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the head of the manuscript department at the Vatican Library. A miracle: they couldn���t get me into the building, but within a matter of days I received a personal copy on DVD of all 188 sheets, beautifully photographed in its entirety. Then I started travelling and making requests for private viewing; each place, it seemed, had its own story. The Casa Buonarroti in Florence probably has more pages of Michelangelo���s pages than all the other museums and archives put together. Along with my partner, photographer Nick Barberio (see his work elsewhere in this issue), I was received there most graciously. Before making our way through dozens of boxes and folders, we were ceremonially handed white gloves, and then told not to use them. Better just wash and dry our hands, they said, since we would be much clumsier if we handled these precious objects with gloves on. The rules at the Louvre, which possesses a small but fantastically choice selection of Michelangelo drawings, were different. In the elegant hushed surroundings of the D��partement des arts graphiques, our hands did not come close to the irreplaceable pages. Several drawings at a time were arrayed for our delectation on easels; they stayed still and we moved around them. The British Museum posed another problem: a magnificent exhibition of Michelangelo drawings was in preparation, and so the works were already in the process of being mounted for the show. But would we like a private viewing of the show before it opened to the public? We sure HYLAND