Of Soave and Michelangelo on a Sunday

If I needed a good reason for a road trip on a beautiful sunny Easter afternoon, could there be a better one than Michelangelo?

So I headed out scenic Route 5 for the plantation row drive to Williamsburg and the Muscarelle Museum to see "Michelangelo: Architecture as Anatomy, Drawings by the Master."

I drive down to the 'burg for exhibits on a fairly regular basis because they always seem to curate interesting shows.

But after that drive, my first stop is inevitably the Ladies' Room, which houses some of the best artifacts in the museum.

In each stall is a metal tray from which hang two rolls of t.p. and at the end of the tray is a built-in ashtray with a small sign above it, saying "Please Refrain from Smoking."

I've been around a while and I still don't remember many public stalls with ashtrays, so I always get a kick out of seeing these, imagining somebody's grandmother having a pee and a cig in there.

What a different world that was.

I'd arrived in time for the docent-led tour, figuring I could peruse the show on my own afterwards.

Given the extremely fragile nature of nearly 500-year old drawings, the lighting in the gallery is extremely low, forcing the viewer to lean in to get a good look; I loved this intimacy with the art.

Michelangelo considered drawings inferior (and p.s., never considered himself a painter) so most of his were destroyed at his death to maintain the illusion of a genius from whom masterpieces sprang without work.

To have a dozen of them in one room was a breath-taking experience.

We began with "Study for a Soldier in the Resurrection," causing one guy to comment what a perfectly appropriate work it was to be viewing today (He's baaack!).

The depiction of a muscular soldier holding down the lid of a sarcophagus as Christ tries to arise from it showed Michelangelo's superb handling of anatomy, in his opinion, the key to success in architecture.

And that was the theme of the exhibition; the master wrote that,"Only a man who can reproduce the human figure and is well-versed in anatomy knows anything about architecture."

Another drawing had a sonnet at the top followed by a cut-out of a cornice in the lower corner.

It was intended as a template for workers creating the cornice, although it had not a single measurement, only the diagram of its shape.

Michelangelo presumed that the workers could figure how to execute based solely on this.

The show was as fascinating for the writing on the paper as well as the drawings.

Since he never intended for them to be seen, there were pages with poems and drawings, inventories and drawings even lists and drawings.

In many cases, the words written on the back bled through the drawing on the front, requiring the viewer to decipher what the eye read as a double image.

It was like having a window into the man's head, full of stream-of-consciousness doodles and words.

Watching his thought processes play themselves out over the course of one sheet of paper was absolutely amazing.

Driving back up Rte. 5 behind all kinds of motorcyclists enjoying the view along with me, all I could think of was opening the bottle of Inama Soave Classico in my frig (scored in a barter with Julia at River City; I hemmed her new jeans, she gave me a bottle of good Italian wine) and sipping it on my back porch as I processed what I'd just seen.

An afternoon in a room with Michelangelo drawings, poems, sonnets and ideas.

If that doesn't resurrect a soul, I can't imagine what would.