The Drawings of Michelangelo and His Followers in the Ashmolean Museum

(nextflipdebug5) #1

P 1 : KsF
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.
Free download pdf