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THE DISPERSAL AND FORMATION OF SIR THOMAS LAWRENCE’S COLLECTION OF DRAWINGS 19of Michelangelo’s works. No doubt he also acquired
from Buontalenti drawings that contained no writing.
And it is tempting to suggest that it was Michelangelo
the Younger who was responsible for making a division
between pieces of paper whose primary interest was his-
torical, records of the most famous member of the family
and of Michelangelo’s transactions, and those whose pri-
mary interest was artistic. In a few cases, pages on which
the two kinds of interest were separable were divided,
and the drawings collections of Casa Buonarroti and the
Archivio Buonarroti proper contain several part-pages
that match each other.^110 Although this division is not
certainly attributable to him, Michelangelo the Younger
would certainly have had the interest, acumen, and intel-
lectual confidence to undertake such surgery.
Contributions came from other sources. In 1616 - 17
and perhaps again in the early 1620 s, the current Duke of
Tuscany, Cosimo II, returned to Casa Buonarroti some
works by Michelangelo, including the low relief of the
Madonna of the Stairs, which had been given to Cosimo I
byLeonardo Buonarroti,^111 and the Presentation Drawing
ofCleopatra, which Cosimo I had extorted from Cav-
alieri. The donation of theCleopatrais significant, for
this drawing was, of course, a gift to Tommaso Cava-
lieri, and had never been in Buonarroti possession. This
may be relevant to the fact that Woodburn both in 1836
and186 0recorded two other very highly finished Presen-
tation Drawings by Michelangelo as coming from Casa
Buonarroti: theDream of Human Lifeof c.153 0 and the
Madonna del Silenzioof c.15 4 0. Both were certainly given
byMichelangelo to friends and would not have remained
in his family. If Woodburn’s statement is correct, it must
be presumed that they were at some date either donated
to Casa Buonarroti by the heirs of the original recipients
or purchased in order to build up the museum conse-
crated to the Buonarrotis’ great ancestor. It is hard to
divine how systematically he bought, but it was, after all,
Michelangelo the Younger who acquired in Rome Con-
divi’s large panel of theEpifania, painted from Michelan-
gelo’s cartoon, under the mistaken impression that it was
byMichelangelo himself, and he considered purchasing,
though in the event did not do so, the unfinished first
version of the MinervaRisen Christ, offered for sale in
Rome in 1607.^112
The fact that some of the drawings in Casa Buonar-
roti’s collection were not inherited but were acquired by
purchase, as they appeared on the market, or as gifts from
artists or collectors persuaded that the rightful home for
their treasures was Michelangelo’s family house and shrine
means that one cannot be sure that all Michelangelo draw-
ings with a Casa Buonarroti provenance had come to theCasa directly from Michelangelo himself. It is possible, for
example, that even great and entirely authentic drawings
acquired from the Casa may not always have been there.^113
It also raises a more delicate issue. It would be a fair pre-
sumption that the great majority of drawings abandoned
byMichelangelo in Florence in 1534 ,orrecovered from
his Roman house in15 6 4,were authentic, although even
this group is likely to have included some drawings by
pupils and associates. This would be much less sure in the
case of drawings acquired for Casa Buonarroti forty or
fifty years after his death. Thus, the possibility is opened
that some of the drawings acquired later might have been
misattributed.
In the absence of written record, it is difficult to be
sure how many drawings by Michelangelo were in Casa
Buonarroti and what they comprised, quite apart from
how and when they arrived there. However, two late
sixteenth- or early seventeenth-century visual sources
have not been fully exploited. These comprise two
series of copies after Michelangelo drawings; they are
complementary: one focuses on architectural drawings;
the other, on figure drawings. The first, brought to schol-
arly attention by Sebregondi Fiorentini in 1986 and Mor-
roghin 1992 ,isthe more straightforward.^114 Leonardo
Buonarroti’s youngest son, Francesco (15 7 4– 1630 )was,
among his other activities, a competent amateur archi-
tect, who made a speciality of designing decorative forms
such as doors, tabernacles, and funeral plaques. Resident
for much of his life in Malta, he periodically returned
to Florence, where his architectural activity took place,
mainly, it seems, in the years 1600 – 1615 .Heleft a sizable
body of graphic work, now in the Uffizi, among which
are ten sheets of generally sketchy copies after surviving
architectural drawings by Michelangelo that, in all except
one case, noted later, are either in, or have direct prove-
nance from, Casa Buonarroti. This group also includes
some sketches for which no Michelangelesque source is
known, but which can reasonably be assumed to be after
drawings by Michelangelo now lost.^115 It is an assumption,
butanassumption verging on certainty, that all the draw-
ings copied by Francesco were in Buonarroti possession
when he copied them.^116
For figurative drawings, the situation is less clear-cut.
The evidence consists of a number of copies of drawings
byMichelangelo by the Florentine artist Andrea Com-
modi (15 6 0– 1638 ).^117 Commodi’s copies divide, broadly,
into two groups. Some of them are more or less exact
replicas of known originals by Michelangelo, generally,
but not always, in the same medium. Commodi had a
considerable reputation as a copyist of paintings, and it is
evident that when he wished to reproduce accurately a