n] vuol delle foglie/ no[n] ci [venga di] maggio,”

areal or invented proverb that might loosely be translated

as: “If you don’t want leaves, don’t come here in May.”

This might suggest that the door was planned for a garden

but Morrogh ingeniously argued that the leaves are those

of books, and that the inscription refers to the contents

of a library or an archive, thus maintaining for this door

the same role as its Florentine prototype.

In relation to that prototype, the forms of the present

structure are heavier, the mouldings of the interior frame

are more elaborate, and the planar play of elements within

the pediment zone are much more complex. It would

seem that sometime after Michelangelo had made his

drawing, he re-worked it. The first redaction would be

defined by the sharply and very carefully ruled multiple

lines that mark the outer edges of the frame and the top

of the triangular pediment. It seems likely that, at this

first stage, the drawing was made purely in line. If so,

then it was in a second stage that Michelangelo added

profiled consoles at the sides of the frame of the door

that matched frontal consoles within the frames and small

protrusions to the left and right near the base of the door,

where it would be set against, perhaps, a wainscotting.

All these elements seem to be drawn in a slightly broader

line technique than the first stage, and in all of them,

wash plays an important role in defining their volumes.

Comparison between, say, the inner triangular and the

outer segmental pediment makes it clear that the former

is sharply drawn and precisely defined, but the latter is

outlined quite loosely, without concern for regularity, and

that wash is used to evoke its forms. All the additions,

which are defined primarily in wash rather than line, are

likely to be a few years later than the main part of the

door. It may be that it was only during this re-working

that Michelangelo added wash.

If this suggestion is accurate, this re-worked drawing

was then re-worked a second time. The console seen in

elevation in the right-hand side of the frame, and perhaps

that on the left too, seems to have been eliminated with

areas of white body colour, presumably to simplify the

design. There seems to have been subsequent application

of wash and perhaps further body colour, now oxidised

and faded, over the table, and a series of six horizon-

tals was drawn across the upper part of the portal frame,

eliminating the upper protrusions and cutting across the

tablet, which was certainly to be eliminated. It would

seem, therefore, that the complexities of the upper sec-

tion and the carefully inscribed tablet were to be aban-

doned, and, in general, the forms were made heavier and

coarser.

This drawing was first connected by De Angelis d’Ossat

with the Palazzo dei Conservatori and specifically with

the door to the Sala degli Orazi e Curazii. He implied

a date for the drawing, in line with the then currently

accepted views of progress on the Palace, of the late153 0s.

This linking was accepted by Ackerman and Newman

and maintained, with additional arguments, by Morrogh.

Morrogh, who firmly established that Michelangelo’s

final designs for the palace were made only very late in

his life, drew the apparently logical conclusion, as with

Cat. 55 recto, that this drawing is also very late. However,

even though both Cat. 55 recto and the present draw-

ing certainly provided starting-points for elements in the

Conservatori, it seems that in both cases Michelangelo

himself re-worked his old drawings in order to achieve

aneweffect, broadening the forms, reducing detail and

decoration (a conclusion reached independently by Elam,

2001 ). Indeed, the inscription alone, which was obscured

in the third redaction, is sufficient to eliminate a date in

the15 6 0s, because its handwriting does not correspond

to Michelangelo’s at that period. In any case, it is surely

too witty actually to be carved at a library entrance. Fur-

ther supporting a date in the15 4 0s for the first layer of

the recto is the watermark, which recurs on Michelan-

gelo’sPiet`adrawn for Vittoria Colonna (Isabella Stewart

Gardner Museum, Boston; Hadley, 1968 ,no. 7 /Corpus

460 ;black chalk, 295 × 195 mm), which obviously ante-

dates her death in15 4 7.

Verso

The verso is one of the most complicated of the age-

ing Michelangelo’s pages of architectural sketches. It is

made more confusing by the fact that, as was his wont,

Michelangelo made superimposed drawings, so that con-

siderable effort is required to disentangle them: In this

case, however, he did provide the student with some help

because the three superimposed studies on this sheet are

drawn with the sheet turned different ways. Second, he

employed lines placed on the sheet with one function

to stand in as scaffolding for drawings made for different

purposes: This also creates difficulties. He had done this

much earlier in life, but this practice, combined with the

relatively soft handling of the forms on this page, means

that different projects are hard to differentiate.