NOTE ON THE DRAWINGS
The great European Museums—especially the Louvre, the Uffizi, the Albertina in Vienna, the British Museum, Oxford University and Windsor—contain very rich collections of Michelangelo's drawings. The most beautiful of those in the Louvre came from the Jabach and Mariette collections.
"You could not ask for anything more finished or showing a greater knowledge of drawing," says Mariette; ... "they are almost too much finished.... I do not know any other master who finished his studies more completely. When he is looking for a certain pose he dashes off impetuously on the paper what comes from his imagination. He draws with large strokes.... But if he wants to study nature so that he may reproduce it later on in sculpture or in painting he follows an entirely different method.... His drawing is no longer a sketch, but a finished fragment in which no detail is left out, it is the flesh itself; and Michelangelo needed nothing more than this for his modelling. I have a number of drawings where you can see the marks which Michelangelo made on them, and which indicate that these designs were used by him as guides in his modelling...."
Some of the drawings in the Louvre were for the tombs of the Medici and for the bronze David for Florimond Robertet.
Another curious thing about these drawings is that we often find upon them verses by Michelangelo, fragments of poems. Both verses and drawings are often the repetitions or variations of certain ideas which were in his mind for years and occupied his attention with the tenacity of fixed ideas.
Michelangelo used indifferently red chalk, pen and ink, and charcoal or pencil.[{180}]
BIBLIOGRAPHY
I.—WRITINGS OF MICHELANGELO