Portrait of Michelangelo Buonarroti

Author: Chris Fischer

Most of Fra Bartolommeo’s portrait drawings were functional. They were made for use in paintings, and were drawn from workshop models who became idealized beyond recognition in the paintings. Around 1513 there were, however, tendencies towards greater naturalism among the painters of the younger generation, and this attitude is perceptible in Fra Bartolommeo’s oeuvre from around 1515. It is most evident in his large studies of faces, where a new immediacy and vitality appear. Although many of these studies were used for paintings, some of them were apparently drawn for their own sake, in order to capture the individuality of friends and fellow artists.^[1] A splendid example is this portrait of Michelangelo (1475-1564), although it is less characteristic and forceful than Fra Bartolommeo’s more famous portrait of Michelangelo also in Rotterdam.^[2] They were drawn in the same combination of black and red chalk. Black chalk was used for both form and structure, whereas flesh and skin gained warmth and sensitivity through the mixture of red chalk in these areas. The smooth, living skin is thus set off against the pure black of the bushy hair and beard.

The identification of the sitter as Michelangelo is based on a comparison with the portrait bust by Daniele da Volterra (1509-1566) in Paris,^[3] which shows Michelangelo in his seventies. Fra Bartolommeo’s drawings show a younger man. They were probably done from life in 1517 when Michelangelo was in Florence to supervise the building of the facade of San Lorenzo. At this time Michelangelo was forty-two years old, which would be an acceptable age for the sitter in Fra Bartolommeo’s drawings. Although Fra Bartolommeo is not mentioned in any of Michelangelo’s surviving letters, there can be no doubt that they knew each other. Both were profoundly affected by the ideas of the Dominican friar Girolamo Savonarola (1452-1498). Michelangelo’s elder brother, Lionardo, was also a link between them. A follower of Savonarola, he also became a Dominican friar in 1491, and in 1510 was living in the San Marco convent where Fra Bartolommeo had been a friar since 1504. By 1517 there seems to have been contact between the two of them in connection with the Billi Chapel in Santissima Annunziata.

Since both Rotterdam drawings are executed in a similar technique and style, they presumably result from the same sitting. Both show Michelangelo with a short beard, dressed in his working clothes. He is wearing the famous hat that protected his bushy hair from the dust produced from carving marble. Although his features are already marked by the reticence, melancholy and fatigue so pronounced in the portrait made in his old age, the dominant emotion that Fra Bartolommeo has captured in this splendid work is the distrustful nature that emerges from many of Michelangelo’s letters. Michelangelo’s broken nose was one of his most conspicuous features, and it is explicitly emphasized in Fra Bartolommeo’s drawing. It was often concealed or softened in the portraits of him made by other artists in an attempt to present their idol in as flattering a light as possible. Its unconcealed rendition in this portrait further contributes to its touching intimacy.