LONDON: Throughout his long life, Michelangelo Buonarroti was plagued by deadlines and a sense of lost freedom. He could never escape his employers. One pope thrashed him with a stick to try and speed up the Sistine Chapel. Another, refusing his bid for more time, sneered that he should learn to paint with his toes as well as his fingers.

Compared with Leonardo's abysmal catalogue of false starts, a massive body of work remains. But Michelangelo was haunted by projects unfinished or never begun a vast equestrian monument, a statue bigger than David, the Laurentine Library, the Medici Chapel. To which one might mournfully add the works now lost, from colossal bronzes to the celebrated snowman that once thrilled Florence. But these vanished dreams leave traces, for what survives of so much loss is an extraordinary body of drawings.

To say that Michelangelo is the greatest draughtsman who ever lived is a meaningless commonplace.

Born in 1475, and dead at nearly 90, he lived through an age of incredible performers on paper. But none of his contemporaries, not even Leonardo, can rival Michelangelo's mastery of the human body, specifically the male nude, nor the zeal and power of his line. In his drawings, every figure excels, every being aspires to greater beauty. His grasp of form and his conflation of the real with the ideal, conveyed in bare chalk and ink, are absolutely without parallel.

Anyone lucky enough to get to the British Museum can witness this fact in the first show of Michelangelo's drawings in more than three decades. Given that so few of his masterpieces are portable, this is about as close to a Michelangelo retrospective as we'll ever get. It gives the whole career, from the great Sistine Pieta when he was barely 23, to the late crucifixions, made when his eyesight was failing. And if drawing suggests something preliminary to you, then think again: Michelangelo's drawings are so fully formed they could almost be black-and-white paintings.

A baby with a kiss curl rocks on his bottom, marooned on the floor. Eventually, he manages to get upright. The sequence is enough to make anyone smile, but this intensely muscular infant also looks like a miniature hero, a classical figure, a Michelangelo in the making. As well he might, for he is at once himself and a working drawing for the infant John the Baptist; the child is father to the man.

So it is with Michelangelo, hardly more than a boy himself at this point. On the reverse of the sheet, he has clearly been to see the famous Apollo Belvedere, a Greek statue recently unearthed in Rome. The resemblance is exact but Michelangelo has brought the marble alive like Pygmalion it dances with vitality.

Decades later, the same thought seems to inspire his tremendous drawing of the Resurrection, in which Christ's stone-cold body returns to (eternal) life. Which other artist could endow sheer solid form with such mysterious lightness soul lifting body to heaven?

Michelangelo's frequently stated view that painting is inferior to sculpture is everywhere reflected in these drawings, which always aspire to a third dimension. He wants to show more and more of each figure, every angle to the full 360 degrees the sole, the inside elbow, the head's crown, the hollow behind a knee. Hence, in part, those incredible torsions.

Think of Adam in the Sistine Chapel: an impossible pose if you try it yourself, but made convincing by Michelangelo's profound understanding of anatomy. An understanding that's not put to the service of knowledge, as with Leonardo, so much as passion and faith the spirit made heroic flesh.

Now you might think Michelangelo's drawings would have less impact than his monumental works, but they turn out to be power compressed. Which can almost be too much when he occasionally uses white chalk to add highlights, so that images hit out even harder in all their graphic force. A hovering angel can look like a boxer.

Almost the smallest image here is Michelangelo's great emblem: the hand of God reaching out to Adam in The Creation. Not much bigger than an inch and crammed in among dozens of other ideas, it is a lightning bolt of pure concept. You can see how Michelangelo has turned the page around and around, ever frugal with his paper (sketches inked over poems, the whole of The Last Judgment contained in a single sheet). There is so much thought condensed in that sonnet; how strong is the comparison with Shakespeare.

The hand must have been drawn from life. Perhaps it was Michelangelo's own. But as with all of his drawings, the sense of an actual person posing before the artist is only there for a second and gone in an instant. He flies straight from reality to ideas.

Bodies in motion, struggle, recoil; bodies straining, falling, reviving everywhere you have the sense of the spirit fighting for freedom. And so compelling are the movements, and so astonishingly expressed down to the last ligament, that you barely wonder what they represent. There is an exquisite study here for Haman, that figure who appears to stretch his left arm right out into the space of the Sistine Chapel as if lifting into flight. There are no nails. You'd hardly know it was a crucifixion.

The utter strangeness and originality of Michelangelo's art is especially manifest in his drawings, where single figures are isolated from the usual dense groups. His single-mindedness is also more evident. No time is wasted, there are few doodles, no jeux d'esprit, except, perhaps, the drawing of old Phaeton knocked out of the skies by young Apollo, made for the teenage nobleman Michelangelo is said to have loved.

An assistant described Michelangelo just before his death standing barefoot and drawing for hours with a concentration that caused him to pass out. Those late chalk images, revised and revised until they are quite spectral on the page, are of Christ's death and feel like murmured prayers; so private and moving it seems remarkable he didn't burn them.

For Michelangelo destroyed most of his drawings in those final months. It is often claimed that he didn't want people to know how much effort went into his art, but that isn't what the drawings say.

They show the exceptional force and clarity of his thought arriving immediately and fully formed on the page. How much more likely that he wanted to stop rivals from stealing his ideas as they had in the past. And how marvellous that he let these few hundred escape the flames, fragile masterpieces somehow surviving these 500 years.

(China Daily 03/28/2006 page13)