The essential aspect of this exhibition is in the title: <em>Michelangelo, the last decades</em>. How does genius age? Michelangelo lived to a great age for his time, dying just shy of his 89<sup>th</sup> birthday. This show deals with his last three decades, give or take a few years. He was summoned just before his 60<sup>th</sup> birthday to Rome in 1534 by Pope Clement VII to paint the Last Judgment for the altar wall of the Sistine Chapel, thereby setting himself up in competition with his younger self, the Michelangelo who painted the ceiling of the chapel. He didn’t have to go through the same physical contortions to paint it, but it was a formidable undertaking. Clement VII died just two days after his arrival; no matter, he continued to work for his successors – he saw in another four popes.
The exhibition has a wall-size reproduction of Last Judgment; the original was unveiled on Halloween, 1541 (fun fact: 29 years to the day from the unveiling of the ceiling) and the exhibition opens with several studies for the Judgment. There’s a wonderfully muscular man hauling himself up, perhaps from a tomb, and another falling through the air. There are clusters of bodies, being dragged downwards or pulled upwards: fighting, striving, falling, pleading. You need to get close to see them, but right below a tiny Christ in Judgment is a man about to throw a punch at another, whose face he has seized; it turns out that there’s a lot of fighting going on among the damned. Like the painting itself before the figures were modestly covered up after Michelangelo’s death, the blessed and damned are naked: apt for the Day of Judgment.
Michelangelo was pre-eminently – in his opinion – a sculptor, and while there are no statues in the show, his drawings, even the faintest, have the massy, muscular physicality of sculpture. It’s especially apparent later in the preparatory drawings for the Crucifixion of St Peter, where the taut, highly muscular bodies might just as well be naked, so little does their clothing disguise the anatomical structure. In their nature drawings have the lively, dynamic quality that painting often lacks. There are 50 of them in this exhibition, mostly black chalk on paper, out of just over 100 works, and 20 come from the British Museum’s own matchless collection: these are the heart of the show.
There’s a focus on two significant relationships from these later years. One was with Tomasso De’Cavalieri, a handsome young nobleman whom Michelangelo loved, as Vasari observed, more than any of the others – he was present at Michelangelo’s deathbed. Michelangelo showered him with poems and drawings in the early years. Among the gifts is a study of Tityus, the giant whose liver is forever eaten by an eagle: the stricken figure is shackled but vainly trying to lift himself up. In the background a shadowy griffin shrieks. On the reverse, Michelangelo economically reuses the figure, right side up, as the Risen Christ. And then there’s the Fall of Phaeton (the youth who took Apollo’s chariot for a ride). It’s beautifully composed: at the top, Jupiter hurls his lightning bolt; below him, Phaeton falls headlong, and so do his frantic, tumbling horses; at ground level his sisters look up, distraught. These pieces were lessons in morals as well as draughtsmanship.
Michelangelo’s relationship with Vittoria Colonna was remarkable. This fascinating woman was an aristocrat, a published poet, a member of the group known as the Spirituali and had been a widow for ten years when Michelangelo met her. She and Michelangelo exchanged devotional letters (we see some correspondence) and gifts; spiritual poems on her part, verse and exquisite drawings on his, including an astonishing crucifixion. Here Christ seems barely pinioned to the cross, straining upwards, His body unblemished and full of agonised vitality, His genitals almost visible under a transparent loincloth. There’s an image of Cardinal Reginald Pole too, another associate of the Spirituali before the movement fell foul of the Inquisition.
The curators do not shy away from Michelangelo’s profound religious feeling. And it is worth remembering that in his youth in Florence he was one of those harrowed by the sermons of Savonarola. But there is nothing in Michelangelo’s works to suggest heterodoxy; his personal piety was centred on passionate identification with the sufferings of Christ and with the Virgin as mother.
It is in his treatment of the Virgin that Michelangelo strikes an especially distinctive note – and remember, he lost his own mother when he was only a boy. She is in the massive cartoon, or preparatory drawing, called the Epifania; a solid figure, more like a sibyl or goddess than a young girl. One shoulder is bare and with one hand she seems to push away a benign St Joseph, while fixing her attention on a man to her right. Christ nestles between her legs, held up by a cloth, while St John the Baptist clutches her wrap. This is a woman in authority. The painting made from the cartoon by Ascanio Condivi seems flat and lifeless by comparison. Indeed, although the show makes good use of paintings by Marcello Venusti, Michelangelo’s associate, based on the drawings, something gets lost in translation. The paintings simply lack the vitality of the drawings.
A series of Annunciations is even more striking. In one, Mary is listening intently to the angel, who is flying at her shoulder; she is not afraid, just pondering what he tells her. In another, she has been interrupted at her reading by the angel; here, her hand is still on her book on a lectern and she is turning her body and her attention to the visitor. These are women who will give their consent to the Incarnation after considering what has been said; their hallmarks are strength and intelligence. A third shows the Virgin standing at her lectern, turned towards her visitor; she looks like Athena; her headdress like a helmet. But in the painting based on it, she is demure, her eyes downcast. Michelangelo’s Madonnas are for the age of feminism.
But the tenderest depictions are those of the Virgin and Child: in one, her face is pressed close to His and one hand presses Him to her. There’s an unusual depiction of Christ taking leave of His mother before going to Jerusalem to be crucified. But perhaps the most moving of all is the unscriptural drawing of the Virgin as an old woman, sitting down, her face shrunken with age. And the figure that appears to her, suspended in the air, is Christ, who seems just risen from the dead.
At the close of the exhibition is a dark oval space for the Meditations, Michelangelo’s reflections on Christ and His suffering and His mother at the end of His life. These are not drawings for public scrutiny, but preparation for Michelangelo’s own death. There’s a Pietà, where the agonised Virgin holds a cadaver of her Son. This is a Christ old, wracked by agony, His mouth gaping. Elsewhere at the Crucifixion, the Virgin presses up very close to her Son’s legs on the cross. It’s almost unbearably moving. Go to the exhibition for these if for nothing else.
Michelangelo, the last decades <em>is at the British Museum until 28 July</em>. © British Museum
