Currently not on view
Bust of a Youth and Caricature Head of an Old Man, Both in Left Profile,
ca. 1530
During the 1520s and early 1530s, Michelangelo drew a number of highly finished ideal heads, which were called “divine” during his lifetime. This black chalk profile of a handsome youth belongs to a category of rapidly executed sketches that may have been made in preparation for these works but were also intended as didactic models for his pupils to copy. Distinctive to this drawing is the comical insertion of a grotesque male head within the youth’s shoulder, probably implying the older man’s lust for the younger. It also evokes Michelangelo’s occasional use of fragmentary forms, particularly as manifestations of dream imagery.
Infrared reflectography reveals a legible architectural black chalk drawing on the sheet’s verso, which had been mounted down in the eighteenth century by one of its former owners. The groundplan for a rectangular chapel with diamond-shaped cross-axes, this sketch has been identified as a preliminary design from around 1560 for one of Michelangelo’s late Roman projects: the Sforza Chapel in Santa Maria Maggiore.
More About This Object
Information
ca. 1530
- Frits Lugt, Les marques de collections de dessins & d'estampes: marques estampillées et écrites de collections particulières et publiques: marques de marchands, de monteurs et d'imprimeurs: cachets de vente d'artistes décédés: marques de graveurs apposées après le tirage des planches : timbres d'édition, etc., (Amsterdam: Vereenigde drukkerijen; La Haye: Nijhoff, 1921)., Lugt no. 3561
- Felton Gibbons, Catalogue of Italian Drawings in The Art Museum, Princeton University, (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1977)., Vol. 1: pp. 91-92, no. 237 (illustrated in Vol. 2 under the same catalog number)
- Paul Joannides, "On the Recto and on the Verso of a Sheet of Drawings by Michelangelo at Princeton," Record of the Art Museum, Princeton University 54, no. 2 (1995): p. 2–11., p. 2, fig. 1; p. 6, fig. 6; p. 9, figs. 12–13
- Paul Joannides, The Drawings of Michelangelo and His Followers in the Ashmolean Museum (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007)., p. 33, no. 31; pp. 179, 290
- Leonard Barkan, Michelangelo: a life on paper, (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2011)., p. 185, fig. 6-10
- Laura Giles, Lia Markey, Claire Van Cleave, et. al., Italian Master Drawings from the Princeton University Art Museum, (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Art Museum, 2014)., p. 83, cat. no. 34; p. 84 (illus.); p. 86 (verso illus.)
