MAKING MICHELANGELO

The Ashmolean Museum in Oxford has one of the few bronze casts of Michelangelo made by his friend and apprentice, Daniele da Volterra. Michelangelo said of Volterra’s work that it looked good enough from a distance, but it didn’t stand up to close inspection. On seeing this bronze head for the first time, it was at the top of the museum in a dark corner with thick glass surrounding it, but I could still see that there was something not quite right about it.

I applied for permission to study it at close quarters. I was allowed to have close up access in their print room, and wore my white gloves. I did some drawings and took some measurements with my wooden callipers, and then embarked on making a copy so that I could see what was troubling me.

I thought that the ears and jawline were out of kilter. I knew Michelangelo had a broken nose, but there was no report of the jaw being out of alignment. The hair is perfunctorily modelled, and the ears were not in the correct plane. I made my model with the eyes open, the hair slightly more detailed and the ears in the appropriate place.

After my studies and my work, I concluded that the original face of Michelangelo had perhaps been made as a life- or a death-mask, and that the rest of the piece had been modelled afterwards to fit roughly around the mask. My overall aim was to see what he really looked like.