The Drawings of Michelangelo and His Followers in the Ashmolean Museum

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

byRubens after Michelangelo drawings in Casa Buonar-

roti are known.^129 And where Rubens might have gone,

not all could follow. The next recorded copy of theCen-

taurs,byDavid’s pupil Jean-Germain Drouais, was made

in 1786 .13 0

If Michelangelo’s relief of theBattle of the Centaurs,

which must always have been on display in the house,

was not well known, then access to the drawings may

not have been easy – although a black chalk drawing

on seventeenth-century paper by an unidentified artist in

the National Gallery of Scotland, Edinburgh (RSA 970 ),

made after Michelangelo’s anatomical pen sketch still

in Casa Buonarroti (CB 11 F/B 73 /Corpus 209 ; 172 ×

196 mm), demonstrates that they were not entirely con-

cealed from view. It must also be borne in mind that

Michelangelo was not generally a reference-point for

artists for most of the seventeenth and eighteenth cen-

turies, and that there may not have been much demand

for access to his drawings. What there was may have come

more from tourists and connoisseurs than artists: Edward

Wright was shown them in the 1720 s, but others may have

been less fortunate. Pierre-Jean Mariette, in his letter to

Gori reproduced in the latter’s 1746 edition of Condivi’s

life of Michelangelo, remarked:

Je ne doute point que vous ne fassiez tout ce que depend de

vous pour avoir communication des Desseins que Monsieur

le Senateur Buonarroti avoit recueilli. Il y en avoit,`acequ’on

assure, de fort singuliers, et je crois avoir ouy dire a M. le

Senateur Buonarroti lui-meme, qu’il avoit recueilli quelquesˆ

lettres et autres ́ecrits de son habile Ancˆetre. L’histoire de

toutes ces curiosites doit necessairement avoir sa place dans ́

votre ouvrage.ˆ^131

It would seem that Mariette had heard about the drawings

rather than seen them. Gori himself did see them. In his

introduction, he remarked that

Nella Galleria e Casa propria del medesimo Michelagnolo

Buonarroti si conservano due grossi Volume di Disegni, par

la maggior parte di Architettura, di Chiese, di Porte, di

Palazzi, di Scale, e di vari studi di Anatomia, e di altre opere,

da me con sommo piacere piuepi` uv` olte veduti, ora posse-

duti dal Sig. Leonardo Buonarroti, figliuolo del dottissimo

e mio ottimo maestro Signor Filippo.^132

It is notable that the drawings that Gori particularly

remembered, or was particularly impressed by, were those

of architecture. For it is in drawings of this class, and par-

ticularly of finished type, that Casa Buonarroti remains

supremely rich, and few of these seem to have left the

collection. This is another irony; it was finished archi-

tectural drawings that twentieth-century scholarship was

most reluctant to accept into Michelangelo’s graphic

oeuvre.

Casa Buonarroti certainly housed other drawings by

Michelangelo not placed in albums, his largemodellofor

the fac ̧ade of San Lorenzo among them.^133 Gori stated

further that he planned to produce a catalogue of all

Michelangelo’s authentic works, including the drawings,

but nothing seems to have come of the project. However,

reading between the lines, it appears that Casa Buonar-

roti’s collections were not perceived as being entirely

stable: Mariette, for example, had further enquired of

Gori:

Le fameux bas relief du combat de centaures, est il toujours

dans la maison de Messieurs Buonarroti, c’est de quoy je vous

exhorte de vous informer, et d’en donner une description

plus exacte que celles qui se trouve dans les auteurs qui ont

ecrit sa vie. C’est le premier morceau de reputation qu’il

ait fait et par consequent celuy qui merite davantage qu’on

conserve la memoire.^134

This sounds as though he might have been aware of pos-

sible dispersals.

However, nothing substantial seems to have left Casa

Buonarroti at that time. In 1760 Bottari noted that housed

there were “due grossi tomi ben legati” of drawings by

Michelangelo, although whether he himself knew them

or was merely quoting Gori is uncertain.^135 Interestingly,

in the edition of Vasari published in 1770 – 2 , the editor,

Tommaso Gentili, as well as repeating this information –

“Il Senator Filippo Buonarroti lasciod` ue grandi tomi ben

legati, avuti da’ suoi antenati, ma per lo piu erano studi`

e pensieri indigesti” – added, apparently from his own

knowledge, “Lo stesso aveva due gran cartoni ridotti in

due quadri, che rappresentano due figure nude, credi per

eseguire nella volta della Sistina, ed erano piug` randi del

naturale,” but nothing further seems to be recorded about

these. Again, there is no evidence of losses on a serious

scale until the dispersals by Filippo Buonarroti of the late

1780 sorearly 1790 s. But the circumstances of Filippo’s

disposals remain obscure, and no detailed account of what

happened has been published.

In an inventory of the collection of Casa Buonarroti

made after the death of Leonardo Buonarroti, in 1799 ,

it was noted of the two large albums of drawings by

Michelangelo, which had been recorded in an inven-

tory of c. 1684136 and had been mentioned in several

eighteenth-century accounts, that many pages of one

of them were missing. It is presumed that these were

removed by Filippo Buonarroti who, in disposing of

drawings from Casa Buonarroti, would seem to have been

in violation of the entail imposed upon the collections