Michelangelo's drawings on display at W&M

WILLIAMSBURG Organizing an exhibition of Michelangelo drawings, complete with a 128-page, illustrated, scholarly catalog, ordinarily would take two years.

Aaron H. De Groft, the energetic director of the Muscarelle Museum of Art at The College of William & Mary, pulled it off in six months.

"Michelangelo: Anatomy as Architecture, Drawings by the Master," which will open Saturday at the Muscarelle, was hardly a gleam in De Groft's eye this past summer when he conducted a study-abroad program for W&M students in Florence, Italy.

But the seeds for De Groft's coup, which presents a dozen Michelangelo drawings in the context of nine prints showing classical architecture and sculpture by his contemporaries, had been planted when he, as a W&M student, studied in Florence in 1988.

Two decades ago, De Groft's influential art history professor pulled strings to get him into the tightly guarded holy of holies containing Michelangelo's drawings at the Uffizi Gallery.

"I remember acutely the anticipation of lifting the lid of a box and the world of Michelangelo . . . being revealed on wonderful and magical sheets of drawings," he recalls in his catalog preface. "I distinctly remember thinking, 'How did I ever get to sit here and see this?' It was a serious, heavy and personal realization."

De Groft knew where the Michelangelo drawings were in Florence last summer. What he needed, in addition to landing some of them, was a theme for a show.

It came to him in two often-overlooked sentences Michelangelo had written to a cardinal in 1560.

"It is certain that the elements that make up the framework of a building are akin to the limbs of the body," the creator of the Sistine Chapel ceiling had written in a document translated into English only 50 years ago. "Only a man who can reproduce the human figure and is well-versed in anatomy knows anything about architecture."

To get the drawings to illustrate what Michelangelo meant, De Groft went straight to the top, the director of the Casa Buonarroti, the Florentine seat of Michelangelo's family since the 16th century. It contains the largest single trove of Michelangelo drawings -- about 250 -- in the world.

De Groft didn't get everything he wanted. He was up against the Casa Buonarroti's rule that no work can be lent more than once a year. He also had to stand in line behind the organizers of major shows involving Michelangelo drawings that are about to open in Paris, Rome and Vienna.

But he got enough, he figures, and he did it by cashing in some art-world chips.

"It's very Italian," De Groft says he prepares to open his show next weekend. "It's all about relationships. Knowing the right people opened doors for me."

In the end, he even enticed the Casa Buonarroti's director into writing a catalog essay.

Michelangelo's drawings and the contemporary prints of architecture and sculpture, all but one of which are on loan from the Casa Buonarroti, occupy the first room of the Muscarelle's second-floor exhibition space, which is dimly lighted -- think 15-watt bulbs -- to protect the fragile images on paper.

The remaining space is devoted to documentation and an audio-visual presentation of what De Groft calls "new digital reconstructions of buildings that show evidence" of Michelangelo's hand.

The only drawing that most visitors would think relates Michelangelo's theory of architecture to human anatomy show his rendering of a pilaster base he designed for the New Sacristy of the Medici Chapel at Florence's Basilica of San Lorenzo.

Its outline closely resembles the profile in Michelangelo's drawing, "Head of Bearded Man Shouting," in the Ashmolean Museum at Oxford University in England.

The rest, De Groft acknowledges, is a matter of picking up on clues and connecting dots.

"You take it as a whole, not necessarily in its individual parts," De Groft explains. "We're exhibiting drawings that suggest Michelangelo's ideas."

De Groft is no stranger to bringing major exhibitions involving Italy into the Muscarelle.

"I got engaged in Florence," he says. "I've been going there for 20 years. I have a lifetime love affair with that great city."

Does De Groft have another Italian show in the works?

"We're always working on something," he says. "We've got some good ideas. But I'm not sure you can top a name like Michelangelo."

Roy Proctor, a freelance writer and theater director, retired in 2004 as the art and theater writer for The Times-Dispatch. He can be reached at royproctor@aol.com.