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15/11/2004

Michelangelo and His Age

Guggenheim Museum, Bilbao

On November 16 the Guggenheim Museum Bilbao inaugurates Michelangelo and His Age, a stunning selection of 16th century Italian drawings and engravings from the Albertina in Vienna. The exhibition seeks to highlight the decisive role of the Italian Renaissance in Western culture and, in particular, the importance of drawing as an instrument of study for artists of the time and as an artistic medium in its own right. The Albertina today holds the world’s largest collection of drawings by the great classical masters. Duke Albert von Sachsen-Teschen (1738-1822) and his wife, daughter of the Empress Maria Theresa, devoted their lives to the collection, subsequently enlarged by their successors and now kept in the Duke’s palace. Today the collection possesses more than 65,000 drawings and a million engravings. In 1920 the collection was merged with the Imperial Library (Hofbibliothek) and renamed Graphische Sammlung Albertina.

Albertina Director Dr. Klaus Albrecht Schröder selected the works with Dr. Achim Gnann, author of essays on several artists, including Raphael, Polidoro da Caravaggio, Perino del Vaga, Parmigianino, and Michiel Coxcie. Michelangelo and His Age was first presented last spring at the Peggy Guggenheim Collection, Venice, then traveled to the Albertina in Vienna before its presentation at the Guggenheim Museum Bilbao. Housed in the three classically shaped galleries on the Museum’s third floor, the exhibition will be open to the public in Bilbao until February 2005.

Besides providing the context for Michelangelo’s long and prolific career, the 80 or so works included in the exhibition also illustrate his development as an artist between 1490 and 1564, a period spanning from the early years of the High Renaissance to the end of Mannerism in the Italian cities that were the major creative centers of the time. While symbolic abstraction underscored the art of the Middle Ages, the Renaissance was marked by a renewed interest in the classical Greek and Roman past. Renaissance man aspired to a new conception of knowledge and understanding that covered all the aspects of humanist culture, embracing art, philosophy, literature, and science alike. This conception was based on a new relation with Nature that made man the measure of all things. The individual conscience of the artist also made its first appearance at this time, accompanied by a belief in the freedom of the spirit and the search for the ideal of beauty through anatomy, proportion, and perspective. In short, the humanist artist looked to reconcile and combine all branches of learning. Such concerns led to drawing becoming the basis for the other arts, by serving as an instrument for the study of man’s anatomy and nature itself. Although significant developments were made in all artistic genres in the Renaissance, drawing undoubtedly reached a peak in Western visual culture at this time, taking a deserved place alongside painting and sculpture.

Therefore the exhibition revolves around the discovery and interpretation of the human body as a paradigm of virtue and vice, the heroic force and human weakness of man. For centuries, the most relevant works of Michelangelo, Leonardo and Raphael in the Albertina were seen as the unquestionable yardstick for any artwork seeking to achieve a pleasing, seemly balance between the imitation of reality and a high degree of idealization. The exhibition pays particular attention to the nudes and studies of the human body, while also presenting many portraits whose interest and importance is made patently clear here for the first time. Michelangelo and His Age also presents drawings by the Mannerists artists, including works by Domenico Beccafumi, Francesco Salviati and Giorgio Vasari, as well as a major work by Daniele da Volterra for which Michelangelo facilitated a number of sketches.

Although Raphael, Leonardo and Michelangelo together dominated the High Italian Renaissance, the latter undoubtedly exercised most influence over the artists of his age, his ideas continuing to have a decisive influence during the Mannerist period, the Counter Reformation up to the Baroque. This is how Vasari in his Lives of the Artists describes the reaction of his contemporaries to Michelangelo’s, Battle of Cascina, the monumental fresco designed for the Large Council Chamber of the Palazzo Vecchio in Florence: “And so the artists were astonished and surprised when they saw that Michelangelo had in this cartoon achieved the pinnacle of art. Indeed, some who have seen these divine figures avow that they have never seen anything better by him or anyone else and that no genius could ever equal this work in the splendor of its art.” Having developed a new, monumental body language that for most artists of his time, at least at certain periods, served as an important model, he showed his mastery of the new ideal figure, heroic and full of power, in this great battle fresco, some studies for which, are in the Albertina collection and have been included in the exhibition. The work’s origin lies in the rivalry with Leonardo’s Battle of Anghiari, the other fresco that was also to have decorated the Palazzo Vecchio in Florence. Unfortunately, the latter was destroyed almost as soon as work began and the former never got beyond the preparatory phase in cartoons.

Although Michelangelo’s figures have powerful, muscular bodies, they also manage to convey the energy and passion of the inner being, combining the classical ideal with a new study of nature taken to perfection. A superb example of this is to be found in the drawing Male nude seen from behind, where the artist’s mastery of shadow and highlighting in white imbues the figure’s impressive presence with a remarkable sense of movement.

Leonardo endows his figures with an extraordinary capacity of expression and emotion, qualities that embody his interest in anatomy and physiognomy, as his Half-length figure of an Apostle makes very clear. This particular work was a preliminary drawing for the St. Peter in the fresco The Last Supper in Santa Maria delle Grazie in Milan.

The young Raphael moved to Florence in 1504. One reason for his move is likely to have been an interest in the battle cartoons of Michelangelo and Leonardo. The drawings in the Albertina quite clearly show Michelangelo’s powerful influence over Raphael at this time. Raphael and disciples of his such as Giulio Romano, Perino del Vaga and Polidoro da Caravaggio contributed not only to the diffusion of Michelangelo’s art throughout Italy. As is evident from these artists as well as from the drawings of Correggio and Parmigianino, they managed to combine Michelangelo’s sense of the monumental with the grace of Raphael. Michelangelo’s influence also reached France thanks to artists like his friend Rosso Fiorentino.

Besides documenting the rise of the drawing as an artistic genre in its own right, this exhibition of masterworks from the Albertina highlights the remarkable diversity of materials, while also giving a fascinating insight into the methods of composition of the great artists of the classical and Mannerist Renaissance, both periods of unparalleled splendor in the history of art.


Guggenheim Museum Bilbao
Avenida Abandoibarra, 2 48001, Bilbao

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