On the 550th anniversary of Michelangelo’s birth, Williamsburg will become a top global destination for those who want to get immersed in the work of the great Italian Renaissance artist.
More than 10 years in the making, the “Michelangelo: The Genesis of the Sistine” exhibition goes on view Friday at the Muscarelle Museum of Art at William & Mary.
The show features 25 of the artist’s original preparatory drawings for his work on the Sistine Chapel; seven have never been shown in the United States. Twenty depict his famous ceiling.
That’s about half of the drawings that exist of his best-known project, said David Brashear, director of the museum, which reopened in February with an enlarged facility.
He’s expecting up to 50,000 visitors for the show, which runs through May 28. Timed-entry tickets will be used to manage crowds.
The show primarily focuses on Michelangelo’s most punishing project. From 1508 to 1512, he stood on scaffolding, head tilted to the heavens, to paint some 300 figures on the mammoth curved ceiling. He depicted highlights from the biblical book of Genesis.
Also going on view are five sketches that Michelangelo made for “The Last Judgment,” the altar wall he finished in 1541 in the same chapel at the Vatican in Rome.
His fragile studies “aren’t often on display,” Brashear said. “It’s not easy to arrange to borrow them.”
What helped is that the museum has a 15-year track record of creating ambitious shows with Renaissance-era art, a rare feat for a smaller institution.
Adriano Marinazzo, the Muscarelle’s curator of special projects, worked on two shows that included Michelangelo drawings.
The genesis for this show came to him in 2012 in Florence, Italy. He was at Casa Buonarroti, which houses Michelangelo’s art gathered by his family. The Italian curator is well-known at that museum and is trusted with its materials.
“I came across this little sheet where he wrote a sonnet. And below the poem, on the same sheet, there was a little sketch by him that was very mysterious,” he said.
He researched it. “I saw that nobody knew about this little sketch, what it was.”
He determined that it was the Sistine ceiling seen from below. “I’m an architect and a historian. With my training, I saw it very clearly.”
Marinazzo was a Michelangelo specialist then, but a series of findings that eluded scholars over five centuries has made him a noted expert.
Other discoveries in the exhibition include a pair of drawings the curator suspected were originally on the same sheet. The lender, the Uffizi Gallery in Florence, tested his theory and agreed.
Those drawings “are part of the genesis” theme, too, he said, because painting the apostles was the first idea of Pope Julius II, who commissioned the ceiling.
“For the first time, these drawings will be presented together in the same frame.”
Michelangelo — born March 6, 1475, in Caprese, Italy — made many drawings in his long career. That’s how he worked out his figures' postures.
However, the artist destroyed nearly all of his studies. He didn’t want to reveal his creative process or his struggles, his friend and biographer Giorgio Vasari wrote in a biography in 1550.
To Marinazzo, gazing at the drawings reveals something else.
“You are alone in these very old archives looking at a piece of paper that was drawn by Michelangelo,” he said. “You feel the history is in front of you. It’s a most spiritual experience.”
Tickets are available beginning Friday. The exhibition is $15 for adults and free for Muscarelle members; W&M faculty, staff and students; and people 18 and younger. Visit muscarelle.wm.edu for tickets, information and additional programming.
