Welcome to The Courtauld Collection series 'In Detail'.
I'm Ketty Gottardo, Martin Halusa Curator of Drawings
and the details that I'm focusing on
today are from a drawing by Michelangelo Buonarroti titled
'The Dream' or 'Il Sogno' in Italian. Emerging from misty clouds and
surrounded by small, barely-sketched heads, one with big, round eyes
is what appears to be a little bag made
of fabric or soft leather and supported tightly by two hands.
The way the hand supports the bag
from below suggests the content of such a bag must
be heavy. The bag and the hands are defined by
precise outlines, executed by pressing firmly the chalk
onto the paper through its very sharpened fine tip.
The modelling of the skin and the texture of the
bag, however, are rendered by much softer lines
and a series of tiny marks, giving the overall impression that the soft chalk
has barely touched the surface of the paper.
What is this bag and whose hands are those?
These details are surrounded by a myriad of figures in action.
At right, five men are wrestling with each other and to the left, two
couples are kissing. Below them is a figure drinking from a vessel.
As we zoom out onto the whole image,
we observe that this swirling mass of figures surround two larger
naked figures: a youthful one with wings hovers above a reclining man, blowing a
trumpet at his head. With the help of copies that
were made after this drawing, at the time when
Michelangelo was still alive, we now know that one small detail has
been partially erased and is now almost invisible in
the original drawing. It is a hand holding a large phallus,
placed between the two couples kissing. This suggests that, at a certain point in
the later life of this drawing, that detail was thought
to be too obscene and therefore was toned down by
partially erasing it. The intervention clearly happened much
later on, because in all the copies that were made
in the 16th century, the phallus is fully visible.
What are all these figures doing together like this
and what is the overall meaning of this work?
Various interpretations of the complex scene have been proposed but the drawing's title
'The Dream', given to it in the 16th century,
has helped to unveil some of its mysteries.
By blasting a trumpet as he descends
the winged youth seems to awake the central nude and dispel a cloud of
shadowy figures engaged in various sinful activities.
These figures have
commonly been interpreted as the seven deadly sins and from left to right
they are: gluttony, lust, greed, wrath, envy and sloth.
Only pride appears to be missing, unless one interprets
the reclining youth at the center of this drawing has a personification of
pride itself. He's resting on a box
containing a pile of masks, symbols of deceit and illusion, while
leaning on a larger sphere, symbolizing the terrestrial globe.
Michelangelo seems to invite the viewer to reflect
upon topics fundamental to human existence,
such as virtue and vice, beauty and temptation.
This vision would have seemed to follow a philosophical interpretation,
exemplifying the rise of a man's soul towards heaven
after he has overcome his false and empty earthly existence.
Only once all vices are defeated
and the physical can be transcended, can man
achieve spiritual freedom. One of the most influential artists of the
Renaissance, Michelangelo was a sculptor, a painter,
architect, a poet and a skilled draftsman and
hundreds of his drawings have survived. This work, 'The Dream', is generally
associated with a group of very finished drawings that he made in the early 1530s
and offered to Tommaso dei Cavalieri, a young member of the Roman nobility
for whom the artist felt a passionate love.
These drawings, often referred to as presentation drawings
because they were presented - that is offered - to a learned patron,
are very highly finished and so is 'The Dream' that we are now viewing.
The complexities of this artwork would have offered the perfect
opportunity for contemplation and discussions within
a learned community. We know in fact that the presentation
drawings owned by Tommaso dei Cavalieri were viewed by many in Rome, even by the Pope.
Thank you for watching and I hope you
will join us for the next episode of 'In Detail'.