Michelangelo's Mythologies

MICHELANGELO’S MYTHOLOGIES

Maria Ruvoldt

Between late December 1532 and September 1533, Michelangelo sent a series of drawings to Tommaso de’Cavalieri, the young Roman noble-man who had captured his affection. In the Rape of Ganymede (Cam-bridge, MA, Fogg Art Museum, Fig. 14), the Punishment of Tityus (Windsor, Royal Library), and the Fall of Phaeton (Windsor, Royal Library), Michelangelo used the imagery of ancient myth to com-municate complex messages of love, desire, and the consequences of human hubris.1 Although much has been made of the intimate nature of these gifts, and of the relationship that generated them, this paper aims to draw attention to the unique status of these subjects in Michel-angelo’s artistic production. The gift drawings for Cavalieri represent

1 ‘[G]li disegnò un Ganimede rapito in cielo da l’uccel di Giove, un Tizio che l’avoltoio gli mangia il cuore, la Cascata del carro del Sole con Fetonte nel Po et una Baccanalia di putti, che tutti sono ciascuno per sé cosa rarissima e disegni non mai più visti, Giorgio Vasari, La vita di Michelangelo nelle redazioni del 1550 e del 1568, ed. Paola Barocchi, 4 vols. (Milan, 1962), vol. 1, 118. A letter from Cavalieri demonstrates that he was in possession of the Phaeton, Tityus, and Ganymede compositions in Sep-tember 1533. See Paola Barocchi, Giovanni Poggi and Renzo Ristori, eds., Il Carteg-gio di Michelangelo, 5 vols. (Florence, 1965–83), vol. 4, no. 932. The literature on Michelangelo’s ‘gift’ or ‘presentation drawings’ is vast. William E. Wallace, ‘Studies in Michelangelo’s Finished Drawings’ (PhD diss., Columbia University, 1983), offers the term ‘gift drawing’ as an alternative to the conventional ‘presentation drawing’ coined by Johannes Wilde. See A. E. Popham and Johannes Wilde, The Italian Drawings of the XV and XVI Centuries in the Collection of His Majesty the King at Windsor Castle (London, 1949), nos. 423–4, 428–31. See also Michael Hirst, Michelangelo and His Drawings (New Haven and London, 1988), ch. 10, ‘The Making of Presents’; Paul Joannides, Michelangelo and His Influence: Drawings from Windsor Castle (Washington, DC and London, 1996), and Alexander. Nagel, ‘Gifts for Michelangelo and Vittoria Colonna’, Art Bulletin 79 (1997): 647–68. For Michelangelo and Cavalieri, see Baruch D. Kirschenbaum, ‘Reflections on Michelangelo’s Drawings for Cavaliere’, Gazette des Beaux-Arts 6e sér. 38 (1951): 99–110; Christoph L. Frommel, Michelangelo und Tommaso de’Cavalieri (Amsterdam, 1979); Robert S. Liebert, Michelangelo: A Psycho-analytic Study of His Life and Images (New Haven and London, 1983); and James M. Saslow, Ganymede in the Renaissance: Homosexuality in Art and Society (New Haven and London, 1986), 17–62. Precisely how young Cavalieri was when the two met is a matter of some debate, but he was surely no older than nineteen and quite possibly as young as twelve. For Cavalieri’s birthdate, see Gerda Panofsky-Soergel, ‘Postscriptum to Tommaso Cavalieri’, in Scritti di storia dell’arte in onore di Roberto Salvini (Flor-ence, 1984), 399–405.

© 2010 by Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, The Netherlands (ISBN: 978-90-04-18334-6)

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14. Michelangelo, The Rape of Ganymede, c.1533 (Vico). Cambridge MA, Fogg Art Museum, Harvard University Art Museums, Gifts for Special Uses Fund. Photo: Alan Macintyre. © President and Fellows of Harvard College.

one of the artist’s few forays into mythological subject matter. Despite his deep engagement with the art of classical Antiquity as a model for his conception of the human form, and his affinity for Neoplatonic philosophy, Michelangelo resisted antique subject matter for most of his career.2 In fact, his use of mythological subjects was restricted to

2 See Erwin Panofsky, ‘The Neoplatonic Movement and Michelangelo’, in Studies

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two distinct moments: first, during his initial training as a sculptor, a period that ended in 1497, and then, after a gap of more than thirty years, from 1529 to 1533, when he produced the extraordinary gift drawings and a handful of other works with classical themes before abandoning such subjects completely for the remainder of his life.3

What caused Michelangelo to turn away from mythology and why did he return to it when he met Cavalieri? What did the language of myth suddenly offer him that had not been available, or at least attrac-tive to him, before? This paper will attempt to answer these questions by tracing the evolution of Michelangelo’s relationship with the art of classical Antiquity over the course of his career. In the process, we will hopefully be able to discern the range of meanings the classical past had for Renaissance audiences.

Encouraged by the intellectual and artistic climate of late fifteenth-century Florence, Michelangelo’s earliest works demonstrate a per-sistent interest in ancient art and subjects.4 Taken into the Medici household by Lorenzo the Magnificent, Michelangelo was influenced by the humanists in Lorenzo’s circle, who suggested subjects like the Battle of the Centaurs (Florence, Casa Buonarroti) to the young sculp-tor.5 He also had at his disposal Lorenzo’s exceptional collection of antiquities, including cameos and engraved gems that would, as we will see, provide inspiration throughout his long career.6 But in this first phase of his artistic training Michelangelo was involved in a proj-ect of imitation, emulating techniques—such the low relief of ancient sarcophagi in the Battle of the Centaurs—and making copies of the

in Iconology: Humanistic Themes in the Art of the Renaissance (1939; reprint, New York, 1962), 171–230.

3 The works from the early period are the Head of a Faun (c.1489, lost), Battle of the Centaurs (c.1492, Florence, Casa Buonarroti), Hercules (c.1494, lost), the Sleeping Cupid (c.1496, lost), Cupid-Apollo (c.1496, lost), Bacchus (1496–7, Florence, Bargello). The later works commence with the Leda (c.1530, lost) and include Venus and Cupid (1532–33, lost), Three Labours of Hercules (c.1530, Windsor, Royal Library), the Rape of Gany-mede (1532–3, Cambridge, MA, Fogg Art Museum), the Punishment of Tityus (1532–3, Windsor, Royal Library), and the Fall of Phaeton (1532–3, Windsor, Royal Library).

4 For Michelangelo’s early career, see Giuseppe Fiocco, ‘Sull’inizio di Michelangelo’, Le arti 4 (1941): 5–10; Charles de Tolnay, The Youth of Michelangelo (Princeton, 1943); Alessandro Parronchi, Opere giovanili di Michelangelo, 6 vols. (Florence, 1968–2003); and Michael Hirst and Jill Dunkerton, The Young Michelangelo (London, 1994).

5 According to both Vasari and Condivi, Angelo Poliziano suggested the subject of the Battle of the Centaurs and the Rape of Deianira to Michelangelo. See Ascanio Condivi, Vita di Michelagnolo Buonarroti, ed. Giovanni Nencioni (Florence, 1998), 13; and Vasari, Vita, 11. See also John F. Moffitt, ‘Another Look at Michelangelo’s Centauromachia’, Source: Notes in the History of Art 25 (2006): 16–26.

6 For Lorenzo’s collection, see Laurie Fusco and Gino Corti, Lorenzo de’Medici, Collector and Antiquarian (Cambridge, 2006).

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sculptures in the Medici collection, often blurring the line between imitation and forgery. His most successful, or perhaps notorious, project was the Sleeping Cupid—now lost—a copy after a work in the Medici collection.7 Michelangelo buried his Cupid to age it artificially, and sold it to an unwitting collector as an actual antiquity.8 The decep-tion was soon discovered, but Michelangelo had established himself as an artist who could compete directly with the ancients.

His efforts and ambitions culminated in the Bacchus (Florence, Museo Nazionale del Bargello, Fig. 15), a life-size marble sculpture that seems to embody the reintegration of classical form and subject matter that Erwin Panofsky identified as the signal achievement of the Italian Renaissance.9 In scale, medium, and subject, the Bacchus betrays its sources—the sculptures Michelangelo had seen in the Medici col-lection and then on his first trip to Rome. It is, in many ways, a highly conventional approach to the antique, a case study in the Renaissance revival of classical Antiquity. It is significant, however, that despite his apparently easy mastery of technique and style, Michelangelo seems not to have been truly engaged by the subjects of these works. The Battle of the Centaurs, for example, is a famously difficult image to decipher. Without Michelangelo’s own testimony, we could determine that the scene is one of conflict and chaos, but we might be hard pressed to identify the subject or even locate a single mythical beast. The Bacchus comes closer to integrating form and subject—the unsteady stance and unfocused gaze of the god make visible the effects of wine, its power to ensnare both mind and body—but it hews so closely to ancient models that it, too, might be mistaken for an antiquity. The Bacchus also offers

7 For the Medici sculpture garden, see Caroline Elam, ‘Lorenzo de’Medici’s Sculp-ture Garden’, Mitteilungen des Kunsthistorischen Institutes in Florenz 36 (1992): 41–83, esp. 58–61. See also Paola Barocchi, ed., Il Giardino di San Marco, Maestri e compagni del giovane Michelangelo (Florence, 1992). For the Sleeping Cupid, see Condivi, Vita, 17–8, Vasari-Barocchi, Vita, vol. 1, 15 and M. Hirst and J. Dunkerton, The Young Michelangelo, 20–8, with further references.

8 Condivi, Vita, 17–8, reports that Lorenzo di Pierfrancesco de’Medici suggested that Michelangelo age the sculpture and send it to Rome for sale, and that the artist obliged. Vasari-Barocchi, Vita, vol. 1, 15, offers different theories of who was responsible for the deception, repeating Condivi’s version, but also suggesting that the sculpture was aged without Michelangelo’s consent. Both sources concur that the ultimate pur-chaser of the work, Cardinal Raffaele Riario, uncovered the fraud and thus discovered the talented young sculptor and brought him to Rome.

9 Erwin Panofsky, Renaissance and Renascences in Western Art (1960, reprint, New York, 1972). For Michelangelo’s Bacchus, see M. Hirst and J. Dunkerton, The Young Michelangelo, 29–35, with further references.


15. Michelangelo, Bacchus, c.1496–7. Florence, Museo Nazionale del Bargello. © Soprintendenza Speciale per il Polo Museale Fiorentino.

a glimpse of the future—of the way that Michelangelo would use the form of the body to express the conditions of the soul.

Paradoxically, perhaps, in bringing him to the attention of patrons in Florence and Rome interested in large-scale public monuments, for which antique subjects were ill-suited, it was the success of the Cupid and the Bacchus that led to Michelangelo’s abandonment of classical

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content. In relatively rapid succession, he was employed by a French cardinal (who commissioned the Vatican Pietà), by the overseers of the Florentine cathedral (who offered him the marble block that would become the David), by the government of Florence (who requested a fresco of the Battle of Cascina), and finally by the pope himself, Julius II (who chose Michelangelo to create his tomb). That project was soon disrupted by another commission from the della Rovere pope, the dec-oration of the Sistine ceiling.

Although Michelangelo was no longer occupied with antique sub-jects after 1497, the aesthetic of Antiquity permeated his work, as he adopted and adapted ancient models, particularly those of the male nude, for his own purposes. Sculptures recently unearthed in Rome quickly found their way into Michelangelo’s work, in both sculpture and painting.10 The fragmentary remains of ancient gods and heroes found new life as Florentine soldiers in the Battle of Cascina, as alle-gorical figures on the Sistine Ceiling, and as Biblical patriarchs in the colossal David, which echoes the Apollo Belvedere, and the Moses for the Julius tomb. Whether directly imitating ancient models, as in the use of the Belvedere torso (Fig. 16) for one of the Sistine ignudi (Fig. 17), or simply deriving inspiration from them, Michelangelo systematically incorporated antique form into his vocabulary of the body.

Although Michelangelo continued to look to ancient art as a model for the perfect human figure, the appeal of imitation and replication had faded. Instead, during his thirty year break from mythological subjects, he was concerned with the creation of a modern art, one that might take inspiration from the art of classical Antiquity as a resource to be mined, but that was finding a different means of expression appropriate to its own subjects. Rather than recreate the visual world of classical Antiquity, Michelangelo and his contemporaries adapted classical aesthetics to Renaissance purposes. The idealised naturalism of ancient art married with a faith that focused on God made flesh made for a potent combination, and for the first quarter of the six-teenth century, Michelangelo laboured to develop a new visual lan-guage of the body that would blend ancient aesthetics with Christian content. It is a kind of visual humanism, as it were, a parallel project

10 For Michelangelo’s appreciation of even minor antique works, see William E. Wallace, ‘Michelangelo Admires Antiquity . . . and Marcello Venusti’, in Ashes to Ashes: Art in Rome between Humanism and Maniera, ed. Roy Eriksen and Victor Plahte Tschudi (Rome, 2006), 125–53.


16. Apollonios of Athens, The Belvedere Torso, 1st century bc. Vatican City, Museo Pio Clementino, Vatican Museums. Photo: F. Bucher. © F. Bucher.

to literary and scholarly efforts to reconcile ancient philosophy with Christian faith.

Just as his early project of imitation was nurtured by the environ-ment of late fifteenth-century Florence and its antiquarian interests, so too does this middle phase reflect the atmosphere in which Michel-angelo was working. He was immersed in the culture of Renaissance Rome during a period of urban renewal and renovation designed not simply to restore the city’s former glory but rather to create a new Rome that would surpass the old.11 The ancient world was physically

11 For the milieu of sixteenth-century Rome, see, among others, Ingrid Rowland, The Culture of the High Renaissance: Ancients and Moderns in Sixteenth-Century Rome (Cambridge, 1998) and Leonard Barkan, Unearthing the Past: Archaeology and Aes-thetics in the Making of Renaissance Culture (New Haven, 1999).

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17. Michelangelo, The separation of light from darkness (detail). Vatican City, Sistine Chapel. © akg-images, London.


present in ruins and rediscovered wonders to inspire new creation, but it was also an obstacle to the modernisation of the city, and sixteenth-century Romans were decidedly unsentimental about demolishing or stripping ancient monuments to make way for new ones. It is precisely this attitude of re-use and reclamation, albeit in a far less destructive fashion, that we can see at work in Michelangelo’s adaptations.

If it was the demands of patronage that drew Michelangelo away from ancient subjects, it was patronage that brought him back again. In 1529, Michelangelo travelled to Ferrara at the behest of the Flo-rentine government as part of an effort to enlist the support of Duke Alfonso d’Este for the beleaguered Republic in its final struggle against Medici rule.12 It was in Ferrara that Michelangelo discovered a new approach to the antique in the gallery of mythological paintings the duke had assembled in his private study and showplace, the Camerino d’Alabastro. The program of Alfonso’s gallery had been conceived by a court humanist, who selected subjects for the paintings from Ovid, Catullus, and the works of other classical authors.13 This was, on a much larger and more formal scale, precisely the kind of arrangement Michelangelo claimed to have had in his youth with the humanists in the circle of Lorenzo de’Medici—using ancient texts as sources for modern works of art.

But if the method of working from texts was familiar to Michel-angelo, the results must have been a revelation. The paintings in the Camerino, including Giovanni Bellini’s Feast of the Gods (Fig. 18) and Titian’s Worship of Venus (Fig. 19), represented an entirely new approach to classical Antiquity, and, as Paul Joannides has recently argued, the experience of them was a transformative experience for Michelangelo.14 The almost archaeological interest in the imitation and re-creation of the ancient world that we see in Michelangelo’s earliest works is present here—Bellini’s grouping of gods recalls the low relief

12 For this episode, see William E. Wallace, ‘Michelangelo’s Leda: The Diplomatic Context’, Renaissance Studies 15 (2001): 473–98.

13 For Alfonso’s Camerino, see John Walker, Bellini and Titian at Ferrara: A Study of Styles and Taste (London, 1956); Cecil Gould, The Studio of Alfonso d’Este and Tit-ian’s Bacchus and Ariadne (London, 1969); Gorel Cavalli-Bjorkman, ed., Bacchanals by Titian and Rubens (Stockholm, 1987); David Rosand, ‘Ekphrasis and the Genera-tion of Images’, Arion: A Journal of Humanities and the Classics 1 (1990): 61–105; Rona Goffen, Titian’s Women (New Haven, 1997), 108–22; and David Jaffé, Titian (London, 2003), esp. 101–6.

14 See Paul Joannides, ‘Titian and Michelangelo/Michelangelo and Titian’, in The Cambridge Companion to Titian, ed. Patricia Meilman (Cambridge, 2004).

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18. Giovanni Bellini, The Feast of the Gods, 1514–29. Washington DC, National Gallery of Art, Widener Collection, 1942.9.1. © National Gallery of

Art, Washington DC.

and regular scansion of classical friezes, and Titian’s picture closely follows the Ovidian text that inspired it—but that scholarly distance is tempered as the ancient myths are grafted onto the courtly culture of love. Although it is possible to identify Bellini’s gods—Neptune’s tri-dent is near his feet, Apollo wears a laurel wreath, and Bacchus is busy at his wine vat—this is a playful take on the antique. The gravity and solemnity of the Olympian gods is absent; we appear instead to have stumbled upon a masquerade, a group of rustic individuals in fancy dress. Neptune’s trident is an abandoned pitchfork, and he slyly slips his hand into his partner’s lap. If it were not for the satyr wandering off to the left, we might be forgiven for failing to recognise this as the realm of myth at all.


19. Titian, The Worship of Venus, c.1518. Madrid, Museo del Prado. © Museo del Prado.

The Camerino was Alfonso’s private retreat, and its decoration was designed to appeal to his sensibilities, blending the sensual with the learned. The paintings are visual celebrations of the pleasures of the flesh, but they also reward careful observation of another sort. The identities of the gods in Bellini’s Feast, for example, though touched by humour, are not immediately accessible; they require an educated viewer to decode their subtle attributes. The frolicking putti in Titian’s Worship of Venus, who embrace each other and fly up to the trees to gather apples perform precisely the actions described by Ovid, in a careful visualisation of the text, just as the train of Bacchus in another

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painting in the Camerino—Titian’s Bacchus and Ariadne—closely fol-lows a description by Catullus. Rich in anecdotal detail, the pictures reflect the social atmosphere of Alfonso’s court; they invite conver-sation that moves from one mode of response to another.15 This is not necessarily a ‘hidden meaning’ available exclusively to initiates, but rather a flexibility of reading that allows for different kinds of response, whether it is a recognition of the fidelity of these paintings to their textual sources or an appreciation of the visual delights and slightly bawdy humour they offer.

Before 1529, Michelangelo had seen myth through the lens of Flo-rentine humanism and Roman renovation, in which the recovery and revival of the ancient world was a serious undertaking, of pressing concern in the formation of Renaissance identity, and put to public use. In Ferrara, he was introduced to myth as a more private mode, a language of pleasure and escape from the cares of everyday life. It was a model he was quick to adopt.

The Camerino had been planned as a showcase of works by all the great masters of Italy, but circumstances had prevented Alfonso from achieving this ambition, and the room had become a monument to Venetian painting, dominated by Titian. Alfonso hoped to add a work by Michelangelo to the collection, and the artist agreed to provide a painting on a mythological subject: the Rape of Leda.16

Michelangelo’s Leda survives only through copies, but they seem to provide a very good sense of the original (Fig. 20). The subject—the ravishing of a beautiful woman by a god—fits in perfectly with Alfonso’s tastes. But Michelangelo’s take on it represents a departure from the paintings in the Camerino. On a formal level, Michelangelo rejects the teeming canvases of Bellini and Titian in favour of a monu-mental composition of two figures, Leda and her swan, who fill the entire surface of the painting. He began, like Bellini and Titian had done, with a primary source, but whereas those artists worked from texts, Michelangelo relied on an image for inspiration. He returned to

15 For the unique viewing conditions of ‘studiolo culture’, see Stephen J. Campbell, ‘Mantegna’s Parnassus: Reading, Collecting and the Studiolo’, in Revaluing Renaissance Art, ed. Gabriele Neher and Rupert Shepherd (Aldershot, 2000), 69–87; Campbell, ‘Giorgione’s Tempest, Studiolo Culture and the Renaissance Lucretius’, Renaissance Quarterly 56 (2003): 299–332; and Campbell, The Cabinet of Eros: Renaissance Mytho-logical Painting and the Studiolo of Isabella d’Este (New Haven, 2004).

16 The painting was never actually delivered to Alfonso d’Este. See W. E. Wallace, ‘Michelangelo’s Leda’, for its history.


an object that he had known in his youth, an onyx cameo of Leda and the Swan from Lorenzo de’Medici’s collection (Naples, Museo Arche-ologico Nazionale) that depicts a reclining Leda embracing her divine lover.17 The pose of the figure, propped up on one arm, with one leg bent and the other extended, had long fascinated Michelangelo. It had turned up, in a different guise, in his Adam and Noah on the Sistine Ceiling, and, returned to its original gender, in the figure of Night in the Medici chapel. In each of its iterations, Michelangelo used the tension of this pose, poised between passivity and control, to signal states of suspense, of transition from one condition to another—Adam about to receive the spark of life, Noah’s shame about to be covered, Night caught between waking and dreaming—but now Michelangelo was returning to its original subject.

17 See Phyllis Pray Bober and Ruth Rubinstein, Renaissance Artists and Antique Sculpture: A Handbook of Sources (London and Oxford, 1986), 54.

20. After Michelangelo, Leda and the Swan, sixteenth century. London, National Gallery. © National Gallery, London.

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The Leda amplifies the scale of the cameo, but retains a sense of its unique appeal to the viewer. In keeping with the conventions of studiolo culture, the paintings in Alfonso’s Camerino require a social kind of viewing; they are meant to be discussed and deciphered. As Stephen Campbell has argued, the paintings in Alfonso’s Camerino present a ‘spectacle of emotion, sensation, and physical life . . . set forth to be scrutinized.’18 In contrast, the Leda is private, introspective. It is not without its own visual pleasure, but it is very different from the canvases of Bellini and Titian, which invite the eye to wander, to discover details and allow the narrative to unfold. Leda’s body fills the frame of the picture and the almost clinical rendering of her coupling with the swan, his tail feathers caressing her buttocks, his neck nestled between her breasts, command the viewer’s entire attention. Leda’s sleep further inflects her relationship to the viewer—it allows for a purely voyeuristic experience, but it also creates an air of stasis and silence in counterpoint to the noisy throngs of Titian’s canvases with their cymbals and dancing. Michelangelo has taken the idea of myth as a language of sensuality and escape and turned it inward, made it con-templative. The mood of suspended action encourages meditation.

This private mode was precisely what Michelangelo needed when he first encountered Tommaso de’Cavalieri in 1532. Michelangelo was, by all accounts, instantly besotted with the young man, and a flurry of letters passed between them, beginning with Michelangelo’s declara-tion that Cavalieri was ‘the light of our century, unique in the world.’19 The artist then promised to send some unspecified ‘things’ of his own that he hoped would please his new friend.20 The ‘things’ turned out to be the series of drawings with which this paper began. Although Michelangelo’s many letters and sonnets to Cavalieri employ the lan-guage of Petrarchan lyric to express his love, his visual language is that of ancient myth.21

In the drawings for Cavalieri, which were personal gifts rather than projects for a patron, Michelangelo was free to develop his own private idiom. The absence of a patron is crucial—the drawings were made by the artist as tokens of love for an intimate friend—they circulated

18 S. Campbell, The Cabinet of Eros, 259.19 Carteggio, vol. 3, no. 897.20 Ibid.21 For Michelangelo’s sonnets and letters to Cavalieri, see Leonard Barkan, Tran-

suming Passion: Ganymede and the Erotics of Renaissance Humanism (Stanford, 1991), 81 ff.


outside the bounds of the traditional artist/patron exchange and were available only to those, like Cavalieri, who had earned Michelangelo’s particular affection. Tangible signs of a special bond between the art-ist and their recipient, the drawings reflect the intimacy of the rela-tionship that generated them in their very form. The Leda had been inspired by an antique gem, but its scale created different conditions of viewing. The drawings, on the other hand, reproduce something of the viewing experience of such small-scale works of art. They are meant to be held and contemplated: they encourage a meditative kind of viewing that is akin to the experience of looking at gems. Cavalieri himself writes about spending hours contemplating them, and Vittoria Colonna, a later recipient of Michelangelo’s gifts, reports using both a magnifying glass and a mirror to explore her drawings.22 By demand-ing such intimate visual involvement from their viewer, the drawings replicate and reinforce the viewer’s intimacy with their creator.

Evidence suggests that in Renaissance practice, the medium of drawing—or at least the exchange and circulation of drawings—signi-fied personal intimacy. Vasari tells us that Leonardo da Vinci made a drawing of Neptune—with ‘great diligence’ for his ‘very good friend’ Antonio Segni, and that the painter Francesco Salviati created a draw-ing of the Three Ages of Man as a gift to mark the birth of a dear friend’s child.23 In fact, the very first collection of drawings in the quattrocento was that of the Veronese humanist Felice Feliciano, who wrote sonnets and letters praising his artist friends, including Gio-vanni Bellini and Andrea Mantegna, dedicated books to them, and seems to have received drawings from them in return.24 Such acts of

22 ‘In questo mezo mi pigliarò almanco doi hore del giorno piacere in contemplare doi vostri desegni . . . quali quanto più li miro, tanto più mi piacciono . . .’ Cavalieri to Michelangelo, Carteggio, vol. 3, no. 898. ‘Io l’ho ben visto al lume et col vetro et col specchio, et non viddi mai la più finita cosa’. Vittoria Colonna to Michelangelo, Carteggio, vol. 4, no. 968.

23 ‘Ad Antonio Segni, suo amicissimo, fece in su un foglio un Nettuno, condotto così di disegno con tanta diligenzia, che e’pareva del tuto vivo.’ Giorgio Vasari, Le vite de’ più eccellenti pittori, scultori ed architettori (1568), ed. Gaetano Milanesi, 9 vols. (Florence, 1878–85), vol. 4, 25. ‘Avendo Francesco fatto amicizia con Piero di Marcone orefice fiorentino, e divenutogli compare, fece alla comare, e moglie di esso Piero, dopo il parto, un presente d’un bellissimo disegno, per dipignerlo in un di que’tondi nei quali si porta da mangiare alle donne di parto: nel quale disegno era in un parti-mento riquadrato, ed accomodato sotto e sopra con bellissime figure, la vita dell’uomo, cioè tutte l’età della vita umana [.]’ Ibid., vol. 7, 20–1.

24 See Evelyn Karet, ‘Stefano da Verona, Felice Feliciano and the First Renaissance Collection of Drawings’, Arte Lombarda 124 (1998): 31–51.

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creative reciprocity add a deeply personal dimension to conventions of gift exchange. As the tangible evidence of the creative act and, by extension, as the most immediate and authentic reflection of the artis-tic self, drawings were the most intimate of artistic gifts.

In adopting classical myth to speak of love and desire, Michelan-gelo was participating in an established tradition, but the gift draw-ings complicate and transform that tradition. By focusing on the male, rather than the female nude, Michelangelo departs from conventional approaches to myths of divine love and is thus able to speak not only of his particular desire for Cavalieri, but also of the Neoplatonic ideal of eroticised male friendship in contrast to the Petrarchan model of male-female desire. He returned to the reclining figure that he had always found so compelling, using it in rotation throughout the series for Cavalieri, creating a visual meditation on states of transformation.25 The same male body, painstakingly and lovingly described, appears to represent a return to a truly classical model of ideal love.

But Michelangelo’s choice of myths is unexpected. These are not simply love stories, they are narrative reflections on both the attrac-tions and the dangers of desire, a far cry from the idyllic escapist fan-tasies of Alfonso’s Camerino. Ascending Ganymede, lifted to heaven on the wings of a lustful Zeus, plummeting Phaeton, hurled out of Apollo’s chariot by a divine thunderbolt, and supine Tityus, eternally punished for his attempted rape of Latona—all stories of divine elec-tion and human hubris. They represent Michelangelo’s efforts to rec-oncile the influence of classical art and philosophy, which permit this kind of visual reflection on the male nude, with his own deeply held Christian faith and its convictions about the perils of physical expres-sions of desire, no matter who its object might be.26

The drawings for Cavalieri caused an instant sensation. By the 1530s, access to an original work by the hand of Michelangelo was extremely limited, and mythological subjects by the artist were also exceedingly rare. Word spread quickly that Cavalieri was in possession of these works and he soon found himself besieged by some of the most impor-

25 For the repetition of the figure in the series for Cavalieri, see Judith Anne Testa, ‘The Iconography of the Archers: A Study in Self-Concealment and Self-Revelation in Michelangelo’s Presentation Drawings’, Studies in Iconography 5 (1979): 45–72.

26 This same tension is expressed in several of Michelangelo’s sonnets that date from this period. See James M. Saslow, The Poetry of Michelangelo (New Haven, 1993).


tant men in Rome, eager to see the drawings. Almost immediately after receiving the drawings, Cavalieri wrote to Michelangelo that the Medici Pope Clement VII, his nephew Cardinal Ippolito de’Medici, and ‘everyone’ was demanding access to Michelangelo’s drawings.27 He reports that the cardinal was so taken with the drawings that he wanted to have copies made of them in crystal.28 Cavalieri reluctantly loaned the drawings out, and they soon generated an astonishing number of copies, in a variety of media, from the crystals for the car-dinal to paintings, prints, and even ceramics.29 Michelangelo’s private inventions thus passed into more general public circulation and were subject to uses and interpretations beyond his control.

It was the very success of the drawings, I would suggest, that caused the end of Michelangelo’s extraordinary experimentation with mytho-logical subjects. Michelangelo had found in his mythologies a language appropriate to his most conflicted private feelings about the nature of love, desire, and divine retribution. He must have realised quickly that although he could control the initial access to the original drawings, he could not manage their afterlife. The ideal of privacy and intimacy that the gift drawings had afforded him was impossible to sustain in light of his celebrity. After the Cavalieri drawings, Michelangelo continued to use the mechanism of the gift drawing as a mode of communication with his most intimate friends, but he dropped mythological subjects altogether, and focused instead on themes of religious devotion and redemption, appropriate not only to the piety of his later muse, Vitto-ria Colonna, but also to the atmosphere of post-Reformation Rome.30

The drawings for Cavalieri represent an unusual hybrid of the ancient and the modern. They marry antique subject matter to a thoroughly modern medium—the highly finished drawing conceived

27 Cavalieri to Michelangelo, Carteggio, vol. 4, 932.28 Ibid.29 Copies after the gift drawings form the core of a larger study I am pursuing

at present on copying and collaboration in Michelangelo’s career. For the copies, see, among others, Mario Rotili, ed. Fortuna di Michelangelo nell’incisione, exh. cat., Benevento, Museo del Sannio (Benevento, 1964) and Marcella Marongiu, ed., Il Mito di Ganimede: Prima e Dopo Michelangelo, exh. cat., Florence, Casa Buonarroti (Florence, 2002), and Maria Ruvoldt, ‘Responding to the Renaissance’, in Renaissance Theory, ed. James Elkins and Robert Williams (London, 2008), 366–76.

30 See A. Nagel, ‘Gifts’, and Una Roman d’Elia, ‘Drawing Christ’s Blood: Michel-angelo, Vittoria Colonna, and the Aesthetics of Reform’, Renaissance Quarterly 59 (2006): 90–129.

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as an end in itself. They represent the final stage in Michelangelo’s evolving relationship to the antique, from imitation to adaptation to re-creation. Yet despite his different methods of integrating the influ-ence of Antiquity into his artistic practice, what remains consistent in Michelangelo’s use of his antique models—and what ties his practice to that of his contemporaries—is his determination to use them as a foundation on which to build a truly modern art.

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Michelangelo's Mythologies