The Drawings of Michelangelo and His Followers in the Ashmolean Museum

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46 THE DRAWINGS OF MICHELANGELO AND HIS FOLLOWERS IN THE ASHMOLEAN MUSEUM

artists prior to the modern period, and especially severely

their drawings: fragile, uncared for – Annibale Carracci

reportedly used some of his most beautiful studies to clean

frying-pans – sometimes deliberately destroyed or discard-

ed by the hands that made them. Keeping in mind the

enormous losses suffered by, for example, Renaissance

drawings should make the student wary of relying on nor-

mative stylistic analysis, and still more hesitant in asserting

his or her views.Awareness of how misleading the kinds of

analysis generally employed to reconstruct the oeuvres of

Renaissance artists would be were they applied to a major

twentieth-century artist, for example, should enjoin the

student to treat the possibilities of the past with extreme

caution. In principle, no type of evidence should be re-

jected per se. Any clue that the drawing – or, if mounted,

its mount – provides, of whatever sort – inscriptions,

numbers, types of paper, types of mount – can prove

valuable in attempting to answer the questions the student

might pose. A recent development that has, in the case of

Michelangelo, proved especially valuable, is the listing of

watermarks. Even though a watermark in a piece of paper

does not prove that the marks on that paper are made by

a specific hand, it can at least restrain wilder speculations,

and it provides also a valuable control for the dating of

what is on that paper.

the make-up of the corpus

Charles de Tolnay’sCorpus dei disegni di Michelangelo, pub-

lished in four volumes between 1975 and 1980 ,repro-

duces in facsimile the vast majority of those drawings that

have seriously been attributed to Michelangelo during the

twentieth century, including a number that Tolnay was

unable to accept but believed should be included. Some

further drawings were considered by him of insufficient

importance to warrant facsimile reproduction, but were

included among the comparative and associated mate-

rial found in the catalogue sections of his volumes. De

Tolnay’s total of 633 sheets can, in the compiler’s view, be

reduced by about forty-three to obtain a total of 590 sheets

containing drawings that, however rudimentary, seem to

him attributable to Michelangelo. To this can be added

around twenty sheets, some overlooked by Tolnay and

some discovered only after the publication of theCorpus.

The total would arrive at around 610 sheets. However,

given the fact that, of the 610 items accepted by the com-

piler, some twenty are probably or certainly scraps cut

from larger sheets or fragments, the number falls to about

590 .Ifone were to add sheets of drawings by Michelan-

gelo now known only in copies, it would again increase

the number by around fifty. But it is probably best to con-

sider only autograph drawing here and easiest to work

with a total of 600.

Of the 600 sheets, 322 are either drawn on one side

only, or contain on one of their two sides drawings that,

in the compiler’s view, are not attributable to Michelan-

gelo. The remainder, 278 ,aredrawn on both sides by

Michelangelo himself. If it is wished to total sides, which

for convenience here will be called pages, the total comes

to about 870 .Onthese pages, of course, the types of

individual drawings might vary immensely, and the page

total gives an unclear idea of the numbers of actual draw-

ings, which may be defined as visual indications intended

bythe artist to be separate from one another or, at least,

drawn separately even if, as on many occasions, they are

overlaid. On a single page of first ideas,concetti– such

as one of those in the Ashmolean for the Ancestors of

Christ in the Sistine ceiling – might be found in as many

as ten sketches (see Cats. 9 – 16 ). On another page, such

as that, also in the Ashmolean whose main figure is a

study for the genius accompanyingLibica(Cat. 18 ), one

can find a developed figure study, a close-up detail of

the Sibyl’s hand, a finely drawn architectural sketch, and

six smallricordiofprigioni.Onanother sheet, however,

might be found only a singlemodello(such as Corpus

188 or 206 )oraground plan (Corpus55 9and 560 ). On

some of Michelangelo’s more complicated sheets,concetti,

figure sketches, architectural studies, and pupil drawings

might be found (Cats. 25 , 30 , Corpus 596 ), and on occa-

sion, the edges of used sheets were cut to make tem-

plates for architectural mouldings (examples of this are

in Casa Buonarroti, Corpus 525 and 537 ). The project

of providing a total – retrievable by type, medium, and

date – of all surviving individual drawings by Michelan-

gelo is daunting, but it would certainly be possible with

computerisation.

drawing types

The surviving corpus demonstrates that Michelangelo,

like any draughtsman, made drawings for many different

purposes, and because he was active as painter, sculptor,

and architect, as well as an occasional designer of deco-

rative objects, his drawings are more varied than those of

most of his contemporaries in their functions and forms.

Broadly, however, they might be divided into two main

classes, figural and architectural/decorative, and further

sub-divided, crudely, into different types, according to

their function. However, it must be remembered that dif-

ferent types of drawings often overlap, and it should not