The odd couple | 31 January 2019

The joint exhibition of Michelangelo Buonarroti and Bill Viola at the Royal Academy is, at first glance, an extremely improbable double act. Viola is one of the contemporary-art stars of the later 20th and early 21st centuries. He was one of the first to achieve fame in the new medium of video art, and is still its best-known exponent. While Michelangelo, as they say in showbusiness, needs no introduction.

But there’s more to this bromance, across eras and continents, between a 16th-century Florentine and a contemporary Californian than might immediately be apparent. The more you think about the pairing, and follow the argument of the curator Martin Clayton, the more analogies between the two appear.

Clayton, who is the head of prints and drawings at the Royal Collection, describes how in 2006 Viola paid a visit to the print room at Windsor, where one of the world’s greatest arrays of old-master drawings is kept. He had come to see the Leonardos most of all, but was overwhelmed by the Michelangelos.

Well he might have been. I had the same experience a few years later, when working on my biography of Michelangelo. I, too, sat down in the print room at Windsor and had box files full of astoundingly beautiful works put on the table in front of me. There was as much of Michelangelo’s invention compressed on those sheets of paper as can be seen on the Sistine ceiling.

Many of the drawings I held that day are on show at the RA. The ones made as gifts for Tommaso de’Cavalieri, the love of Michelangelo’s life, are there — and to see them is worth the price of admission in itself. These are works and subjects that were selected by the artist; no pope or Medici patron was involved.