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MANNERISM AT THE MORGAN

So You Think You Can Draw | February 21st 2008

Pontormo "Two Studies of Male Figures" (1521), Gabinetto Disegni e Stampe degli Uffizi

Sure, most of us know how to hold a pencil. But a simple sketch by Michelangelo handily illustrates the yawning gap between mortals and masters, Ariel Ramchandani writes. Such divine drawings,  such beefcake legs ...

Special to MORE INTELLIGENT LIFE

I am a huge fan of "Project Runway". Partly for the personal drama, partly for finished products walking down the runway in time to exciting music, and definitely for the superfluous German. However, the most exciting thing about "Project Runway" (and other "creative process" programming) is watching the contestants create something from nothing--in this case yards of uncut fabric. The viewer is privy to the studio experience, able to see every sketch, cut and mistake.

"Project Runway" came to mind at a drawing show at the Morgan Library and Museum in New York, called "Michelangelo, Vasari and Their Contemporaries: Drawings from the Uffizi". The vast array of works in this show collapses time and takes viewers into the minds (and studios) of Renaissance and Mannerist artists. Many drawings feel as though they had just been drawn yesterday, with limbs left unfinished as if the artist had just put pen down and gone to the corner for a coffee and some lunch.

The schoolroom/library hush of the Morgan helps: the proportions and slanted tables give the distinct feeling of being in someone's studio. It's like you could be right behind Vasari's shoulder, comparing the cloak of one Madonna to another, or one leg to the next (both in the "beefcake style", as my Italian Art History would say). Perhaps, on a good day, you might even catch Michelangelo's eye--hey, its fantasy--and he likes you enough to give an old sketch as a present (wink, you cutie pie).

A plethora of books and courses are devoted to the concept that everyone can draw. This is true to some extent, for the most part, as many of us know what drawing "feels like"--how it works to hold a pencil and attempt to copy what we see. But in this show that knowledge--of how to pick up a pen--brings us closer to the artistic process, to the experience of drawing. Just like the way the experience of being in a studio seems to bring us closer to Michelangelo than we may otherwise have felt while gazing at a varnished oil painting.

Of course, the opposite holds true as well. Seeing these drawings by veritable old masters up close also makes it clear just how hard it is to achieve something so basic, so deceptively simple. I have never attempted an oil painting (perhaps a good thing), but I have, in my Drawing 100 days, learned how to block out shadows and lights into separate and discreet sections. I am amazed by the complicated flickering composition of Rosso Fiorentino's "Virgin and Child with SS. John the Baptist, Margaret, and Sebastian and an Elderly Male Saint (Joseph?)" from 1522-5, in black chalk and gray wash.

Ditto for the solid, sculptural muscularity (beefcake, again) of the "Male Nude Seen From Behind" by Bronzino in 1540-6, every arched muscle illuminated--the shadows creating an impossible stone texture. I can hold a pen, but I know my pen stroke could never create the flutter of the "Punishment of Titius, done by Poppi (a Michelangelo copy) in which the agitated bird flies down in feathered strokes on the softly moulded writhing figure, which may very well be as delicate and beautiful as the Michelangelo original.

It goes without saying that the drawings on view are not simply life drawings, or copies of other works. In this show drawing from life meets that special, master Mannerist edge. As Holland Cotter said in the New York Times, "everyone wanted to make art this good and this strange". Michelangelo's bizarrely polished masculine figures and limbs sit across from a quick sketch by Pontormo, "Two Studies of Male Figures" from 1521, in which the males in question look like crash-test dummies, twisting and turning in heavy charcoal strokes, emerging from the chaos of the page.

In all of this cataloguing and description I haven't even reached the chameleon style of Vasari himself, as well as all of the other student works that comprise this show of almost 80 drawings. Sometimes the proportions seem off, or a section seems overly wrought. These are nice moments, and demonstrate that many of these men were still learning, painstakingly copying or sketching over and over, until they got it right.

(Ariel Ramchandani is a contributing editor to More Intelligent Life, and a writer based in New York.)