Conserving Michelangelo
The drawing is pale brown ink over cream paper. A diagonal tear crosses from the arches on the left to the robe of the figure on the right, then disappears — as if a bird had suddenly flown through Michelangelo’s studio and he, taking its path for a sign, had put it in. The whole is twice-mounted, first simply by Michelangelo’s great-nephew, then, a century, later, in grander style — but both mounts, being too small, have left the paper rippled.
Marjorie leans over her work, one palm flat on its either side, as if she were shielding it with her body. Which she, passionately, is. She wants it never to become a sadness, like that of a woman on whom it slowly dawns that by destroying her wrinkles, she has lost her greatest beauty: the time she wears on her face.
Having thought this, Marjorie decides she was right about the sadness, but that a drawing’s life is more complicated than a woman’s. Before she can know what to mend and what to leave alone, she must see it free. She tests glues, settles on seaweed gel then treats the mounts two inches at a time, flattening each gel worm with her hand. When she finishes the trip, since like Machaut her end is her beginning, she picks up a damp brush. In this work she is a painter, and a poet, too — and patiently, for painters and poets need patience in moments as delicate as these, she gentles the glue away.
Now, with the drawing naked on the table before her, she can see that the linen and flax paper on which it is rendered — the strongest the world has ever known — has, after a lifetime of too much light, become tearable and worse, warped. Because this cannot stand, she cradles it, lays it carefully into a plastic box, covers the lid with weights so that not one of its inspirations can escape — and leaves it there. Hours later she returns, takes it out, presses it between blotters, lays it back. Leaves it, takes it out, presses it, lays it back. What are weeks compared to centuries? What is her own life compared to the beauty of these pale lines, this washed paper, the calm of the monk it shelters? Compared to the brilliance of the hand that made the monk?
When she has done all she can, the drawing lies nearly flat. But not quite. It’s not the matting now, but the tear, carelessly mended so long ago, that disturbs its surface. But then it comes to her: the tear is history, is a testament to human fallibility, even Michelangelo’s since it must have happened in his studio.
An Incident in Michelangelo’s Studio. What could be more alive, she thinks, than that: the tear, the wrinkles, the truth. Oh how she adores every moment she spends with her eyes, her hands, her heart, in the presence of genius; how lucky she is that the heavens have allowed her to dance this way, how unlike herself, but poetic nevertheless, are the slow surgeries of her life.
— for Marjorie Shelley, Curator of Works on Paper , Metropolitan Museum of Art
