Volume 39, Number 6 · March 26, 1992
Michelangelo, True or False?
By Charles Hope
Michelangelo's Drawings: The Science of Attribution
by Alexander Perrig, translated by Michael Joyce
Yale University Press, 167 pp., $55.00
Drawn to Trouble: The Forging of an Artist
by Eric Hebborn
Mainstream Publishing Projects, 380 pp., £17.50
Michelangelo's Nose: A Myth and Its Maker
by Paul Barolsky
Pennsylvania State University Press, 168 pp., $28.50
Why Mona Lisa Smiles and Other Tales by Vasari
by Paul Barolsky
Pennsylvania State University Press, 128 pp., $22.50
Giotto's Father and the Family of Vasari's Lives
by Paul Barolsky
Pennsylvania State University Press, 136 pp., $22.50
More than any other artist of his time Michelangelo exemplified the Renaissance idea that art should improve on nature. He also subscribed to the Florentine belief that the use of preparatory drawings was an indispensable part of the creative process. At various times in his life he is said to have burned large numbers of his own drawings, supposedly because he wished to conceal the intense labor which his works involved, but presumably also because he did not regard them as works of art in their own right. Only one class of graphic material did not fall into this category, the so-called Presentation Drawings, highly finished compositions which he made for a few privileged friends such as Vittoria Colonna and the young Roman nobleman Tommaso de' Cavalieri. When other wealthy collectors begged Michelangelo for anything by his hand, including drawings, most of them probably had in mind works of this kind or even cartoons for frescoes and panels rather than preliminary studies. This is no doubt one reason why the Presentation Drawings were so frequently copied. But the copying of drawings was also an essential element in the training of artists, and this would account for the fact that several of the few preparatory chalk drawings plausibly associated with the Sistine ceiling exist in more than one version.
Review, 3841 words
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