Michelangelo's Dream

Despite being intimate, heartfelt gifts, Michelangelo's 'presentation' drawings to Tommaso de' Cavalieri have led a very public existence. Cavalieri, a young man whom the much older artist fell passionately in love with, and for whom many of the drawings and poems on display here were made, was generous with these marvellous gifts from the divine Michelangelo, making them readily available to craftsmen to copy. Through such engravings and copies the presentation drawings, whose images expressed Michelangelo's intense love for Cavalieri, entered the visual lexicon of the age. 'Truly miraculous,' wrote Vasari, in his 'Lives'. 'Outstanding drawings the like of which has never been seen.'

Despite the rather reserved commentaries and the emphasis on chaste, neoplatonic love, the drawings are quite frankly erotic. The Ganymede and Tityus especially, when taken as a pair, seem very unambiguous indeed, and not very chaste at all. The extraordinary Phaeton, with its frighteningly heavy horses, torqued and tumbling, is perhaps less direct, but here too there is an abundance of very solid flesh, and the dead centre of the drawing is reserved for a set of equine genitalia which partly echo the thunderbolt being thrown from on high by Zeus.

At the centre of the display is 'Il Sogno', The Dream. Unlike the presentation drawings, which illustrate episodes from antique myth, 'The Dream' is an allegorical image, full of ambiguity, which appears to illustrate the awakening of virtue - the young man seemingly roused from sleep by a winged herald - from the sleep of vice, whose hallucinatory temptations encircle him. Rich and strange, in truth it escapes a definitive reading, though as testimony to Michelangelo's staggering virtuosity and complex intellect it is inarguable, and nearly half a millennium later it is still easy to agree with Vasari's judgement.