Fascinating insight into the mind of Michelangelo

You’re pushing 60 and an important patron asks you to repeat an artistic feat you accomplished in your thirties. There’s nothing more daunting than having to compete with your younger self, but the patron is the Pope. How can you say no?

Besides, it’s an excuse to get away from Florence, where your work for the republicans who expelled the Medici has become an embarrassment since their return. So you tell Pope Clement VII that, yes, you will move to Rome and paint a Last Judgment on the altar wall of the Sistine Chapel.

Bladder stones, colic, backache, gout – Michelangelo had them all and moaned about them in letters

Contemplating this monumental fresco, it’s hard to believe that it was the work of a man already complaining of old age, but Michelangelo (1475-1564) was an artistic titan. That’s what makes the British Museum’s new show so special: by focusing on his last three decades, it demonstrates that even titans age. Bladder stones, colic, backache, gout – Michelangelo had them all and moaned about them in letters to his nephew. Italians, even titans, don’t have stiff upper lips.

This is not a show of Michelangelo masterpieces; it’s an introduction to how a great artist thinks. It includes some polished presentation drawings made in the early 1530s for his young pash Tommaso dei Cavalieri – with whom he was infatuated to the point of offering: ‘If you do not like this sketch… I have time to make another one’ – and some marvellous life drawings for the ‘Last Judgment’. But more fascinating are the jottings on the backs of sheets where we can read the artist’s first, second and third thoughts on different projects. Always careful with money, he used and reused every scrap of paper, sometimes even gluing irregular offcuts together.