Michelangelo: The Man and the Myth provides American audiences with a rare opportunity to intimately view twelve drawings (doubling the number in U.S. collections) and three documents by the hand of one of history’s most revered artists, all on loan from the Casa Buonarroti in Florence and never before exhibited in the United States. These original works are accompanied by six portraits of the artist (my favorite is the enigmatic bronze medal by Leone Leoni, 1561); six posthumous publications of his poetry, including one sonnet set to music by Benjamin Britten (1943); a twentieth-century bronze replica of Michelangelo’s marble Vatican Pietà (original 1499, replica 1982); and a copy of the original Pietà’s commission document of 1498. At Syracuse University, these items were supplemented by an excellent documentary film from the British Museum entitled Michelangelo Drawings—Closer to the Master and nineteenth-century sepia-colored albumen photographs from the university’s permanent collection depicting Florence and Rome, along with some of the artist’s more famous works.

The exhibition and its accompanying catalogue aimed to re-present this mythic artist to the audience. Their goals were threefold. First, they proposed to reintroduce Michelangelo as a multi-talented and truly “Renaissance man” who, in addition to being a renowned visual artist, was also an accomplished poet, military engineer, and businessman. Second, the exhibition claimed to present an “inner portrait” of Michelangelo as revealed through portraits of the artist and his writings. Third, the exhibition tried to deconstruct the commonly held image of Michelangelo as a tormented creative genius, who worked in isolation and to whom ideas came fully and perfectly formed, as a myth constructed by the artist’s immediate followers, relatives, modern scholars, and by the artist himself, who manipulated his own biography and destroyed many of his own preparatory studies to advance such a reputation.

These are ambitious goals for such a small exhibition that understandably contains none of the artist’s completed masterpieces. Exactly how these individual objects function as evidence of these goals is not always revealed to readers of the catalogue (the exhibition’s wall texts were more explicit in this regard). The catalogue primarily focuses on historiography and provenance, especially how these works arrived at the Casa Buonarroti. Making connections between the various facets of Michelangelo’s career and his portraits, poetry, and drawings appears to be contradicted by the catalogue’s division of the works into two sections, each with its own introductory essay, and by the separation of these objects by genre in the installation at Syracuse (they were more integrated in New York).

Part 1 of the catalogue, “The Face of Michelangelo,” claims to provide an “inner portrait” of the artist through portraits of Michelangelo and examples of his literary work (41). According to Ragionieri, “this portion of the exhibit addresses a topic rarely examined by scholarship” (37); and Syracuse’s exhibition was the first of Michelangelo’s portraits since 1911 (12). (This is in addition to Ragionieri’s own exhibition of portraits of Michelangelo at the Casa Buonarroti, May–July 2008.) As the catalogue essay indicates, portraits of Michelangelo made during his lifetime are rare. Michelangelo left behind only two supposed self-portraits—the flayed skin of St. Bartholomew in the Last Judgment (1534–41) and Nicodemus in the Florence Pietà (ca. 1547–55)—and only four contemporary portraits of the artist are mentioned by Giorgio Vasari, including the medal by Leone Leoni from 1561 (cat. 4) and an oil painting of 1535 by Jacopo del Conte (not in the show) that was the prototype for the exhibition’s oil portrait by Marcello Venusti painted in ca. 1535 (cat. 2) and engraving by Giorgio Ghisi of ca. 1545–65 (cat. 3). In addition, the show contains a nineteenth-century copy of the “domestic” watercolor portrait of ca. 1538 by Francesco de Hollanda (cat. 11) not known by Vasari. Vasari’s own vivid description of Michelangelo (down to the boots he wore!) is alluded to (12) but curiously omitted from the catalogue; however, it was present in the exhibition wall text. The essay and catalogue entries provide little in the way of contextualization or interpretation of these portraits, nor do they relate them to Michelangelo’s own interest in anatomy and physiognomy, as is apparent in his drawings, or to his madrigal Se dal cor lieto divien bello il volto of ca. 1544 (cat. 5) in which he describes a person’s external appearance in portraiture as a reflection of their internal emotions. One is left to question how these portraits fit within the tradition of Renaissance portraiture. What conclusions can we draw about Michelangelo’s “inner” being from these external portraits? Does knowing what an artist looks like contribute to a deeper understanding of his artistic production?

“The Face of Michelangelo” also reveals the difficulty in decoding the sentiments expressed in Michelangelo’s poetic works, which have been variously interpreted by scholars as either a true reflection of his internal nature or, contrarily, as a “mere literary exercise” in neoplatonic verse (more of an explanation of what makes these verses neoplatonic would have been helpful for a general audience [43 and 57]). The tenderness revealed in Michelangelo’s poetry and his generous gifts of sonnets and drawings to his friends are interpreted to reveal the complexity of Michelangelo’s character, which is often described as temperamental and miserly (40–41). I found the punning annotation that accompanies his Four epitaphs in honor of Cecchino Bracci from 1544 (cat. 6), however, to also reveal a biting sense of humor. Opinions of his poetic skill are equally contradictory. Ragionieri notes that Michelangelo’s poetry received praise from sixteenth-century authors, including Vittoria Colonna, Giorgio Vasari, Donato Giannoti, Benedetto Varchi, Pietro Aretino, and Francesco Berni (42). Yet she falls into the mythological trap set by the artist and his followers when she takes Ascanio Condivi’s comment that Michelangelo produced poetry “more for his own enjoyment than as a profession, always humbling himself and acknowledging his ignorance in such matters” as a genuine sign of the artist’s humility (42). According to Vasari, Condivi, and Michelangelo’s own letter to John of Pistoia (1509–12), Michelangelo similarly claimed ignorance in the field of painting while he worked on the Sistine Ceiling, despite having apprenticed under Domenico Ghirlandaio (a fact revealingly omitted in Condivi’s biography). Michelangelo, therefore, had a habit of lowering expectations for his work which, together with the burning of his own imperfect drawings, helped to construct his reputation as an untrained and divinely inspired genius.

Part 2 of the catalogue, “The Drawings of Michelangelo,” begins with an introductory essay that focuses almost exclusively on the history of the collection of Michelangelo’s drawings. It is left up to the reader to determine the relationship between these drawings and his poetry or portraiture and to draw conclusions about what they collectively reveal about the myth of Michelangelo or the artist’s “inner portrait.” For example, readers will need to extrapolate that the contract for the Pietà (122–3), the sketches for blocks of marble with instructions made for his stonemasons (cat. 17), and the notice posted to his foreman stating his refusal to pay workers who were not hired by himself or his headmaster (cat. 19) reveal that Michelangelo did not work in isolation, but that he was a shrewd businessman who depended on the generosity of his patrons and the assistance of stonemasons, a headmaster, and a workforce in order to accomplish his masterpieces. Michelangelo’s Studies Made from Roman Monuments of ca. 1515 (cat. 18), based on the so-called Codex Corner’s drawings of ancient monuments attributed to Bernardo della Volpaia, and the similarities (noted for the first time in this catalogue) of his Sacrifice of Isaac dated ca. 1535 (cat. 24) to Filippo Brunelleschi’s Baptistery competition panel of 1401 (112), show that Michelangelo sometimes derived inspiration from other artists. Lightly drawn guidelines, ghostly experimental figures, and a layering of compositions using gray pencil, red pencil, and brown ink (often more than one in the same drawing)—frequently not legible in reproductions—are clearly visible in person and in the catalogue’s large-scale color reproductions. Most notable are the barely visible figures in the Studies for a Cornice and for the Nudes for the Sistine Ceiling from 1508–9 (cat. 16), Study for Christ in Limbo dated 1530–33 (cat. 22), and the so-called Three Nudes of 1531–2 (cat. 23) in which several lightly drawn muscular figures in dynamic poses are apparent (I now see at least eight figures!). The visible guidelines in the Study for the Head of Leda from 1529–30 (cat. 21), the Plan for San Giovanni Fiorentini of 1559–60 (cat. 25), and the Study for a Gate (Porta Pia?) dated 1561 (cat. 26) provide evidence of how Michelangelo sometimes used regulating lines to compose his drawings.

A more in-depth discussion of Michelangelo’s drawing techniques in both the catalogue and the exhibition might have revealed more of the “inner” Michelangelo and how these works serve to break the myths that surround him. The most detailed discussion of Michelangelo’s architectural-design process can be found in the entry for the Plan for San Giovanni Fiorentini (cat. 25), which “shows points where the Master corrected and recorrected, going over it with pen and brush while the white lead paint was still wet. The complex construction of the plan appears to have been made with a compass, of which traces are visible” (115). The pentimenti in his Study for the Head of Leda, Sacrifice of Isaac, Plan for San Giovanni Fiorentini, and the Study for a Gate reveal that even Michelangelo’s creative process was one of trial and error—leading one of my students to find comfort in the familiarity of Michelangelo’s process and struggle for perfection. The wall text accompanying these drawings in the exhibition encouraged viewers to interact with the works of art by pointing out details that reveal Michelangelo’s artistic process and by asking viewers to draw their own conclusions for cases in which scholars remain uncertain, such as the intention of the study for Three Nudes dated 1531–32 (cat. 23). This dialogue prompted by the curator between the viewer and the works was very effective.

The catalogue is abundantly illustrated with color photographs of all the works in the exhibition (including Britten’s musical score and nineteenth-century books). There are, however, hard-to-see and seemingly dated sepia-colored images of all other works in the catalogue, except for the color image of Michelangelo’s Last Judgment (31). (Was the curious choice of sepia instead of black-and-white images intended to relate the aesthetic of the catalogue with Michelangelo’s use of brown ink or with Syracuse University’s collection of albumen prints that were included in the exhibition?) The five 11” x 14” fold-outs are cumbersome and sometimes make it difficult to view an image of the object while also reading about it. Bibliographic notes would be more helpful if integrated with the text by footnote markers. The text includes some minor typographical errors (i.e., incongruous font in bibliography on p. 83, misspellings: biiographical on p. 75 and bibliograpphy on p. 112).

There is much to learn about Michelangelo’s design process and drawing technique from looking at his drawings. Especially worth viewing is Michelangelo’s Sacrifice of Isaac in which Abraham’s elderly body entwines with the vibrant youthful body of his son Isaac, whose active musculature is modeled with vigorous hatching that is barely contained by the contours of his body. As Abraham prepares to slit his son’s throat, his deadly action is arrested by God’s angelic messenger, whose gaze locks with that of Abraham. Michelangelo creates an entrancing physical and visual tension between these figures. The accompanying wall caption called the viewer’s attention to evidence that Michelangelo reworked Isaac’s final position (I now see three heads and two left legs!) to arrive at his final composition. This work reveals Michelangelo’s artistic process and undeniable genius, while its imperfection exposes his humanity.