Michelangelo, Vasari and Their Contemporaries: Drawings From the Uffizi

Michelangelo, Vasari and Their Contemporaries: Drawings From the Uffizi

Morgan Library & Museum, New York

Through April 20

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To understand an artist, study his drawings, said Lance Esplund in The New York Sun. Unlike finished paintings, “drawings can allow us to see more directly and quickly into how an artist is seeing, thinking, composing, rethinking, and recomposing.” This exhibition brings together nearly 80 works on paper by Michelangelo and his 16th-century successors. All belong to the Uffizi gallery in Florence, Italy. Rarely in this country can you see so many first-rate Italian drawings in one place, and the two Michelangelo drawings alone are worth the visit. Studies of a Male Leg, in metalpoint, presents an absurdly muscular limb in two views. “The drawing is airy and linear in most areas but, within one rippling hip and thigh, is worked up into bulging tonal striations.” Another sheet, in chalk, shows drawings of the heads of a woman, an old man, and a child. “They are studies, but they read as memories, dreams, allegories, or apparitions.” The woman looks out at us with striking immediacy.

Drawings by other artists all reflect the dominant influence of Michelangelo, said Holland Cotter in The New York Times. Jacopo Carucci, known as Pontormo, “zealously scrutinized Michelangelo’s work, then took it in a new direction—away from a reliance on natural forms—to create an intensely personal, conceptual style known as Mannerism.” Later artists such as Bronzino, Poppi, and Giovanni Stradanus formalized Mannerism into a more finished, less expressive style. The artist with the most works displayed here is Giorgio Vasari, a “cultural polymath” who painted, wrote, and planned elaborate decorative schemes for Florence’s ruling Medici family. “To see so many Vasari drawings—there are 14—makes for an interesting study in personal style, mostly because none is apparent.” Yet their irrepressible creativity in many ways typifies the dynamism, diversity, and sheer energy of the age.