A Vienna museum is showing more than 100 drawings by Michelangelo, in the world’s biggest show of the Renaissance genius in 20 years, organizers said a day before Thursday’s opening.
The exhibition at the Albertina museum highlights Michelangelo Buonarroti’s skill in depicting the human body in all its facets. “He injects bodies with a kind of power and strength that had not been seen before him,” curator Achim Gnann said on Wednesday.
The Albertina has gathered the Italian artist’s drawings from museums including the Uffizi gallery in Florence, the Metropolitan Museum in New York and the Louvre in Paris. The works include drafts for the frescoes in Rome’s Sistine Chapel, as well as his earliest existing drawing.
Michelangelo turned drawing from a tool for making drafts into an autonomous art form, organizers said.
His drawings were “the essence of what a work of art can represent,” Albertina director Klaus Albrecht Schroeder said.
The artist, who lived from 1475 to 1564, created more than 20,000 drawings, of which only some 600 still remain. The exhibition is scheduled to run until January 9.
