Michelangelo and his boy

Yearning: Michelangelo did not present The Dream, above, to young Tommaso, perhaps embarrassed by the phalluses drawn among the background figures — hard to discern above but clearly visible in the original work at the Courtauld. Below, Tityus
5 April 2012

There is more to Michelangelo than the inexplicably accomplished Pietà that he began to conjure from a block of marble when he was 21, more than the beautiful gauche hobbledehoy David, more than the Sistine Ceiling and the Last Judgment — all of which were public works and all of which we know. There was a private Michelangelo. Indeed, there were several private Michelangelos: one was miserly and worried about money, troubled by his careless family; another was ambitious, proud, even vain perhaps, scornful of Raphael and Titian; a third, something of a thinker and philosopher, religious too and a reciter of the length of Dante, wrote passionate poems and letters that betray an intellect far less orderly and disciplined than his public works suggest; and the fourth was a man uneasy with the compulsion that drove his love and longing for younger men and boys.

This last is the leitmotiv of the Courtauld Gallery's sternly art historical investigation of Michelangelo's Presentation Drawings. The term was first used by Johannes Wilde, the most august of my tutors there, to define the small group of highly finished drawings that Michelangelo prepared as gifts, principally for Tommaso Cavalieri whom he met in Rome in 1532.

Michelangelo was then 57, Tommaso at least 12, at most 21 — the documents are in conflict. That a contemporary Florentine historian could write of, and publish his response to, the incomparable beauty of Tommaso's body should surprise none of us, for Florence was more or less openly the European capital of sodomy; Michelangelo too, also Florentine, wrote of the boy's physical attraction but, never comfortable in his homosexuality, dwelt more on Tommaso's social grace and educated mind, his aristocratic birth perhaps making him less physically approachable for Michelangelo than the sort of boy he might — and Leonardo deliberately did — choose for an apprentice. In their letters they address each other as "my dearest Lord" — in the boy's a conventional politeness, in the man's a note of anxious servility.

If we are to believe the assertion of Vasari who, as his biographer, knew Michelangelo well, that the presentation drawings sent to Tommaso were intended in some sense as lessons in drawing, then they were surely far too intellectually complex in their meaning for a boy on the point of puberty to understand. His letters too suggest an older boy rather than a child, and give the impression of developing from the kind of exchange an ageing man might have with an adolescent boy of, let us say, 16, to a young man fully adult, anxious to seem paternal and not to cross the undefined boundaries of age, class and sexual interest, metamorphosing first into the melancholy of hapless unrequited physical longing and, finally, perhaps recognising the grotesquery of his imperfect body in conjunction with Tommaso's, deluding himself into the belief that their affections were sublime and wholly spiritual.

These were not drawings for a boy. Tommaso gives the impression that he studied them as he might read a book, and for as long. But without the apparatus of a century of Humanist learning, without a philosophical knowledge of iconography, symbol and allusion, what could even a courtly and classically educated young man have made of them? Can we be sure that even Michelangelo, muddled thinker that he often was, knew what he meant with them? If they were intended as demonstrations of fine drawing to guide Tommaso's hand, then they must have been far beyond his amateur abilities, for they were not even understood by the professional copyists of the day. Just as in the Pietà of more than 30 years before he had developed a "new" sculpture, larger, more polished, more complex, more tellingly and contemplatively emotional than any work by any Florentine precursor of the Quattrocento (if only there had been a Tommaso for him then), so in these presentations he developed a new drawing, an unheralded technique that to Vasari made it seem that Michelangelo had breathed them onto paper.

To me they seem, in their dominant figures, wholly sculptural, the sense of form and volume hefty with the weight of stone and even the technique — a combination of hatching, stippling and broken line — when magnified, resembles the mark of a sculptor's tools on stone as he refines the figures rescued from within the block. Without magnification, our eyes combine these marks into a finish so polished that one might not unreasonably have assumed these drawings to be of real sculptural elements, or such elements combined in high relief, rather than of fleeting inventions in Michelangelo's mind's eye.

Four drawings presented to Tommaso are gathered at the gallery. From the Royal Collection come Tityus (the primeval giant punished for attempting to rape Latona, mother of Diana and Apollo, his punishment to be chained naked to a rock so that a vulture could feed on his ever-renewing liver) drawn in 1532, The Fall of Phaeton, of 1533 (with variants from the British Museum and Venice), and the Bacchanal, perhaps a little later. From Harvard comes Ganymede, the beautiful boy abducted by Zeus to be his catamite and cup-bearer, supposedly drawn in the same year as Tityus but infinitely inferior; this I believe to be a damaged copy of an original quite certainly presented to Tommaso. A young man of some sexual experience might interpret this with wry lubricious humour, but how, if Tommaso was only 12, could he see the implication of such a gift but as himself the Ganymede and Michelangelo the eagle that was Zeus, sodomy the threat to one, the desire and intention of the other? How could Michelangelo have risked sending such a message so openly to such a boy? His Presentation Drawings may have been private gifts but their public celebrity is evident from the number of engravings, copies and derivations that some immediately spawned, now included in the exhibition.

The principal purpose of this exhibition is, however, not to examine all the Presentation Drawings, construct a context for them and demonstrate their increasing spirituality — there are too many absentees for it to be anywhere near such an ambitious project. Nor is it to expose to the prurient Michelangelo's relationship with Tommaso, though this has never been done at quite such length with quite such clarity. It is to scrutinise and probe a presentation drawing in its own collection, The Dream, of c1533, bequeathed it by Count Antoine Seilern, its greatest scholar-benefactor, on his death in 1978. That it was never presented to young Tommaso is, to the curators, a matter of minor importance. I am not so sure. If its earliest supposed provenance — the Casa Buonarotti in Florence — is true, this suggests that it was never presented to anyone but retained by Michelangelo himself. We must ask: why?

At first glance the subject seems a variation on one traditional iconograph of St Matthew, whose gospel was inspired by an angel sometimes blasting him with a trumpet, but here the central figure is a heavily-built nude, more man than youth, cast in the muscular mould of Adam from the Sistine Ceiling, his total nudity made modest by the same device — genitals so diminutive that we recognise them, not as descriptive realism but as a cypher — the same solution as the ancient Greeks employed to solve the intrusive problem of penis comparison. The youth half reclines on a box of theatrical masks, and he and the angel are ringed about by ghostly smaller figures demonstrating the Seven Deadly Sins.

So far, so good: the message seems to be that the angel wakes the youth from an unsaintly dream of the sins that surround him, and urges him to abandon the worldly things of which the globe to which he clings is a symbol, and to remove himself from the box of deceits and falsehoods on which he has been sleeping. All this, more or less clear to any educated Italian in the Renaissance, would have been a suitable moral instruction to send Tommaso, but among the confusion of subsidiary figures only six sins can reasonably be identified — Pride is missing, Lust seems to be duplicated and I have some difficulty in finding Envy. Perhaps they are not sins at all but some forgotten programme of figures from an obscure Humanist or Neo-Platonic text yet to be rediscovered.

Two elements among these figures have defied explanation — they have been remarked on but never explained. One is a small penis, erect at 45 degrees, the other a much larger tumescent penis, horizontal, in an alien masturbating right hand, the thumb towards the root; neither is attached to a body and both are far larger in scale than the neighbouring figures. Did Michelangelo think better of sending such a drawing to Tommaso a year or so after the clear message of the Ganymede? And what are we to think of Michelangelo, fumbling in his trousers as he drew these phalluses, the remembered beauty of Tommaso in his mind?

It is an intriguing exhibition — nine extraordinarily beautiful sheets by Michelangelo (not all of them Presentation Drawings), in which I do not include The Dream for, while sharing Vasari's awe for the technique, I have always found the angel obtrusively ugly in its disproportion, its head absurdly small (a fault shared with Ganymede, and Phaeton's horses too); these are supported by the art historical apparatus of often quite wretched, but fascinating, related prints, copies and comparative material by Albrecht Dürer and others. The catalogue is so shrewd a summary of views on the drawings presented to Tommaso Cavalieri that I doubly regret that not all the Presentation Drawings were included and addressed. Even so, it is far and away the most accomplished study of the subject yet.

Michelangelo's Dream is at The Courtauld Gallery, Somerset House, WC2 (020 7872 0220, www.courtauld.ac.uk) until 16 May. Daily 10am-6pm. Admission £6, concs available, free on Mondays 10am-2pm.

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