Bad reasons for wanting to be friends with someone: 1) to use their fame to help further your career 2) to use their talent to undermine your biggest rival 3) to use their HMV staff discount card. Two out of three of those terrible friendship ingredients are in the slightly unpalatable visual soup that is Michelangelo & Sebastiano. This show tells a story of friendship, collaboration and admiration between a great master of High Renaissance art and a pretender to the throne, but also a story of manipulation, deception and total political bastardry.
Sebastiano was a Venetian painter with big aspirations and a poor work ethic. Skilled but lazy. His work tackled the big themes of the time: Christ (dead, alive and in-between), Christ’s mum (pregnant, knackered and sad), biblical scenes of minor importance, and some paintings of the pope. There’s a staunch, austere solemnity to his paintings. He’s at his best when he contrasts dark drama with illuminating colour: Christ entering limbo in brilliant white, raising Lazarus in raw, porky pink surrounded by Granny Smith greens, carrying the cross in perfect sky blue, all while swirling dark clouds of gloom swarm behind him. But few of the works here reach that level.
You can see why the younger artist so desperately wanted to befriend the great master: being associated with Michelangelo would shunt him up the career ladder and open doors. Michelangelo, though, saw the friendship as an opportunity to undermine his arch-nemesis Raphael (the levels of ‘Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles’ pettiness here are unreal). Letters displayed throughout the exhibition show Renaissance political shenanigans at their finest.
But the fact that the letters are the most fascinating bit of the show is damning. The problem is that Sebastiano pales in comparison to Michelangelo, his hand lacks the sharpness, clarity and zingy gorgeousness of the master. Even when Michelangelo directly draws elements for Sebastiano’s paintings, the older man still has the edge.
And, of the handful of Michelangelo works included here, most are either from the National Gallery’s collection or are drawings from the British Museum. The Pietà here is a cast, ‘The Virgin and Child’ painting is unfinished and so is the entombment image. The marble roundel is from the RA, just up the road. Most of these are not great Michelangelos, and the ones that are you can see for free most of the time anyway.
So you’re left with Sebastiano, and even there the quality of the works is stretched. Maybe getting loans of old masters is getting harder and harder, but a 3D recreation of the Borgherini Chapel is not a big deal – it’s basically a print.
The story here is fascinating and absorbing, the research in-depth and passionate, but the work just doesn’t live up to its potential. Michelangelo and Sebastiano’s friendship fell apart eventually, condemning Sebastiano to the history books – this attempt to drag him back out into the open just doesn’t tug hard enough.
@eddyfrankel