Last-Minute Michelangelo

While museums around the world are shuttered due to the Covid-19 pandemic, Apollo’s usual weekly pick of exhibition openings will be replaced by a selection of digital initiatives providing virtual access to art and culture.

In the final moments before having to shutter the museum, the curators at the Getty took their only opportunity to hurriedly shoot a series of videos of their current exhibition of Michelangelo’s drawings. These videos – released last week at a rate of one per day – feature analysis of the artist’s work by exhibition curator Julian Brooks; in the first two, he discusses Michelangelo’s debt to older artists such as Masaccio, evident in drawings such as Three Draped Figures with Hands Joined, and the Study of a Mourning Woman, which was lost for hundreds of years, rediscovered only in 1995. The videos have been released on the Getty’s Facebook page; you can read Brooks’s reflections on closing the exhibition on the Getty’s website.

Preview below | View Apollo’s Art Diary here

Screenshot – Julian Brooks with the Study of a Mourning Woman

Study of a Mourning Woman (c. 1500–05), Michelangelo Buonarroti. J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles

Three Draped Figures with Hands Joined (1496–1503), Michelangelo Buonarroti. Photo: © Teylers Museum, Haarlem