The Drawings of Michelangelo and His Followers in the Ashmolean Museum

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

9. The model template, a full-size version of the forms

to be carved or modelled in the models, which acts

as a guide for the transfer of the idea onto the

objects to be worked (Corpus 600 , 612 verso,and 613

verso).

10. Templates proper. In the New Sacristy, some were

drawn on the walls of the Cappelletta (Corpus 536 and

539 ).

11 .Ricordiof architectural work already carried out (puta-

tive, no surviving examples).

12. Copies of antique architectural forms designed to

familiarise the artist with their elements (Corpus 516 and

517 ).

13. Theoretical drawings, analysing or explaining the

principles to which work has been planned (Corpus 593

and 594 ).

rates of survival

Before essaying a chronological overview of Michelan-

gelo’s development as a draughtsman, it may be useful

to look at his surviving graphic oeuvre as a whole. To

repeat, it comprises some 600 sheets and 870 pages, and

it includes drawings of almost all the types listed previ-

ously. The drawings range from notations of a few lines

that would have taken no more than a second or two

to throw onto the paper to highly elaborate Presentation

Drawings that might have taken a day or more to execute.

But these are likely to be the temporal limits.

Leaving aside Presentation Drawings, copies of works

byother artists or architects made either for research

or recreation, anatomical drawings, drawings made for

educational purposes, and the like, it is instructive to

turn to drawings made for Michelangelo’s major projects.

But when the final versions of projects for which draw-

ings survive are compared with the versions found in

those drawings, even quite developed figure-studies rarely

match precisely the finished works. This may in part be

due to Michelangelo’s making changes in the course of

execution – he certainly improvised to some extent on

the Sistine ceiling – but it strongly suggests that more –

perhaps many more – drawings were made between the

surviving ones and the executed works. Therefore, even

when relatively large numbers of drawings survive for a

project, these must still represent a small proportion of

those Michelangelo made.

Because no complete sequences of drawings survive

for any of Michelangelo’s projects, no analogies can be

drawn among them, and even if a complete sequence

had survived, there would be no guarantee that it was

representative. It is also evident that some projects and

some periods of Michelangelo’s life are likely to have

generated a greater quantity of drawings than others:

The Sistine ceiling, for example, would have required

avery large number. Michelangelo’s sculptural projects,

even massive ones like the Julius Tomb or the New

Sacristy, probably fewer comparatively, because much of

the individual statuary would have been worked out,

after preliminary drawings had been made, in models

of wax or clay; however, even in these cases one can-

not be categoric, for Michelangelo made multiple studies

of, for example, the shoulders ofDay(Corpus 215 and

216 ).

The quantity of drawings made by Michelangeo would

also have varied with his age. In his formative years, to

attain his high level of proficiency in drawing, he must

have made practice sketches and studies in very large num-

bers. At the other end of his career, it was recounted,

byTiberio Calcagni writing to Michelangelo’s nephew

Leonardo on 29 August 1561 , that Michelangelo was still

capable of drawing for three hours at a time, and this

practice was probably not related to particular projects

of that time, but as exercise, to keep his hand in. From

his own advice to a pupil, “Disegnia Antonio, disegnia

Antonio, disegnia e non perdere tempo” (Corpus 240 ),

it is evident that Michelangelo held the act of draw-

ing in supreme regard and emphasised the importance

of continual practice. It is also worth remarking that no

contemporary testimony suggests that Michelangelo was

lazy.

It is immediately noticeable that the numbers of sur-

viving figure drawings fall off greatly after153 0.Accord-

ing to the compiler’s calculations, there are seventy-one

pages of drawings for the Sistine ceiling, a fresco that con-

tains a complement of some eighty substantial full-length

figures – comprising theignudi, the Prophets and Sibyls,

and the Ancestors of Christ, plus many subsidiary deco-

rative figures, as well as large numbers in the vault his-

tories and the pendentives – but, in his view, only about

twenty-six pages of drawings survive for theLast Judge-

ment, whose overall complement of figures has been cal-

culated at some 390 – although, of course, many of these

are minor. However, a recent discovery (Turner and Joan-

nides, 2003 ) has shown that Michelangelo studied even

the limbs of fairly secondary figures with care. For nei-

ther the Sistine ceiling nor theLast Judgementis there a

single surviving cartoon fragment. Only two reasonably

secure preparatory drawings (Cat. 43 and Corpus 358 )

plus a large fragment of the cartoon survive for the two

frescoes in the Pauline Chapel, which, taken together,

contain over seventy figures.