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MICHELANGELO IMPERFECT is nearing its final weeks AT SMK, and to mark it I am organizing a two-day international colloquium in collaboration with the Friends of the Royal Cast Collection to share and discuss what we have learned and might potentially learn in the future from the project and — more generally — from the use of 3D copies and facsimiles in the study and appreciation of art.

Numbers are limited, so do let me know if you would like to attend!

Michelangelo, A study of a seated nude man for the ‘Battle of Cascina’. 1504-5, London: The British Museum

I’ve had the plesure of contributing an expansive, critical essay on Michelangelo’s life and art to a monumentally conceived, high-end compilation volume of the Michelangelo drawings at the British Museum, published by Spanish book afficionados Artika Press. It consists of two volumes, the central one of which includes high-quality, full-size reproductions of all the drawings, while a study book includes essays on the drawings by my excellent colleagues at the British Museum Hugo Chapman and Sarah Vowles, in addition to my essay. They are encased in a glriously wild case featuring a relief reproduction of Michelangelo’s David!

The essay was a thrill to write and I’m excited to be in such great company and to find publication under such fantastic conditions. Simply titled “Michelangelo: Life and Art”, my essay starts like this:

Michelangelo made modern art. Not alone, not

on his own, but if we were to point to a single

artist responsible for establishing in our collective

consciousness the notion of art as self-expression, it

would be he. And he did it on a scale unmatched by

his contemporaries, giving his art a heroism integral

to our narrative of his pre-eminence. Yet there are

also profound intimacies to his work, emotional

disclosures—even vulnerabilities. This dichotomy,

surely, has been crucial to his position at the centre

of the western canon.

Here’s an image of the product, which I believe retails at a price beyond most of our means.

See more on the Artika website.

I’ve recently had a couple of scholarly articles published in two anthology volumes. I hope you will check them out.

One is a treatment, my most comprehensive yet, of Titian’s engagement with reproductive printmaking, from his scattered interactions with printmakers working after his designs and finished works in the earlier parts of his career, his involvement in Venetian literary circles from the later 1520s onwards and its manifestation in book illustration and print portraiture, to his increased collaboration with printers and printmakers issuing prints after his paintings from the 1550s onwards, culminating in his famous work with Cornelis Cort in the mid 1560s through 1571.

The article is included in the anthology Titian: Themes and Variations, edited by the great Peter Humfrey. It compiles new scholarship on Titian’s practice of replication and variation throughout his career and across media, written by many of the top scholars in the field. I’m honoured to be included.

The other article was developed from a conference paper I gave during covid for a Roman conference on Raphael in 2021, postponed like so many other things involving Raphael, from the anniversary year of 2020. It examines the close creative exchange, competition and mutual inspiration between Raphael, Sebastiano del Piombo and Michelangelo in Rome during the second decade of the sixteenth century and beyond. I have new things to say about Raphael’s appropriations from the Sistine Chapel ceiling, his and Sebastiano’s race to complete mural paintings in oil, the internal chronology of their respective renditions of the Transfiguration of Christ and a proposal about Michelangelo’s contribution to Sebastiano’s never-complete altarpiece for the Chigi chapel in Santa Maria della Pace.

It is published in the volume Himmlische und irdische Liebe: Ein anderer Blick auf Raffael, edited by Yvonne Dohna Schlobitten, Claudia Bertling Biaggini, Claudia Cieri Via, a rich compendium of work by a wide variety of scholars on this crucial period in the history of modern Western art.

Do take a look at either or both when you’re next at your academic library. I also recommend getting them for your own bookshelves of course, but realise that that is a longer shot.

Sebastiano del Piombo, Study of Martha and other figures for the Raising of Lazarus, 1517. Frankfurt, Städel

Last week I was a guest on the live culture evening broadcast og Italian Radio 3 along with my great colleague and friend Costanza Barbieri to talk about Michelangelo and Sebastiano del Piombo on the occassion of our new(ish) book The Compass and the Mirror. If you can deal with my pessimo italiano, I think it turned out pretty informative, especially due to Costanza’s presence there. And if you just can’t get enough, here’s the video of the book presentation we did at the Accademia San Luca last autumn.

Last week I had the pleasure of attending the book presentation at the Accademia di San Luca in Rome of The Compass and the Mirror – Sebastiano del Piombo and Michelangelo that I have edited and contributed to. Based on research conducted and insights gained during the 2017 exhibition Michelangelo & Sebastiano that I organised at the National Gallery, the book presents a wide variety of new research on the two artists and the context of their collaboration. It is published by Brepols and you can read more here.

It was a real privilege to be able to organise a book presentation of this sort and to hear the critiques of my esteemed colleagues Professor Alessandro Zuccari of the Sapienze University of Rome and Cecilia Frosinini, faculty member at the Opificio delle Pietre Dure in Florence. Both had pointed and important remarks that I will take forward in future work. You can see the entire presentation above, but note that the two respondents speak in Italian and only I, out of necessity, respond in English at the end.

Matthias Wivel — The Compass and the Mirror

Elena Calvillo — Friendship, Medium and the Diverging Lives of Sebastiano del Piombo and Michelangelo

Piers Baker-Bates — Copies and Versions in Sebastiano’s Art? The Christ Carrying the Cross

Sheryl E. Reiss — A Word Portrait of a Medici Maecenas: Giulio de’ Medici (Pope Clement VII) as Patron of Art

Arnold Nesselrath — Raphael: Of Heirs and Pretenders

Matthias Wivel and Rachel Billinge — Sebastiano’s Vich Triptych

Carlo Piga — Da Michelangelo a Sebastiano: antiche suggestioni e moderne invenzioni nel ciclo decorativo della Cappella Borgherini in San Pietro in Montorio a Roma

Stefania Pasti — Aperietur in tempore: Sebastiano del Piombo and the Borgherini Chapel in the Light of Prophetic Readings

Paul Joannides — A New Drawing by Sebastiano del Piombo for the Semi-Dome of the Borgherini Chapel

Costanza Barbieri — Sebastiano as Portraitist and a Case Study: The Portrait of Michelangelo Pointing to His Drawings

Oriana Sartiani — A Portrait of Michelangelo Attributed to Sebastiano del Piombo: Technical Examination, Discoveries, and Treatment

Simonetta Antellini — L’originalità compositiva della Nascita della Vergine di Sebastiano del Piombo

Daniela Luzi — ‘Il bel secreto’: La pittura sperimentale sulla pietra di Sebastiano nella Cappella Chigi

Morten Steen Hansen — The Readings of Angels: Sebastiano del Piombo and the Politics of the Immaculate Conception

Andrea Donati — Marcello Venusti, Michelangelo and the Legacy of Sebastiano del Piombo

Charles Robertson — Michelangelo’s Last Judgement: Sebastiano del Piombo’s Contribution

Michelangelo & Sebastiano, with Dr Matthias Wivel and Dr Piers Baker-Bates from Colnaghi Foundation on Vimeo.

It’s Christmas time, so here’s a treat for the two and half people who might care. I was searching for something else and happened upon this video through the Colnaghi Foundation website. It records a conversation I had at their premises in London in the spring of 2017 with my colleague Piers Baker-Bates on Sebastiano del Piombo, his relationship to Michelangelo and his fortuna critica in Spain (a particular specialty of Piers’). Of course the impetus was the exhibition I had organised at the National Gallery, to which Piers had provided invaluable assistance.

I was aware at the time that it was being filmed but forgot all about it, so it’s nice to see it’s been online for a while. It’s very nerdy, but that was also kind of the brief, and frankly a relief at a time when I was doing many more general — and also enjoyable! — introductions to the subject. Plus, it’s always nice to chat with Piers. Enjoy!

A curatorial triumph, with individual exhibits
selected with confidence and intelligence, the exhibition
offers an exceptional opportunity to understand and appreciate
Michelangelo’s art and creative mind at the most intimate level.
However, while this well suits those ready to devote a long
time to it, one wonders whether, for the more casual visitor, so
comprehensive an approach through sheer accumulation might
flatten the impact of individual objects : many of which would
be centrepieces in other displays.

In it, I also discuss the very forceful attribution to Michelangelo that curator Carmen C. Bambach advances for the picture illustrated above, from the Kimbell. Ostensibly Michelangelo’s first painting — executed in when he was a pre-teen or in his early teens — it is a compelling work that could be by him, but about which I am not alone in habouring certain doubts.

Anyway, read the Burlington at your local art library!

Siddende mandling model, ca. 1510+12, Wien, Albertina