Choice: Exhibition

Michelangelo and His Influence, Queen's Gallery, London SW1 (0171- 839 1377)

Michelangelo and His Influence, Queen's Gallery, London SW1 (0171- 839 1377)

In the computerised world rankings, Michelangelo is the world's number one sculptor. His overpoweringly tall statue of David in the Academia in Florence or the heart-stabbing tenderness of the Vatican's Pieta are enough to grant him immortality, but even if these had not survived, his drawings would clinch it. As Tom Lubbock wrote, "We see him as an artist deeply concerned with the constructability and the malleableness of the human form. His art is powered by the realisation - exhilarating and alarming - that he could do with it what he wanted. With mastery, he could put it through the most incredible twists and turns, displacements and distensions, make it into the most contradictory shapes. Limbs contort this way and that while seeming to perform continuous gestures. Bodies can hurtle forwards while, at the same time, appearing to hit a brick wall... a radically ambiguous art that's bent on daring impossibility." Closes Sunday. David Benedict