When Michelangelo moved to Rome from Florence in 1534 he was nearly 60 years old. He would have been considered an old man by the standards of the time. (Average life expectancy was around 70 years). He was to live another three decades, decades that saw him produce some of his most remarkable work. An exhibition at the British Museum, Michelangelo: The Last Decades, chronicles and celebrates this period. It’s not to be missed and, by the looks of the long lines outside the museum at opening time this morning, many agree with me.

The number and scale of the commissions he accepted in those decades would have daunted even a younger person. Everyone, it seemed, wanted to be his patron, and he found it difficult to refuse the various popes and noblemen offering him architectural and painting work. Little wonder that he took to preparing outlines and sketches that were finished by lesser artists. The magnificent drawings, mostly completed in chalk on paper, are the heart of this small exhibition, and looking at them close-up it’s hardly surprising that his contemporaries marveled at this “divinely inspired” talents. Anyone whose experience of Michelangelo has been confined until now to his vast frescos or monumental sculptures ought to beat a path to the British Museum and marvel at these wondrous drawings.