Lord Elgin, you let us down. With all the masterpieces of world art that Britain’s rapacious collectors grabbed from hither and yon, couldn’t they have got their hands on a single statue by Michelangelo? No, the only original work in marble by the great sculptor, painter, architect and poet in a British collection is a circular relief owned by the Royal Academy. What we have instead are extensive holdings of his drawings in the British Museum and Royal Collection. Unfortunately, the BM’s hushed use of these works on paper to try to illuminate his later life shows what poor recompense they are.
The problem is disappointingly obvious from the start. After being moved by a portrait of the elderly, bearded, introspective Michelangelo by his most talented pupil, Daniele da Volterra, you’re plunged into his designs for The Last Judgment, painted on the altar wall of the Sistine Chapel from 1536 to 41. Michelangelo was in his early 60s when he returned to the scene of his earlier triumph on its ceiling to create his cascading, tumbling vision of bodies rising to heaven and falling to hell against a deep blue. Here are his sketches of swarming muscular nudes, struggling and fighting – or embracing? – all desperate to join the ranks of blessed. Yet I couldn’t tear my eyes from a projection of the actual fresco, or stop wishing I was there with the real thing, in the Sistine Chapel.
