CLEVELAND, Ohio —Michelangelo’s fresco on the Sistine Chapel ceiling at the Vatican, is one of the most famous artworks of all time.
- A special group of drawings that have never been shown together outside of the Netherlands are now on display at the Cleveland Museum of Art
- The drawings start at the beginning of Michelangelo’s training, when he was a young man in Florence, through his major commissions from the Medici family and the Popes of Rome
- The exhibit runs until January 5
But the Italian master didn’t just climb up a scaffold and start painting.
He started with a sketchbook.
Some of those sketches are now on display at the Cleveland Museum of Art.
“So, these drawings showed that Michelangelo worked very hard. He labored at his craft. These are his sketchbook drawings. They are drawings he used for very specific purposes to plan for his great final projects,” said Emily Peters, Cleveland Museum of Art curator.
Peters says Michelangelo’s Sistine Chapel project included over 100 figures.
“So, in the exhibition, we have several drawings that relate to him working out the poses for those figures — just one of hundreds that he had to plan before he painted the fresco,” said Peters.
Andrea and Mark Rossiter of Green are preparing for a trip to Italy.
They plan to visit the Sistine Chapel, so they’re studying the life and works of Michelangelo.
That homework included a trip to the museum to see the sketches.
“We’ll be visiting the Sistine Chapel, and hope to see a lot of Michelangelo’s works,” said Mark Rossiter, from Green, Ohio. “And this was very timely. We were able to get up here and tour the exhibit and get a better understanding of what we are going to see.”
Twenty-eight of Michelangelo’s sketches are on display at the museum.
Most of the pages are double-sided, giving an indication of how the artist worked.
The drawings start at the beginning of his training, when he was a young man in Florence, and continue through his major commissions from the Medici family and the Popes of Rome.
“Michelangelo was a notoriously secretive man, and he was very guarded about his design ideas,” said Peters. “And so, he is known to have ordered the burning of his drawings at several times in his life. Given his long 88 years, he probably made tens of thousands of drawings, but today there’s only 600 that we know of in the world.”
This is first time this collection of sketches has been in America.
“It’s been fascinating. So, some of the history I did not know about,” said Andrea Rossiter, of Green, Ohio. “I didn’t realize how many works of art he destroyed over the course of his lifetime, and the fact there is only like 600 left out of tens of thousands, I had no idea about that… just to see the detail and the sculptures, and it’s just amazing.”
The Michelangelo “Mind of The Master” exhibit runs until January 5.
