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MICHELANGELO’S DRAWINGS 49In architecture, the situation is in some ways similar but
in others different. Some twenty sheets of block sketches
are known for the fac ̧ade of San Lorenzo and, proba-
bly, another dozen for the New Sacristy, but there are
none for the Laurentian Library or any of Michelangelo’s
later architectural projects. It is evident that very large
numbers of drawings must be lost, quite apart from those
that Michelangelo deliberately destroyed at at least two
moments in his career.
Finally, although one can do no more than conjecture
how many drawings Michelangelo might have made, it
may be helpful to move back and look at the matter in
large. Michelangelo’s active working career, one of the
longest on record, continued for a little more than three
quarters of a century. During most of that time, he was
acentral figure, and for many yearsthecentral figure,
in the universe of Central Italian art. He was responsi-
blefor a sequence of massive, complex, and exception-
ally important projects, and he worked for the richest,
most powerful, and most sophisticated patrons that Flo-
rence and Rome had to offer. All his schemes – pictorial,
sculptural, and architectural – would have required exten-
sive and elaborate preparation, and his universally recog-
nised accomplishment as a draughtsman – by common
consent one of the greatest that Europe has produced –
can have been achieved only by constant exercise. The
existing total of his drawings provides an average of some
eight sheets or twelve pages of drawings – of all types –
per year, which further averages one sheet of draw-
ings every six weeks or one page per month. Because
Michelangelo was not a constipated draughtsman, or one
who found the act of drawing difficult, it is quite feasi-
blethat an artist renowned for his hard and rapid work
might have averaged, over a working lifetime, one sheet
of drawings – regardless of type – per day. Because few
among all the drawings that survive would have taken
much more than an hour or two of concentrated work
to execute, then, over a lifetime, Michelangelo could
easily have made some 28 , 000 sheets of drawings. This
would mean that the surviving corpus of sheets contain-
ing autograph drawings would comprise no more than
about 2 percent of his total output. If an average of two
sheets of drawings a day were assumed, and on some days,
in the heat of work, Michelangelo could have made many
more, then the total would be some 56 , 000 ,ofwhich the
surviving corpus would comprise about 1 percent. The
second is the sort of total to be found in an artist of com-
parable genius and comparable longevity, who was also a
great and fluent draughtsman: Picasso. Whichever totals
are adopted, it is evident that only a minute fraction of
the drawings that Michelangelo made is now known.thephasesofmichelangelo’s drawing
The earliest phase of Michelangelo’s drawings shows him
following in the footsteps of his master Ghirlandaio.
Although no drawings by Michelangelo can certainly be
dated before15 0 0,there is a general consensus – which
may be correct – that his copies after Giotto and Masaccio
(Corpus 3 and 4 )were made during the early 1490 s. Sig-
nificantly, it was in the Brancacci chapel, where they were
drawing after Masaccio’s and Masolino’s frescoes, that
Torrigiano reportedly broke Michelangelo’s nose. And
Ghirlandaio was a key figure in the revival of interest in
Masaccio’s work that took place in the last third of the
quattrocento.
Ghirlandaio’s surviving drawings are in pen and in black
chalk. His pen drawings consist both of rapid composi-
tional sketches, and of fairly highly finished treatments of
drapery. Like most of his contemporaries, he used rela-
tively thinly applied black chalk for underdrawing, but he
also employed black chalk in an elaborated and system-
atic way to make drapery studies. However, this aspect
of his work seems little to have affected Michelangelo. It
is sometimes suggested that Michelangelo’s early use of
pen was affected by engravings. Although Michelangelo
wascertainly interested in the engravings of Schongauer,
it was primarily for their iconography, and there is little
need to posit such an influence. Pen drawing was a par-
ticularly Florentine skill, much valued, and Donatello –
whom Michelangelo greatly admired – is reported to
have made many drawings in pen. Michelangelo would
have been aware of a much larger number of drawings
byGhirlandaio and others than is now known, and he
no doubt found whatever inspiration he needed in them.
Some of Michelangelo’s early drawings show unmistak-
able links with Ghirlandaio’s sketchy style: The same for-
mula is employed for heads and faces, obviously influ-
enced by the copying of lay-figures and small jointed
models, and Michelangelo incorporates similar features,
obtaining, more potently than Ghirlandaio, a sense of
power by the very distortion of his forms.
Better known are Michelangelo’s highly finished pen
drawings in which he brought cross-hatching to a pitch of
flexibility and density not previously attained, and never
quite to be attained again. It was this type of drawing,
illustrated both in his studies of draped figures (Corpus 5 )
and in his more detailed studies of the nude (Corpus 21
and 22 ), that was to provide the basic model for certain
drawings by Raphael and by Bandinelli and those artists
who followed him. In principle, it involved tighter or
more open weaves of lines according to areas of shadow of
light, but Michelangelo’s mesh was both richer and more