Drawing of the Month #17 (UK)
Saturday, 1 February 2025. Newsletter 17.
Michelangelo Buonarroti (1475-1564)
A Bacchanal of Children, 1533
Red chalk, 27.4 x 38.8 cm. Royal Collection, Windsor Castle
Martin Clayton, Head of Prints and Drawings at the Royal Collection Trust, has kindly chosen our UK drawing of the month.
The nineteen drawings by Michelangelo in the Royal Collection are remarkable for the high proportion that were made as ends in themselves, either as personal meditations or gifts for his closest friends. The meditations centre on the Passion of Christ; the gift drawings (often called ‘Presentation Drawings’) are primarily mythological or allegorical, the most celebrated being those made for Tommaso de’ Cavalieri.
Michelangelo met the young Roman nobleman in 1532 and was immediately enraptured, writing to him of the ‘ocean with overwhelming waves that has appeared before me’. We know of four drawings that Michelangelo made for Cavalieri: a Punishment of Tityus and an Abduction of Ganymede, New Year’s gifts at the turn of 1532-33; a Fall of Phaethon the following summer (exhibited at the British Museum in 2024); and the so-called Bacchanal of Children, drawn in the autumn of 1533. All are now at Windsor except Ganymede (that sheet has been identified with a version in the Fogg, but the jury remains out).
Though not a uniform set, the four drawings are finished to a similarly high degree – the modelling almost ‘stippled’ with finely sharpened chalk – and all carry a philosophical or moral message. Tityus and Ganymede represent the opposed forms of love in Neoplatonic philosophy: the carnal lust that leads to earthly suffering, and the spiritual love inspired by beauty that leads to the divine. The Phaethon is an exemplar of the consequences of hubris, and may express feelings of unworthiness in daring to love one as beautiful in body and soul as Cavalieri (however unwarranted such humility might seem, in Michelangelo of all people).
The Bacchanal is more complex, and its relevance to Michelangelo’s love is not obvious. In a rocky cave, children carry the corpse of a deer towards a cauldron, where their companions stoke the fire and stir the pot. Others drink from a wine vat; one urinates into a wine bowl that will soon be offered to his friend. An aged goat-woman suckles a child, while a naked man slumps asleep or in a drunken stupor. Though no literary source has been identified, the meaning in Neoplatonic philosophy is clear: the children (and the goat-woman and drunken man) represent the lowest level of human existence, acting in the absence of reason, intellect and divine love.
The Bacchanal is the most carefully worked of all Michelangelo’s drawings, and must have taken him many hours to execute. It is in pristine condition and has clearly been treasured since it was drawn. Yet strangely for such a celebrated drawing, there is a yawning gap in the provenance: we have no knowledge of its whereabouts between the Farnese collections around 1600 and its documented presence in the Royal Collection around 1800, nor any idea as to how it was acquired.
Michelangelo’s Bacchanal of Children is in the exhibition ‘Drawing the Italian Renaissance’ at The King’s Gallery, London, to 9 March.
