Sketches and Portraits by Artists as Young Renaissance Men

Before you book a semester abroad in Florence, check out The Morgan Library and Museum’s current exhibition “Michelangelo, Vasari and their Contemporaries: The Drawings from the Uffizi.” Borrowing prints and original drawings from the renowned museum in Florence, the exhibit provides a deep and historically accurate look into the lives and work of Renaissance masters. This rare display of drawings illustrates the technique and skill that painters like Michelangelo, Ghirlandaio, and others perfected in order to produce a sense of movement and anatomical precision on their canvases.

The exhibit focuses on Vasari. As an architect, draftsman, painter, and writer, Vasari is essentially an art history superstar. His classic text The Lives of Artists is labeled the first art history book ever written. Unfortunately, this exhibit cannot change history, and Vasari’s writing remains more impressive than his art.

“Drawings from the Uffizi” does do a wonderful job tracing through the masters to whom Vasari looked for inspiration. The presentation incorporates the drawings of Vasari’s contemporaries and predecessors, many of whom made indispensable contributions to the art of the Renaissance.

The exhibition focuses on the Palazzo Vecchio, a Florentine landmark and tourist attraction par excellence. At the Palazzo Vecchio, the Medici family made its home and played patron to worthy Florentine artists. Under the auspices of the Medici family, artistic study developed and creativity flourished. Over the course of Vasari’s career, the preeminent style of art shifted from humanism, a style typified by Michelangelo and a reverence to classical subject matter and aesthetics, to mannerism, perfected by Parmigianino and his graceful manipulations of proportion and space.

This exhibit includes drawings and sketches that earlier humanist draftsmen made in preparation for later paintings, frescoes, statues, and tapestries. The lesser-known painter Pontormo’s sketch in red chalk, No. 5 Two Studies of Male Figures, reflects the attention to movement that characterizes these studies. Pontormo’s soft sfumato chalk strokes give a sense of the crouching masculine figure, the weight on his bent knee, and the extension of his opposite calf flexed to counterbalance it. The blurred contours of the subject’s dropped shoulder not only suggest movement but also give him a palpable psychological presence.

Similarly, Andrea del Sarto’s soft chalk strokes are masterful in his study of The Lamentation of Christ. His soft use of chalk easily creates the effects of light and shadow, especially along the profiles of the figures standing behind Christ’s recumbent form. Fast, intense strokes deftly render the figures buckling under the weight of Christ’s outstretched body, while in other places del Sarto slows down his hand and gracefully captures the bowed brows of the Virgin with languid, gauzy flourishes.

There are also several works by brand-name artist Michelangelo. Although they may not be his most impressive studies—these sketches do not carry the same emotive pull as del Sarto’s or Pontormo’s works—they are still remarkable to the viewer. Highlights include his Studies of a Male Leg (ca. 1525-31) and Bust of a Woman, Head of an Old Man, and Bust of a Child (mid-1530s).

In Bust of a Woman, Michelangelo toys with the female physique, with strange and fascinating results. A braided coil, which looks more like a thick helmet than a delicate crown, wreathes her head. Her breasts and shoulders are broad and well defined, fostering a certain masculinity. Michelangelo proves himself a sculptor even with charcoal, shaping her anatomy and musculature with such care that her form takes on an animate vitality. Sketches of tendons and skeletons along the margins of the sheet reveal the time and work required for Michelangelo to perfect the undeniable physical presence of his forms.

Indeed, Bust of a Woman is a sublime drawing, one that hugely influenced the art of its time and continues to influence the art of today. But “Drawings from the Uffizi” offers more than academic insight. The works of Pontormo and del Sarto, among others, are dramatic and remarkable in their own right. Although his name carries cachet and commercial appeal, Michelangelo’s works on display here are often outclassed by those of lesser-known, but perhaps equally talented, draftsmen.