Spiritual journey

There has been a certain amount of controversy about this exhibition, the first Michelangelo show at the British Museum for 30 years. The exhibits are drawn almost entirely from the collections of three museums — the Teylers in Haarlem (where the exhibition was shown last year), the Ashmolean in Oxford and the BM itself. These are three of the greatest repositories of Michelangelo’s drawings, but over-reliance on them does exclude, for instance, the remarkable presentation drawings from the Royal Collection at Windsor. The exhibition has also been attacked on the grounds of authenticity. As the Daily Telegraph’s art critic Richard Dorment points out, ‘Only three of the 80 or so drawings attributed to Michelangelo on display are universally accepted by all scholars as being by the hand of the master.’ Will such dire warnings deter ardent gallery-goers? I hope not.

The problem with attribution is that scholars have to make a name for themselves, and what better way to do so than by overturning previously accepted masterpieces and insisting that they are actually by lesser artists? Delightful rumpus and everyone reads your book.