Drawings from the Uffizi

Last week my friend Marylou and I went to the Morgan Library and Museum to see the drawings from the Uffizi. I hadn't been inside the Morgan in a good ten years and was amazed by the architectural changes. Gone is the charming little interior patio where you could eat a quiet lunch. Gone are the sleepy galleries where you might find yourself the only art lover in sight. 

The Morgan has transformed itself into an upscale tourist attraction, complete with the requisite loft-like entrance room and lavish gift shop where you can put art on your Amex card, or at least some Murano glass jewelry. Now it is fabulous. But I have to say, at the risk of sounding like a conservative fogey, that  I miss the old Morgan--its peace and intimacy.

I went to the Uffizi show without having read any reviews. And it's a good thing I did. I don't take it well when people tell me what my eyes should think they are seeing. Unfortunately, even the curator--or the person who wrote the wall copy--couldn't resist telling us viewers what to see.  Next to Michelangelo's drawing that includes a bust of a woman, the head of an old man and the bust of a child, a sign proclaimed it one of the most "perfect" drawings he ever made.

Perfect? Not!--as my fifteen-year-old daughter would say. The bust of the woman sits there in profile, rigid as marble--and I don't mean Michelangelo's marbles, which are usually astoundingly fluid. She's got a curled, Roman upper lip and a slightly dim look on her face. Her hair is done in elaborate curls and braids and tucked neatly under an absurd helmet. Her bared breasts are pushed up and out, as if by some Fashion Week sadist.

"She looks like a man," Marylou whispered to me. And I nodded vigorously. "You know, sometimes they used male models for women in those days," she added.

"Did they all use male models or was this just one of Michelangelo's peculiarities?" I asked. But Marylou didn't know the answer. I am still wondering.

Perfect. I'm not sure I believe in the concept. But if I did, and if I were going to burden one of Michelangelo's drawings with that label, it would probably be his pen and ink Satyr's Head, which is not in the Uffizi's collection but in the Louvre's. Although Michelangelo was drawing a mythological creature, there is such beauty and humanity in that delicately-etched profile! Surely he was seeing a self-portrait of sorts in the satyr. Every time I look at that drawing, I'm astonished and awed again. Unfortunately, the Morgan show doesn't include this gorgeous piece. But you can view an electronic image on the internet.

A second Michelangelo drawing does hang in the Morgan show, a sketch of a leg. Three sketches of legs and some bones, all on one piece of paper, to be exact. And they are beautifully-drawn legs, though over-muscled. Hundreds of artists, throughout history, have sketched equally lovely legs, though. Michelangelo himself probably sketched hundreds and hundreds. There is nothing terribly special about this drawing. If you want to find the poet of Carrara, look in Rome or Florence. You will not find him in New York.

More exciting than the Michelangelo drawings is the Two Studies of Male Figures by Pontormo, one a rough sketch in black chalk, the other a more finished piece in brown, both on the same sheet of paper.  I love these studies because you can see Pontormo working away, drawing and redrawing the outline of the shoulder, the foreshortening of the knee and thigh. He's working so fast, he doesn't take time to erase. A perfect image doesn't matter to him. What counts is catching the motion, the moment in time.

One recent critic referred to the black sketch as "Futurism." But that misses the point that this was not a finished work for Pontormo. Looking at the loose black lines, I realized that, in some ways, art really hasn't changed very much in 500 years. Walk into a studio today, where students are drawing from a model, and you'll see the same kind of thing on one sketch pad after another. Stripped of its broader context, the basic stuff of so much art remains the same: the hand and the eye of the artist, a stick of charcoal, a piece of paper.

There are 79 Renaissance drawings in the Morgan show. Most are well-done but uninspired. What stuck me most was how busy these guys must have been, always working on one project or another. A wall to be painted, an altar to be designed. A benefactor to flatter with a commissioned portrait. Compared to many artists today, these guys were lucky, economically speaking. You can't picture them sitting by the telephone or the computer, waiting for a bit of work to trickle in. These Florentine craftsmen seem to have been perpetually employed. In a way, they were like carpenters and plumbers, submitting their bids, rushing to get the work in on deadline. Another day, another dollar.

We know, of course, that Michelangelo seethed under the grind of the endless busywork. In his mind, perhaps, he was one of his own unfinished slaves, forever trapped in stone. While for Romans, Florentines and future generations around the world he was the genius of Western civilization, he seems to have been a failure in his own eyes.

One day, several years ago, I was wandering through the Museo dell'Opera del Duomo in Florence, when I came upon his Florentine Pieta. Nothing had prepared me for it. I had never heard of the sculpture, or seen a photo of it. Later, I would read about the work in books and study pictures of many angles of the group that includes Jesus, Mary, a servant and the hooded Nicodemus. Later, I would brood over its tragic story. But on that winter day, suddenly, there I was, all by myself, face to face with Michelangelo.

I took one look at the hooded figure--his broad cheekbones and broken nose--and knew I was staring into the soul of the artist. Michelangelo, old at the time of its sculpting, was facing his fate. It was like having a conversation with the man on his deathbed. I stood there alone with him and wept. 

Only after drying my eyes did I realize that the Pieta had been mutilated. Someone had once attacked the marble and smashed it to pieces. The Jesus was still missing a leg. Other pieces of the sculpture had been broken, then reattached. Who could have done this? What madman could possibly have committed this brutal act? 

You probably know or perhaps have guessed the answer faster than I did.  It was the artist himself. Michelangelo Buonarroti, the same passionate life force that brought David, the giant-slayer, out of a misshapen block of marble and hammered out the Titan Moses for the Pope's tomb, took his chisel against one of his own greatest works, leaving it in ruins on his studio floor. There are many stories about why he did this. Some say there was a flaw in the marble, one that was impossible to work around. Maybe. But clearly the most tragic and beautiful flaw was in Michelangelo himself. Michelangelo, the man who demanded such extraordinary, impossible brilliance from his art. Let us thank all the stars in the firmament for Michelangelo Buonarroti, who has brought so much joy to so many, but also ponder that he found little peace for himself.

Of the 79 Uffizi drawings at the Morgan, I was most captivated by a small sketch by Santi di Tito of a sleeping baby. After a long progression of carefully-drawn figures and tableaux, at last I came upon this spontaneous ray of sunshine. A small, chubby face, blissfully unconscious. It could as easily have been Provence in 1880 or Kansas in 1945. Simple, direct, unpretentious. No Popes or patrons dangling dollars over this one, it's safe to guess. Even during the hard-working Italian Renaissance, an artist could sometimes find a moment to pick up a pencil and draw a few lines just for the sheer pleasure of drawing. When it comes to art, may we always make space for those simple delights.  

Michelangelo, Vasari and Their Contemporaries, Drawings from the Uffizi

Through April 20th, 2008, at the Morgan Library and Museum, 225 Madison Avenue at 36th Street, New York, NY 10016