THEThe sketch is an unfinished preparatory work that concerns the whole or part of a composition that is intended to be transposed into a finished work. The preparatory drawing, on the other hand, concerns individual details whose optimal performance requires a particular application. It is unthinkable that, for such vast frescoes as those in the Sistine Chapel, Michelangelowho also had the singularity of wanting to work mainly alone even in works which usually involved a master builder behind whom a team of collaborators moved, did not make extensive use of not only cartoons through whose contour holes he left traces for the main figures, but also sketches and even more preparatory drawings.
The problem is that almost all of this material has been lost, something which seemed to support the testimony of Vasari who believed it destroyed by the author himself (“…he burned a large number of drawings, sketches and cartoons made by his own hand, so that no one would see the efforts he put in and the ways in which he tested his ingenuity, so as not to appear anything other than perfect”).
The drawings of the Sistine Chapel
In reality, two preparatory drawings in red chalk are known for one of the last figures created in the Sistine Vault, the Libyan Sibyl (1512). The first of these is from 1924 in the Metropolitan Museum in New Yorkwho for the purchase benefited from the mediation of the great American painter John Singer Sargent from the heirs of one of his talented Spanish colleagues, Aureliano de Beruete. As was the practice for sheets of this kind (paper was quite expensive in those days), drawings appear on both sides. In the black charcoal one, the foreshortened pose of a seated figure is sketched, particularly in the lower part, whose roundness would seem compatible with a female body.
Michelangelo Buonarroti (1475 – 1564) Studies for the Libyan Sibyl, ca. 1510-11. Bequest of Joseph Pulitzer, 1924 / New York, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Inv. 24.197.2
In the red chalk one, however, the figure is defined by focusing on some anatomical details evidently considered of special importance despite the distance from which they would have been seen: the backward foot with the twist of the toes that lever on a support point which in the painting would have become a wooden box, a tilted head with half-closed eyes with the usual marked and impeccable features, above all the formidable musculature of a naked back, later softened in the painting, which could only derive from a male model. Michelangelo’s homosexuality, whether real or presumed, has nothing to do with it.
Faithful to the idea of Saint Augustine according to which if God had chosen to become man it was because that was considered the most perfect body in creationBuonarroti used to represent women in the size of today’s wrestlers or weightlifters, certainly also tickling certain male erotic fantasies that should not be missing even in the ecclesiastical sphere. Rather, if the back is so strong it is because of the position of the Libyan Sibylintent on opening the book of prophesied truths, was supposed to suggest an upward momentum, standing up on her feet as if she were somehow participating in the effort with which the painted vault was supposed to give the illusion of standing on itself.
The other one that has come down to us concerning the Sistine frescoes is also connected to the Metropolitan’s drawing: a study for the advanced foot of the Libyan Sibyl, which in the fresco also has a more slender arch of the foot, to underline the elastic reaction with which it reacts to the weight load. It was sold just two weeks ago at Christie’s in New York for over $27 millionan absolute record for graphic works. It was announced in recent days that an independent researcher, Valentina Salerno, had found around twenty drawings to add to the two just mentioned. In cases like these, given that drawings of the finished works in the form of study copies were more than frequent, one must tread carefully, certainties can only be acquired after careful technical and critical checks of what has just been brought to attention.
In short, the case of the alleged drawings of another Michelangelo, Merisi, should not be repeatedwhich caused a sensation when their existence was revealed, but which, once shown, found little credit among the most qualified scholars. The hope, of course, is that Valentina Salerno is right. The whole of humanity would benefit from it, even more than you.