Michelangelo: The Last Decades review – feels close to a religious experience

British Museum, London
This huge yet intimate show of the Renaissance polymath’s work guides you by the heart as well as the eyes, through hypnotic studies, his own words, and drawings that are prayers as much as pictures

The final section of the British Museum’s exhibition Michelangelo: The Last Decades is circular and enclosed. The walls are black and the light low. The feeling is of being in a small chapel: if a person was to speak in this space, they would surely whisper – though my instinct was for absolute silence. The work on display here, made in the last 30 years of the artist’s long life, is so far beyond the meaning bestowed by words, and even if it wasn’t, who could improve on those of Michelangelo himself? By the door is one of his poems, dated 1554 (on loan from the Vatican library, it is gorgeously translated by James Saslow). “The voyage of my life has at last reached/ across a stormy sea, in fragile boat,” it begins. It acknowledges that the moment of “accounting” is imminent. It speaks of a soul that may no longer be calmed by the material. Death is engraved on its author’s every waking thought.

The sketches of the crucifixion in this room are exquisite, of course, their beauty and tenderness only deepened by the fact that the artist’s hand is now less steady, his sight possibly fading. But there’s something else as well: a numinosity that radiates outwards, like heat. These drawings are as much prayers as they are pictures, each one a bead on a rosary. Over and over, the artist works away with his black chalk, moving ever closer to the truth as he sees it. In Crucifixion with the Virgin and St John the Evangelist (c1555-63), Mary presses her cheek against Christ’s naked thigh. Her body half curled, her hand resting on her chin, she seems in her bewilderment and her sorrow more child than mother. It is one of the most daringly intimate depictions of the crucifixion I’ve ever seen, and for all that I’m more or less entirely godless these days, it brought me almost to tears.