WHERE: Frist Center for the Visual Arts.

WHEN: October 30, 2015 through January 6, 2016.

 

Michelangelo: Sacred and Profane, Masterpiece Drawings from the Casa Buonarroti

 

This exhibition offers an intimate view into the mind of Michelangelo Buonarroti (1475–1564). A varied selection of twenty-six drawings, ranging from rapid sketches to presentation drawings, attests to the High Renaissance master’s accomplishments as a sculptor, painter, architect and military engineer. The works span almost six decades, from around 1504, when Michelangelo was a mature artist of nearly thirty, until a few years before his death. They show the incredible diversity of his projects and the dynamics of a career spent largely working for ambitious popes in Rome and Florence.

Michelangelo’s powers to evoke the sacred are fully displayed in the large and deeply moving drawing Madonna and Child (ca. 1524). The sculptural figures are rendered in a fascinating mixture of techniques that includes underdrawing in black chalk and flesh tones in the child’s arm in red chalk. Michelangelo’s Study for the Head of Leda (ca. 1529), a mythological subject, he made it in preparation for the panel painting Leda and the Swan (destroyed in the seventeenth century) commissioned by Duke Alfonso d’Este of Ferrara in 1529 and completed in 1530. Red chalk proved to be the ideal medium for conveying Leda’s delicate features and allure.

Marking the first time works by Michelangelo have ever been exhibited in Nashville, The Casa Buonarroti holds the most extensive and significant collection of Michelangelo’s architectural drawings. The important ecclesiastical designs chosen for display include several plans too ambitious and costly to be realized: the San Lorenzo façade, the rare book room of the Laurentian Library, and the church of San Giovanni dei Fiorentini in Rome.

These visionary drawings gain impact from their notable dimensions, which range in height and width from twelve to fifteen inches, and a few are even larger. Impressive in their own right, the works provide dynamic links to a better understanding of Michelangelo’s interdisciplinary virtuosity.

MORE DETAILS: www.fristcenter.org.