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Michelangelo’s Drawings for the Sistine Chapel Visit the U.S. for the First Time

The show is the culmination of intense coordination by curator Adriano Marinazzo, and some luck.

Michelangelo, The Creation of Adam (1511). (Photo: Vatican City, Sistine Chapel)

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By Adam Schrader

February 3, 2025
5:10 pm
Los Angeles, CA

Dozens of drawings Michelangelo made while planning the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel will go on view at the Muscarelle Museum of Art after a monumental feat in networking and logistics by the Williamsburg, Virginia museum ahead of the Renaissance master’s 550th anniversary. Curator Adriano Marinazzo, an architect and Michelangelo expert, has organized a show that offers an extremely rare chance to see 25 drawings that were used to plan for the celebrated ceiling and another fresco in the Sistine Chapel known as The Last Judgment. Of those drawings, seven have never traveled to the United States. Most have never been shown together. In total, some 38 objects are going on view, including a famous portrait of Michelangelo in the time between his work painting the ceiling and The

Curator Adriano Marinazzo, an architect and Michelangelo expert, has organized a show that offers an extremely rare chance to see 25 drawings that were used to plan for the celebrated ceiling and another fresco in the Sistine Chapel known as The Last Judgment.

Of those drawings, seven have never traveled to the United States. Most have never been shown together. In total, some 38 objects are going on view, including a famous portrait of Michelangelo in the time between his work painting the ceiling and The Last Judgment by his contemporary Giuliano Bugiardini.

“What he likely did, and this is a typical fresco sort of process, is make large drawings, putting them up on the ceiling and likely poking holes at various inflection points in the drawing,” museum director David Brashear said in a video call.

Adriano Marinazzo is pictured in 2012 at Casa Buonarroti studying Michelangelo’s original drawings. (Photo: Muscarelle Museum of Art)

All of those “cartoons” were probably destroyed at the time they were used. In advance of those cartoons, he likely did hundreds, maybe thousands, of miniature drawing studies to work out compositional elements.

“He destroyed almost all of them before dying because he was feeling sick. He knew he was dying. He never created them for public display,” Marinazzo said. “Now less than 50 survive and we have almost half of those, and four in preparation for The Last Judgment.”

Brashear said the survivors, mostly preserved by Michelangelo’s nephew, are locked in dark boxes and only sanctioned by Italian authorities to leave for 12 weeks every few years. So Marinazzo painstakingly coordinated with Italian institutions and authorities to ensure the drawings would be available and not promised to another museum.

Michelangelo Buonarroti, Study for the Prophet Zechariah (1508). Courtesy of Gallerie degli Uffizi, Gabinetto dei Disegni e delle Stampe. (Photo:Muscarelle Museum of Art)

One drawing Marinazzo sought could not be loaned for this show, Brashear noted, because it had already been promised to the British Museum. Nevertheless, he commended Marinazzo’s effective coordination in securing notable examples for the Muscarelle.

Earlier in his career, the Italian curator worked with the Casa Buonarroti, a museum dedicated to Michelangelo in the home he bought for his family when he found success. Marinazzo became close friends with Casa Buonarroti’s late director, Pina Ragionieri.

“You have to make sure that you can reassure the lenders that all of the best museum practices will be in place as you have them in your custody,” Brashear said. “Then, of course, they travel with couriers and are guarded all the way. It’s a complicated process. It’s very different from collecting and hosting an exhibition on, say, Cézanne paintings.”

Michelangelo Buonarroti, Study for the Cumaean Sibyl (1510). Courtesy of Biblioteca Reale. (Photo: Muscarelle Museum of Art)

Brashear added that the exhibition will include massive recreations of scenes from the Sistine Chapel ceiling, a showcase that came about because of the Muscarelle’s partnership with the Vatican Museums. “We’re not getting any drawings from them,” he said, “but we are getting their highest level of detail image files that we’re allowed to use in the exhibition.”

“That’s where it’s really going to become powerful for viewers,” Brashear added. “Like, ‘this is the head of one of the figures in the Sistine Chapel ceiling frescoes’ and ‘this is what it looks like in the final form, as Michelangelo put it up on the ceiling.’”

The idea for this exhibition was born in 2012, while he worked in Casa Buonarotti’s dusty archives, Marinazzo said. As he read Michelangelo’s letters, he spotted a sonnet with a sketch underneath that the artist likely sent to his friend Giovanni da Pistoia.

Michelangelo Buonarroti, Self-portrait in the act of painting the Sistine ceiling with autograph sonnet (c. 1509–10). Courtesy of Casa Buonarroti. (Photo: Muscarelle Museum of Art)

“Nobody knew what it was. After a while, I understood, since I’m an architect, that this little sketch was the representation of a ceiling,” he said. “Eventually, I thought to put together ‘Michelangelo’ and a ‘ceiling’ and realized it might be a sketch for the Sistine Chapel.”

Experts consider it to be perhaps the first drawing Michelangelo made for the project. Another very famous sonnet in the exhibition, also likely sent to Giovanni da Pistoia, contains a self-portrait of Michelangelo painting the ceiling. The show marks the first time these two sonnets with sketches about the Sistine ceiling are together.

The exhibition features two drawings of apostles that “were almost forgotten by scholars” but are significant because they were ultimately not used in the ceiling. When Pope Julius II commissioned Michelangelo to design the ceiling, he asked him to paint the 12 apostles over the ceiling’s pendentives. Michelangelo started the sketches but ultimately told the pope he didn’t just want to paint the apostles, and they were scrapped.

Michelangelo Buonarroti, Study for a male face for the Flood (c. 1508–1509). Courtesy of Casa Buonarroti. (Photo: Muscarelle Museum of Art)

Marinazzo also described how the show’s organization directly led to a new discovery about the drawings. Scholars had previously thought that two little sketches on two different pieces of paper were probably part of the same sheet of paper.

“But we didn’t have any proof,” he said. Before such valuable drawings are shipped, their condition is checked by restorers. Restorers put them together and found the line where they were connected. “So, we are publishing this, too. The drawings will be framed together and presented for the first time in the exhibition together.”

The show is laid out through several galleries, Marinazzo said. The first three are dedicated to the ceiling, with the fourth dedicated to The Last Judgment, and the exhibition is capped with works by Marinazzo that contextualize Michelangelo’s work for the public.

Michelangelo Buonarroti. Study for the Prophet Jonah (1512). Photo courtesy of Casa Buonarroti. (Photo: Muscarelle Museum of Art)

One of the topics is the relationship between the artist’s sculptural work on the tomb of Julius II and the painting of the Sistine ceiling. For this exhibition, Marinazzo prepared 3D renderings of what he believes the tomb would have looked like if completed.

He argued that the Sistine Chapel ceiling is inherently tied to the commission of the tomb, including its artistic design. In 1505, Michelangelo traveled to Rome. Pope Julius II requested that Michelangelo build a large tomb that would feature 40 statues. Although the original drawings are lost, the initial design is described.

Michelangelo went to Carrara to collect marble for the project and returned to Rome to request additional funds. However, Pope Julius II shifted his focus to constructing the new Saint Peter’s Church and was no longer interested in completing the tomb.

A comparison between Michelangelo’s sketch of the architectural outline of the Sistine Chapel ceiling and the actual ceiling view, digitally elaborated by Adriano Marinazzo. (Photo: Muscarelle Museum of Art)

Michelangelo felt slighted and returned to Florence. The pope sent emissaries to persuade him to return to Rome, emphasizing that his skills were needed. Initially, Michelangelo refused but eventually complied after further pressure from Florence’s ruler, who did not want conflict with Rome.

Ultimately, Michelangelo met Julius in Bologna, where they agreed he would resume work on the tomb and take on a new commission for the Sistine ceiling. The tomb as it was initially designed was not completed, but this established a connection between them.

“If you read the description of the tomb by Vasari, a biographer and contemporary of Michelangelo, it recalls the painted architecture in the ceiling,” he said. “So, I recreated the 3D structure over the architecture, and I use these architectural elements, combined with the description by Vasari, to make a reconstruction of the tomb that was never built.”

The show also includes an installation titled This Is Not My Art, made by the curator, that contextualizes the show.

Adriano Marinazzo, This is Not My Art. (Photo: Muscarelle Museum of Art)

A memo Michelangelo wrote in 1508, when he moved from Florence to Rome to start to work on the ceiling, also appears. And the museum got ahold of a famous letter from Michelangelo’s friend, Francesco Granacci, that has never been on view. In the letter, Granacci whines about complications in recruiting assistants to paint the ceiling.

Brashear noted that, because of the significance of the exhibition, the museum coordinated with local authorities to plan for a major influx of visitors. Luckily, the city is already prepared for tourists because of the Colonial Williamsburg historical complex.

“When we previously did Italian master exhibitions, we shared them with MFA Boston, a museum much larger than us. We put the shows together and then they bought in and invested and took it for half of those 12 weeks,” Brashear said. “With the reopening of our museum, we wanted to be the sole venue and have it for the full 12 weeks.”

“Michelangelo: The Genesis of the Sistine” will be on view at the Muscarelle Museum of Art, 603 Jamestown Road, Williamsburg, Virginia, March 6–May 28.

Source: artnet