But Michelangelo’s many drawings, and certain derivative works they inspired, also tell a compelling story about his life and the way art and artists were viewed in the 16^th century, says Maria Ruvoldt, PhD, associate professor of art history and a scholar of Italian Renaissance art.

For instance, there was an almost revolutionary idea afoot: that drawings were valuable works of art in themselves, she said. When others created art based on Michelangelo’s drawings, it was treated as if it had been produced by the master himself.

“Any design Michelangelo made, even if it was then executed by another artist, was considered a Michelangelo. It doesn’t matter that it’s not by his hand, because the idea has been reproduced,” Ruvoldt said. “In the 16^th century, value was created in a very different way.”

Michelangelo in Multiple

In the book she’s writing, Michelangelo in Multiple, Ruvoldt views these different conceptions through the lens of drawings that Michelangelo produced as gifts for Tommaso de’Cavalieri, a young nobleman he was infatuated with, as well as other works based on the drawings.

The drawings, ostensibly private, didn’t stay private for long, since they were passed around among Michelangelo’s immediate friends and in fact helped bind that group together. They

wound up generating additional art works that were highly sought-after themselves.

“They circulate within a relatively small circle of people, but almost immediately people outside of that circle are aware of them and want to get their hands on them, and they’re copied at an astonishing rate,” Ruvoldt said. Copies ranged from re-drawings to prints and ceramics to sculptures and paintings for elite patrons.

Michelangelo probably wasn’t surprised that this happened, Ruvoldt said. He was at the height of his fame, and the status of the artist in society was in flux.

“Michelangelo is asserting his autonomy, his ability to make things outside of the traditional client-patron relationship, at a time when people are starting to value the artist as a creative individual and not just as a workman,” she said.

Also in flux was the value of drawings themselves, which were starting to become prized as “residue” of the creative process.

“In a drawing, you can see the artist’s mind at work,” she said. “It’s a transitional moment, really, in the history of the medium of drawings. They start to get collected in this period for the first time.”

The drawings also offered a window into Michelangelo’s personal relationships. With their mythological subjects, they signified different things for different people, depending on how close they were to Michelangelo’s circle of intimates.

“The farther away you get from the immediate relationship, the farther away the images get from their very personal meaning, their very private meaning,” said Ruvoldt. “And they start to be applicable to a broader audience.”

One drawing dwells on the myth of Ganymede, a beautiful prince whom Zeus brings up to Mount Olympus to be his cup bearer, or lover. But the story’s other meaning, as an allegory for the elevation of the soul into heaven, provides cover for a racier interpretation that might prompt speculation about Michelangelo’s relationship with Cavalieri.

“Their meaning is debatable, and mutable,” Ruvoldt said. “If you say, ‘Well, they’re obviously about sex,’ I can say, ‘No, no, it’s an allegorization of the soul.’”

Lack of Copyright

The value created by the drawings was basically up for grabs, given the inchoate state of copyright protections at the time. After Cavalieri surrendered one of Michelangelo’s drawings to the Cardinal Ippolito de’Medici, the cardinal turned around and hired the gem engraver Giovanni Bernardi to make a series of rock-crystal intaglios based on it. “Nobody asks Michelangelo if it’s okay,” Ruvoldt said.

Bernardi then made bronze and lead copies to sell on his own, with his own signature on them. “Now they’re not just Michelangelo’s works, they’re now Michelangelo’s and Bernardi’s, and so they’re doubly valuable,” she said. “Michelangelo doesn’t have any ability to say, ‘Stop doing that.’ And that’s the thing that’s in flux, that idea of what constitutes authorship and what constitutes ownership of the design.”

“Those ideas that, for us, seem kind of settled were not at all settled,” she said.

During the 2014-2015 school year, while conducting research for Michelangelo in Multiple at New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art on a Jane and Morgan Whitney Fellowship, Ruvoldt decided to pursue a longstanding idea of hers: teaching a class entirely on-site, at the museum. She taught it for the first time last fall and will be teaching it again this year.

Spending so much time around the objects during the fellowship sharpened her appreciation for being in their presence. She sees this appreciation in her students as well, when they view ancient objects like a Krater—or Greek pot—in person rather than seeing them in a classroom slide presentation or in a textbook.

“They’re just kind of blown away,” she said. “They didn’t know it was so big, they didn’t know they could see the cracks in it and the places where it’s been repaired. That moment, I think, is a kind of ‘aha’ moment for them.”

But to historians, it’s “marginalia.”

On Nov. 12, reading historian Bill Sherman, Ph.D., professor of English at the University of York, delivered the fall Southwell Lecture on visual responses to texts, as expressed in the margins of more renowned medieval and Renaissance publications. He framed his talk through the words and works of Erasmus, the Dutch humanist, Renaissance philosopher, and Catholic priest, to illustrate the shifting relationship between reading and seeing in the 16th century, during the advent of printing.

While Erasmus, it turned out, was a lousy doodler himself (and warned against profane use of religious imagery), ironically his own image was widely reproduced in his time—through book drawings and doodles, on a coin, and most famously, in a painting (depicted at right) by Hans Holbein the Younger. Some of Holbein’s earliest surviving work, in fact, is itself marginalia—a set of some 80 drawings in the margins of one of Erasmus’ most famous books, In Praise of Folly.

Erasmus believed that the visual was part of the imagination, and that skillful illustration was a part of storytelling in print. While teaching at Oxford he was also said to have encouraged his students to mark brilliant passages or maxims within the books they read.

Currently, said Sherman, generalizations about Renaissance marginalia are hard to come by, as “there are a lot out there still to be seen or discovered.” He shared his own enthusiasm for an early printed edition, housed at Stanford University, of Pliny the Younger’s Letters in which Italian humanist Bernardo Bembo has added ostentatious pointing fingers (“manicules”) and staring eyeballs (“opticules”) to the margins to accentuate certain passages. He also showed slides from a 1481 copy of Dante’s Divine Comedy that had 19 printed illustrations, but which also contained hundreds of visual marginalia by artists—including an “extraordinary map of hell.”

Marginalia, Sherman concluded, do not often compete with the beauty and craftsmanship of great medieval scribes and illuminators. However, they offer a sense of the new mode of interaction during the time, which draws on medieval models but which is also part of an emerging culture of print, as well as the rise of humanism and “commerce with the classics.”

“Even the crudest ones give us a sharper image of  the period eye,” he said. “Like great art, good marginalia have a peculiar power to deliver intimate glimpses of the Renaissance world. And this sense of intimacy is, in the end, the most striking feature in these visual modes of reading.

“[We’re being] allowed to look over the shoulders at the hands of long-dead people, and, with this material, it is beginning to feel as if we might be able to see through their eyes.”

But the Renaissance master’s “Last Judgment,” which was unveiled in 1541 on a wall directly behind the altar, is not to be dismissed, and in fact is so richly detailed that it is open to endless interpretation, said Lee Palmer Wandel, Ph.D.

“Perhaps no other single image has provoked as much criticism over as long a time as this one: in one of the most sacred locations, the chapel in which the Pope celebrated some of the most important Masses, before both ecclesiastical and secular dignitaries, Michelangelo chose to paint dozens upon dozens of nudes,” Wandel said on Thursday at the Lincoln Center campus.

“As Girogio Vassari report in his Life of Michelangelo, the papal master of ceremonies, Biagio da Cesena said “It was a very disgraceful thing to have made in so honorable a place all those nude figures showing their nakedness so shamelessly,…a work not for the chapel of a Pope, but for a bagnia or a tavern.” In response, Michelangelo painted Cesena’s face on one of the damned—intimating another way of viewing the image.”

Wandel, a professor of history and religious studies, University of Wisconsin—Madison, delivered her lecture “A Liturgical Reading of Michelangelo’s Last Judgment,” as part of the St. Robert Southwell, S.J. Lecture Series.

The painting, she noted, has many elements in it that set it apart from its contemporaries. Aside from its depiction of nudity—Christ is wearing nothing but a loincloth—it also contains no blood. Even St. Sebastian, who is normally pictured with arrows piercing his torso, is holding the arrows in his hand. Also, she noted that up until then, the final judgment was rendered as an orderly sorting out of souls.

“Here is no image of stasis, of a stable ordering of the world. No one is seated. No one is static. The bodies of the saved as well as the damned are rendered in movement,” she said. “Michelangelo’s Christ is not bearded, but a young man, without any beard, originally without clothing of any kind—and not seated, not in stasis, but in motion, “rising” as many of his interpreters see the figure.”

Examination of the painting’s placement above the altar also shows, she said, that if a celebrant is raising a host and chalice above their head, a clear line can be seen leading up, through several parting angels, directly to Christ. Michelangelo would have known the Mass primarily not as a text, she said, but as a visual, aural, haptic, olfactory, somatic experience, and would have witnessed the complex relationship between the priest and the person of Christ.

Ultimately, the painter’s faith, which Wandel said has been described as “Sphinx-like,” can be seen in high relief on the wall of the chapel.

“The nudes of the ‘Last Judgment,’ I think, were not simply studies in classical form, but a breath-taking engagement with Incarnation and its implications for humankind, in Michelangelo’s present—hence painting Cesena into the image,” she said. “Christ’s perfect form serves as a visual, material link to all the saves who surround him, as well as to the damned, whose contorted figures convey the pain of which the human body is the means as well as the site.”