Michelangelo’s Dream0

In 1532, a 57 year old Michelangelo met and fell in love with a young nobleman to whom he was to dedicate his greatest drawings. Tommaso de’Cavalieri was about 40 years the artists junior and although Michelangelo spoke of it as a chaste love, he wrote passionate sonnets and effusive letters to his young lover that were infused with erotic desire. Cavalieri wrote tender letters in return and the two remained close for 32 years, until Michelangelo’s death, with Cavalieri at his side.

Now two of Michelangelo’s love letters can be seen in the wonderful and tightly focused exhibition examining the highly finished drawings that the artist created for Cavalieri, ostensibly to teach the youth drawing skills.

The small group of Presentation Drawings depicts figures so finely wrought and exquisitely modeled that they might have been carved in stone instead of drawn with chalk.

And even though the drawings were made to be presented at the court of Pope Clement VII, and hence not made solely for his lovers eyes, some are, in fact, incredibly sexually charged.

Take The Rape Of Ganymede, which depicts Jupiter, in the form of a huge, voracious eagle, carrying off the beautiful Trojan Ganymede. The young mortals limbs are held fast in Jupiter’s grasp, his naked body spreadeagled for our admiration. But the most masterful of these drawings is Il Sogno (The Dream), a complicated and slightly unsettling allegory based on the theme of vice versus virtue. A muscular youth leans his weight against an earthly globe while a trumpeting angel roused him from his slumber – and his lustful dream, judging from explicit sexual imagery that surrounds him. Its a powerful image of temptations of earthly love in a thoroughly beguiling exhibition.

Open until May 16, 2010.
Courtauld Institute of Art, daily from 10am to 6pm.
Entry is £5 per person.
www.courtauld.ac.uk
Tube: Temple/Charing Cross