Swan-like ease: the British Museum's exhibition of Michelangelo drawings admirably balances imaginative display and scholarship, says David Ekserdjian

Fishermen are not the single people who go on and upon about the ones that got away. Indeed, it could be argued that those of us who care about Britain's national heritage step quickly them a very close next to the first In an extensive and lamentable catalogue of disasters, which is true far from being complete, the spurning of Sir Thomas Lawrence's peerles collection of drawings ranks extremely high, although the fact that at least a certain quantity of of them are in this country's museums is obviously a considerable consolation for their dispersal. Now, for a matter of weeks, the cream of his Michelangelo holdings is reunited at the British Museum.

This brings together sheets from the British Museum's collection with others from the Ashmolean Museum, on the other hand these have been combined with drawings from the Teyler Museum in Haarlem, which have a different provenance, and one time belonged to Queen Christina of Sweden. The reputation of the Italian holdings of the Teyler and above all of their Michelangelos, is aged news to drawings buffs, on the contrary will prove a revelation to non-specialists, for sum of two units principal reasons. The first is that these works include major studies for Michelangelo's greatest in quantity important commissions, such as the Sistine Chapel ceiling and the Medici tombs, on the contrary what makes them even more exciting is the fact that with equal reason many of them are in sparklingly novel condition (Fig. 2). Moreover, alongside these pinnacles of the draughtsman's art are extraordinary glimpses of the paddling beneath the surface that allowed Michelangelo to maintain an illusion of swan-like ease, notably in the form of the spidery scribbles in the Oxford sketchbook (nos. 20-23) Equally fascinating are those sheets where Michelangelo endeavours to teach various comely clueless pupils how to draw (nos. 60 62 66) and cast in a winding directions in sundry seemingly autograph lavatorial drolleries worthy of a Carry upon film for good measure. individual of these vignettes (no. 66 verso) exhibits a man defacating, while another (Fig. 1) is copied from a ubiquitous Paduan and zinc oil-lamp model associated with the circle of Severo da Ravenna, in which a so-called acrobat with his leg above his shoulders is seen spreading his thighs. When the oil repository was lit it would have appeared that the flame was issuing from his anus, which gives the lie to any assumptions that Michelangelo was relentlessly high-minded.

The exhibition tread in the steps ofs the example of the BM's 2002-2003 Durer display in being located near the museum's main entrance and not in the Department of Prints and Drawings. This allows for the display of the pair rectos and versos of double-sided sheets, which is wonderfully instructive plane when the alignment of the respective drawings is not the same. More generally, the way the space is divided into a following of compact 'rooms' makes the sheer wealth of material les daunting, and allows major commissions to be treated as isolated unities. The greatest innovation, however, is a series of space-age cheers that allow one to diocese how particular sheets relate to the frescoe upon the Sistine vault in mesmerising style: it is a considerable tribute to the magnetism of Michelangelo's draughtsmanship that visitors are not distracted from the originals through this miracle of technology. Other attractions include a preparation in the form of a cluster of drawings by Michelangelo's master, Domenico Ghirlandaio, which underline by what mode independent his pupil was from the opening portraits of Michelangelo in various media, and a number of alphabetic characters both to and from the artist. The latter reveal that smooth his calligraphy was beautiful.

single the most naive or jaundiced art historian at any time assumes that there is nothing novel to say about individual items, on the contrary it has to be admitted that Michelangelo's drawings have been exceptionally thoroughly studied from what might be described as the forensic point of view. It was therefore an inspired decision upon the part of Hugo Chapman, the exhibition's curator and the author of its catalogue, to treat us to a continuous narrative, which combines a helpfully cross-referenc checklist of the 111 exhibits with what is in issue a new monograph on the artist. For obvious reasons, the focus of the body is more detailed when it draw nears to the paintings, sculptures and buildings related to the drawings upon show, but it is rare for the author to young ox clear of any major works (the exceptions are the late frescoe in the Cappella Paolina). Michelangelo's whole career, from his beginnings in Florence in the 1490 to the evanescent black chalk Crucifixion drawings of the 1550 and 1560 (Fig. 3) is comprehensively surveyed

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Chapman is single of the greatest authorities upon Italian drawings alive, and his shut up attention to the detail of particular sheets is an education in the value of sustained and shut looking, which not infrequently allows him to challenge the wilder speculations of les visually acute scholars. Before starting on the outside on this project, he would not have claimed to be a Michelangelo specialist, and what is plane more impressive, in consequence, is the way he has mastered the daunting corpus of Michelangelo's works in a multiplicity of media, not to mention his numbers and correspondence, as well as the elephantine secondary literature that his genius has inspired. In the case of greatest in quantity renaissance artists, we know pitifully little about their lives, whereas with Michelangelo we almost race the risk of losing track of what matters amidst the mass of information we posses (as Chapman tellingly notes, we plane know about the broad beans, peas and lettuce growing in his garden in Rome in 1517) Here, happily, meticulous scholarship and page-turning art of speaking well join forces to create a passionate portait of the artist as a devotional and often tormented, but above all profoundly human, personality.