Michelangelo lived till almost 90 and wrote near the end: “I live here in Florence in great toil and great weariness of body and have no friends of any kind and don’t want any, and haven’t time to eat what I need.”
His last drawings were all of the Crucifixion. The above, owned by the ROYAL COLLECTION TRUST, is one of them. From their description:
“A drawing of Christ on the Cross, with St John the Evangelist and the Virgin Mary. At the base of the cross is an indication of a third figure crouched, presumably Mary Magdalene. On the verso, a drawing of a left leg, and a triangular outline.
In the last years of his life Michelangelo drew the Crucifixion repeatedly (see also RCIN 912761 and 912774), as a sustained and profoundly felt spiritual exercise. In addition to the two drawings at Windsor, there are four other complete drawings of the subject in London (two), Oxford and Paris, together with several fragments, preparatory sketches and copies of lost drawings.
These very late drawings, together with two (or possibly three) sculptures of the Lamentation or Pietà, differ radically from Michelangelo’s earlier works, in which the body of Christ on the cross, or after death, is depicted as undefiled, even heroic. Those earlier works asserted Christ’s triumph over death; the later drawings and sculptures emphasise instead his sacrifice, and the death and dissolution of his material body.
In these drawings Michelangelo depicts the Crucifixion not as a narrative scene but as a symbol, and what began as a carefully drawn composition gradually became more indefinite as he repeatedly reworked the outlines of Christ. Here the torso of Christ is finely modelled, though the face is uncertain and the legs are in several distinct positions. This is not due to imprecision of touch in Michelangelo’s old age: his reworking of the figure of Christ gave an entirely deliberate effect of indeterminacy, capturing the dissolution of the body as the soul leaves the material world at the moment of death and passes into a different realm…A few lines between the Virgin and St John may be first indications of Mary Magdalene embracing the base of the Cross. There is also a patch of red chalk on Christ’s feet, placed too precisely to be accidental and surely added by Michelangelo as blood.”
I was pointed to the drawings by a wonderful book: Christopher Neve’s Immortal Thoughts: Late Style in a Time of Plague (2023). Of Michelangelo’s old age, he writes:
“A simple faith in God seems to him the only change of redemption and through purification, of ultimate salvation. He still knows much of Dante by heart…
Let me know mine end and the number of my days. Very soon it will be February 8th, 1564 [the day Michelangelo died]. Do not attempt to guess what is running through Michelangelo’s head in these last five drawings.
All are of the crucifixion [sic]. Four include Mary and Saint John. Each drawing is blotched and marked, full of revisions, alterations, corrections, and patently incomplete. In two the vertical of the cross has been changed using a ruler, apparently at a late stage, to a slight tilt, the better to express the dead weight of the body. For in these drawings Christ is dead…Mary and John are in despairing attitudes. In one, Mary holds her head with both hands. In two others the distraught figures approach the body of Christ but cannot touch it. Their feet heavily grip the ground and their clothes are either absent or or so rudimentary as to accentuate their nudity by wrapping round it. The body of Christ himself is beautiful beyond all belief, full of hollows, the agonized muscles of the chest and stretched stomach, which are at the centre of each drawing, conveyed miraculously by a sort of smoke of changing indication within the form.
Do not say: This is drawing by an old man’s shaky hand. For it is drawing by one of the greatest sensibilities there has ever been, at its wits’ end.” pp 35-38.
Continuing with our Lenten reflections…I’ve been thinking how we Catholics have the confessional. Why then do some of us, including, starting with St. Augustine, choose to “confess” to the whole world?
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