BY: ALAN RIDING

NEW YORK TIMES, AUGUST 20, 2002

LORENCE—With the statue of David never without a crowd of worshipers at the Galleria dell'Accademia, it could be said that every year is a Michelangelo year in Florence. But thanks to three exhibitions here this summer, il Divino, as Michelangelo is known to Italian devotees, seems more present than ever. In spirit at least. In reality, taken together, the three shows display fewer than a score of drawings and only a handful of sculptures that are confidently attributed to him.

The point, however, appears to be that Michelangelo transmogrified the art of his times, both through his reinterpretation of male and female beauty and through the influence of his architecture, sculpture, painting and drawing on successive generations.

That is the thrust of "The Shadow of Genius: Michelangelo and Florentine Art From 1537 to 1631," the large show at the Palazzo Strozzi through Sept. 29. Its focus is very much on the "shadow."

Two smaller exhibitions come closer to the artist himself and, above all, to his competing visions of physical and emotional attachment. "Venus and Love: Michelangelo and the New Ideal of Beauty," at the Accademia through Nov. 3, explores heterosexual love, while "The Myth of Ganymede: Before and After Michelangelo," at the Casa Buonarroti through Sept. 30, touches on Michelangelo's homosexuality and his infatuation with a young noble, Tommaso de' Cavalieri.

Both shows are built around specific works: Pontormo's painting of "Venus and Cupid," based on a life-size—but lost—drawing by Michelangelo, at the Accademia; and Michelangelo's drawing of "The Rape of Ganymede," which is on loan to the Casa Buonarroti from the Fogg Art Museum at Harvard University. Both works serve as departure points for reflections on Michelangelo's response to the human body.

The Rape of Ganymede, by Michelangelo

"In the choice of myths, there is a sort of 'equal opportunity' (highly appropriate in these politically correct days) for homosexual love and heterosexual love," Antonio Paolucci, the superintendent of Florentine museums, writes in an introduction to the Accademia's catalog, "idealized, idealized to the extreme, it must be said, both the one and the other."

The sexual charge is strongest in "The Rape of Ganymede," which Michelangelo gave to Tommaso de' Cavalieri in 1532 when he was just 12 and Michelangelo was 57. An undisguised allegory for the artist's passion for the boy, it portrays Zeus as an eagle kidnapping a beautiful young Trojan to become his cup bearer. In Michelangelo's rendering, while the eagle grips the boy's legs firmly with his talons, Ganymede's relaxed arms suggest he welcomes the abduction.

In "The Punishment of Tityus," another mythological drawing given to Tommaso that is in the Casa Buonarroti show, Michelangelo seemingly implies that his love is accompanied by torment. Here the lustful Tityus is shown being punished by having a vulture devour his liver for eternity. Yet letters between Michelangelo and Tommaso hint at no particular anguish: in early-16th-century Florence, it seems, intimate relationships between men and boys were not uncommon.

The Punishment of Tityus, by Michelangelo

The show, organized by Marcella Marongiu, concentrates on the myth of Ganymede because it has long caught the imagination of artists. It is portrayed in golden Greek earrings and a bronze Etruscan engraving from the third century B.C., as well as a Roman agate-and-onyx relief and a marble statue from the first century A.D. Revived in the Renaissance, the myth would have been familiar to educated Florentines. Michelangelo himself did a study for "The Rape of Ganymede" in 1502 and a different version in the late 1520's.

It is the drawing given to Tommaso, though, that inspired most copies. On display here are reproductions of the image in drawings, bronze reliefs, prints, ivory cameos and frescoes. In one bizarre instance, Battista Franco added the eagle carrying away Ganymede to a large painting of "The Battle of Montemurlo." The date on this oil, 1537, indicates that, while the drawing was a personal gift to Tommaso, it quickly became familiar to a larger public.

At the Accademia, "Venus and Cupid" also comes with a story, that of the wealthy patron Bartolomeo Bettini, who in 1532 invited Michelangelo, Pontormo and Bronzino to decorate a room in his Florentine palace. Unusually, Pontormo, no mean artist in his own right, was willing to copy in oil the "Venus and Cupid" drawn by Michelangelo. The painting, which was then confiscated by Duke Alessandro de' Medici, is the only surviving testimony of the drawing.

Bettini also planned lunettes in his salon portraying major Tuscan love poets. Giorgio Vasari, the 16th-century painter and writer, said Bronzino completed those of Dante, Petrarch and Boccaccio, although only one of Dante, attributed to Bronzino, survives and is included in the show. This image, showing the poet in profile, was frequently copied, including by Vasari himself in his painting of "Six Tuscan Poets," also on display here.

Few paintings, though, were more copied in the 16th century than "Venus and Cupid," which contemporary poets described as "designed by Michelangelo and colored by Pontormo." Records speak of 32 copies, with 16 extant and 2 in this show. Thanks to a restoration this year, the original "Venus and Cupid" can also be seen as it was painted, without the clothing that was later added to cover Venus's nakedness.

The exhibition, displayed in the Accademia on two sides of Michelangelo's "David," goes beyond "Venus and Cupid" to study other examples of the artist's treatment of the reclining nude, through oil copies of his sculptures of "Night" and "Dawn" from the Medicis' tomb in the New Sacristy of the Church of San Lorenzo and through a full-size copy of his lost drawing, "Leda," which shows the mother of Helen of Troy being seduced by Zeus in the guise of a swan.

These works in turn spotlight Michelangelo's representation of the naked female form. And here the exhibition's curators, Franca Falleti, director of the Accademia, and Jonathan Nelson, a professor of art history at Syracuse University in Florence, are eager to dispel the popular notion that Michelangelo's homosexuality meant his ignorance of women led him to portray them as muscular, masculine figures with breasts attached as afterthoughts.

Since it was customary at the time to work from life models, Mr. Nelson asks, "Can we really believe that Michelangelo, the most famous artist of his day, had less access to female models than his contemporaries?" Further, his anatomical sketches demonstrate that he could reproduce the human body to perfection. But as the subtitle of this show suggests, in his allegorical and biblical paintings, sculptures and drawings, Michelangelo was seeking a "new ideal of beauty," one inspired by art rather than nature.

"Regardless of Michelangelo's personal views about women," Mr. Nelson notes in a catalog essay, "he strove to create beautiful images of them, and his Tuscan contemporaries enthusiastically praised and commissioned copies of these figures." They were also defiantly different from those of the Venetian masters. Vasari said that after visiting Titian in his studio, Michelangelo remarked, "It is a shame that in Venice they never learned to draw well from the beginning."

The show at the Palazzo Strozzi, in contrast, is a celebration of the Florence that Michelangelo left behind when he moved to Rome in 1534. And it sets out to demonstrate how his influence on architecture, sculpture, drawing and even the decorative arts was felt in the city for the best part of a century. This exhibition will be at the Art Institute of Chicago from Nov. 9 to Feb. 2 and at the Detroit Institute of Art from March 16 to June 8.

Visitors drawn to the show only by Michelangelo's name, however, may be disappointed. From Michelangelo, it has just a half-dozen fine drawings, including "Lamentation for a Dead Christ," and a splendid marble statue of "Apollo/David." On the other hand, those seeking an exhibition that might better have been called "Art in the Age of the Medicis" will be delighted by a virtuoso display of the Mannerist art of High Renaissance Florence.

The first two sections, called "The Living Legend" and "Father and Master of All," trumpet the Michelangelo connection and underline his influence over Pontormo, Bronzino, Vasari, Cellini, Baccio Bandinelli and Pierino da Vinci. And the case is well made through Bandinelli's bronze statue of "Neptune," Cellini's bronze of "Perseus and Medusa" and da Vinci's marble statue of "River God," on loan from the Louvre.

But while the riches of the show go on, Michelangelo's "shadow" seems to fade as successive Medici rulers of Florence express their wealth, power and patronage in everything from the fine arts to architecture, decorative and applied arts, and garden design.

The show ends with a "virtual" visit to the Casa Buonarroti, the house that Michelangelo bought and never occupied and that was turned into a museum by his great-nephew. On the other hand, for anyone in Florence it is far simpler to see the real thing a few blocks away on the Via Ghibellina. And there, in the gallery's permanent collection, one can find much more of Michelangelo's work.