ABSTRACT
This chapter deals with critical debates about Michelangelo as a draughtsman. His studies of heads and bodies were given great attention in the last three decades of the century as expressions of his complex creative genius. The chapter presents a case study of the Victorian painter Edward Burne-Jones and his admiration and use of Michelangelo's disegno, in the term's concrete as well as in its abstract sense. The chapter outlines the English as collectors of Michelangelo's drawings. Reattribution has become a major issue in Michelangelo scholarship, especially since the 1890s when Bernhard Berenson started his re-examination of the artist's drawings. The inventory drawn up at Michelangelo's death lists only ten drawings and cartoons, primarily for the basilica of St Peter's; the main body of the surviving designs must therefore have been given away or collected elsewhere before 1564. The English started collecting drawings by Michelangelo in the seventeenth century.
