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michelangelo’s drawings
approaches
Any serious discussion of Michelangelo’s drawings must
start with the surviving body of his graphic work. It
might, of course, be possible to produce an idealist
account of Michelangelo’s drawings, by deduction from
his works in other media and taking no notice of those
drawings generally attributed to him, but whether such
aconstruct could have any value is doubtful. But it must
be admitted also that there is not and cannot be abso-
lute proof that any drawing generally believed to be by
Michelangelo is genuinely by him. This can be gener-
alised to the observation that there can be no absolute
proof that any drawing is by any artist to whom it may be
attributed. Any drawing can be dismissed by the icono-
clastically minded critic as a copy, a forgery, a pupil draw-
ing, or simply a drawing by another, unidentified, hand.
These constraints apply to all attempts to attribute draw-
ings of whatsoever type and period, but they are particu-
larly to be borne in mind in the case of graphic oeuvres
produced before the invention of photography; graphic
oeuvres that have been reassembled from scattered sur-
vivals on the basis of internal resemblance and/or relation
to documented or otherwise generally accepted works
in other media; and graphic oeuvres assembled with lit-
tle support from collateral evidence such as paper types,
collective provenances, or anecdotal testimony. In such
territory, the assertions of a connoisseurship that calls
itself scientific can acquire an apparent authority because
they seem to provide simple maps through difficult ter-
rain. But allsoi-disant“scientific” attempts to construct
corpora of drawings, quite apart from the fact that the
methods employed are never as scientific – in the terms
of the mathematical sciences – as their adherents claim,
are inevitably circular in that they start from a core of
“authentic” drawings, drawings against which others are
measured, whose composition itself is a matter not of
proof but of faith. The same critiques that the iconoclas-
tically minded critic direct to works that he or she rejectscan be applied also to those that he or she accepts. Such
“scientific” assertions invariably prove disastrous, whether
they be expansionist or contractionist (almost invariably
the latter), for they rest on the illusion that the eye of the
individual critic is an unchanging and impartial instru-
ment of analysis. The connoisseur who believes him-
or herself to be possessed of a supra-personal eye, able
to allocate authorship on the basis of pure visuality, is
suffering from self-delusion, and from this the descent
into solipsism is likely to be rapid. This is not to say that
the application of a few rigid visual criteria to a poorly
defined oeuvre may not be useful in clearing perimeters
and pruning excrescences. But it is less effective in the
work of positive construction and is particularly ill-suited
to grasp variety, development, and change.
In practice, when attempting to define the graphic
oeuvre of an artist, one’s judgements – always provisional –
must rest on close analysis of individual drawings seen not
as isolated objects but within the context of the artist’s
work both in drawing and other media. Particular judge-
ments must be situated within an awareness as detailed and
profound as possible of the stylistic range and particular
traits of the artist being studied and of his or her chronol-
ogy.Aknowledge of work by contemporaries and a gen-
eral experience of the ways in which artists work within
certain traditions will serve as helpful controls. But, finally,
such loose concepts as “the balance of probability” can-
not be avoided. It is also salutary to remember that, when
the complete or virtually complete graphic work of an
artist is known – a situation rare before the nineteenth
and twentieth centuries – the changes of drawing-style to
be found between one page of a sketchbook and another,
the variety of interests to be found over a few sheets of
studies for a single work, or the variety of techniques
exploited on a single page of drawings can be enormous.
Such experiences should alert the student to the fact that
major artists are always more various than their inter-
preters can conceive. And they should also remind the
student that time has severely edited the work of most
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