MICHANGELO AT THE MET

We saw the Michangelo drawing show at the MET. Turns out, he did not draw transparently. No surprise, really, given that he was the pinnacle of the Renaissance.

The show forcefully demonstrates the seductive power of representation. You come away from the show saying, ok, I get it. If you can get that much representational power with a piece of chalk and a piece of paper, then that explains in a nutshell the trajectory of Western art; for the next 500 years, all anybody really wanted to do was to do it the way he did it.  One trouble is, nobody really ever got close.

Yet there was, let’s call it, an accidental transparency that the show demonstrated.  In those days, paper was precious.  And so you ended up drawing on both sides of the parchment / paper.  The show highlighted these pieces with a unique arrangement of display and lights;  you could see the overlay of both entirely distinct drawings.  And this yields a type of transparent drawing.

For example, this piece, titled Study of a Male Nude (Risen Christ), was done on the other side of an architectural study.  In fact, the caption states that Michangelo’s architectural submission, because it was rejected, was returned to him.  And he then did the nude study on the other side of the paper.  So while one drawing was some sort of architectural plan, and the other drawing was a representational chalk study of a human figure, taken together there is a transparency to the resulting composition.

The combination of two, independent sources for form generation is similar to the method called Form Combine offered in these pages.  In my drawing above,  I projected and combined from the base geometry from both sides of Michangelo’s paper.  While not my best drawing, I have no reservations showing it because there is no bad drawing.  Plus, this reminds me of Jeff Koon’s basketballs and sharks suspended within aquarium type vessels.

As for the rest of the show, I found it wondrously overwhelming.  Even on a Wednesday afternoon at 2, it was rather crowded.  And once you get thru every drawing, you absolutely cannot take in any more information.   Don’t miss it if you have the chance.