Author: Albert Elen
Michelangelo was a versatile and innovative artist: painter, sculptor, architect, as well as poet. He worked for the most distinguished patrons of his day, above all Pope Julius II and his successors in Rome. His long career, fame, and the fact that his drawings were in great demand by colleagues and collectors ensured that a relatively large number of sheets have survived, but nevertheless the majority must have been lost. In fact, Giorgio Vasari (1511-1574) even wrote that Michelangelo burned a number of his own drawings.[1] He meticulously prepared his paintings with dozens of studies of individual figures and groups, making a general composition sketch that he gradually worked up into one or more new composition drawings. He drew from nude models, placing each figure in the desired pose, and made separate studies of heads and limbs, often in alternative poses. The provisional result was a cartoon (a full-sized drawing executed on sheets of heavy paper pasted together) that was used for the one-to-one transfer of the composition to canvas, panel, wall or ceiling. He often continued to make alterations or worked passages up even further, right down to the smallest details, often with the aid of yet more drawings.
Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen has three drawings that are regarded as autograph works by Michelangelo (the present one and I 185 and I 198). Arguably there are four, for this sheet is drawn on both sides. The drawings in black chalk are both preliminary studies, but for different projects. The one at top left on the front (recto) is of two nude horsemen whose upper bodies are repeated on the right. The rear figure is in a remarkable pose. He is smaller than the other one and is on his knees on the horse, as if he has hurriedly jumped up onto its back. This is one of the twenty-four surviving preliminary studies for parts of The Battle of Cascina, a large fresco that was intended for the east wall of the new Salone dei Cinquecento in Palazzo Vecchio in Florence as a companion piece for the even larger Battle of Anghiari by Leonardo da Vinci (1452-1519).[2] This project, which was commissioned by the Signoria (the executive council of the Republic of Florence), on which Michelangelo worked with several interruptions from 1504 to 1506, was never finished, because his sudden departure for Rome in March 1505 made it difficult if not impossible for him to return to it. Leonardo’s mural, on the other hand, was executed in part, but was ruined due to a poor technique and was removed in 1557 to make way for new murals.
The full-sized preparatory cartoon was very large and widely admired, and according to Vasari was completed in the months after Michelangelo’s return to Florence in the spring of 1506.[3] It is now known only from a few much smaller contemporary copies, among them a pen drawing in London.[4] The Rotterdam drawing is a preliminary study for a group of horsemen readying themselves for action in the left foreground, which was recognized as such by Hartt (1969) and accepted and augmented by Joannides (2013) in his reconstruction of the probable composition. In the London copy it is a small group of figures, with a single rider on a kicking horse on the right, and a rider and standing horse in a symmetrical pose on the left. In the tentative reconstruction by Joannides (2013) the London copy is a combination of a nude rider mounting his horse with the assistance of a standing figure in front, and the Rotterdam drawing is of a horseman riding away with a soldier riding along. Michelangelo further elaborated the latter in a separate study of a kneeling male nude with raised arms, which is now in Florence.[5] The Rotterdam study is very close in style to the black chalk study for the first figure group, now in Oxford.[6] The drawings show how the artist carefully prepared all the parts of the composition, as he also did for the figures in the central main scene. The latter is of Florentine soldiers bathing in the Arno who are startled by the initial skirmishes with the Pisan troops. The large figure study of a male head looking back over his shoulder with a bared torso, drawn once the Rotterdam sheet was rotated 180 degrees, can be seen on the left of a reduced copy with just the soldiers bathing, now in Holkham Hall.[7]
Hartt (1969) assumed that these studies must have been made in the months leading up to 31 October 1504, when the enormous stock of paper for the large cartoon was ordered and the sheets were glued together on site after delivery.[8] That, though, is not plausible, because working out the parts of the composition and details would probably have continued right up to the last moment. It was, after all, an ongoing creative process. Work was brought to a halt by Michelangelo’s departure for Rome in March 1505. In the summer and autumn of 1506 he was back in Florence and worked further on the cartoon for the Cascina fresco until the pope recalled him again. In March 1508 he was briefly back in Florence. The dating of the preliminary studies in Rotterdam and Oxford can therefore be moved later by a few years, even until after Michelangelo’s more or less definitive departure for Rome in March 1508. This could also explain why the drawing on the reverse, which is a preliminary study for Michelangelo’s next and greatest commission (the monumental fresco decorations on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel in the Vatican), is stylistically so close. It can be concluded that both projects were developed very closely together,[9] and that there was no question of reusing a sheet that had been drawn some years earlier, contrary to what is generally assumed.[10] While Michelangelo worked on the first half of the ceiling frescoes in the Sistine Chapel in the period 1508-10 (they were completed in 1512), the unfinished Cascina project must still have been looming large in his thoughts. The end of the Florentine Republic in the summer of 1512 and the disposal of the carefully preserved cartoon, on public display together with that of Leonardo’s fresco in the Sala del Papa of Santa Maria Novella, put an end to the entire episode.[11]
The two drawings on the reverse of the sheet are anatomical studies of a right forearm in various positions. They were made in preparation for the raised, gesturing right arms of the sons of Noah in the fresco The Drunkenness of Noah. That is the first of the five smaller rectangular fresco scenes on the barrel vault at the rear of the Sistine Chapel, which is where Michelangelo embarked on the project.[12] The study at the top is for the arm of Noah’s son Ham, while the one at the bottom is for the arm of one of the other sons, Shem or Japheth. It is clear from the correction of the contours that Michelangelo was searching for the correct position for the arms and hands. He used hatching to make the muscles and tendons look as natural as possible, and was also undoubtedly drawing from a live model.[13]
Several experts have questioned whether the drawing is indeed by Michelangelo (Berenson 1938, Dussler 1959),[14] but this attribution has been accepted in more recent publications (Joannides 2007 and 2013, Gnann 2010, Bambach 2017). Bambach even regards the drawing at the top as a study for the iconic outstretched arm with pointing hand of God the Father in The Creation of Adam, the central and best-known of the Sistine ceiling frescoes, except that the hand on the ceiling is tilted up more and a little further to the right, making the three fingers extending below the thumb easier to see.[15] Maybe Michelangelo also used the Rotterdam study for that scene, but partly so as not to repeat himself he altered the position of the hand slightly. One would have expected him to make a separate drawing for that motif, but if he did it has not survived.
