Michelangelo the painter is ever present in his architectural drawings, both in his choice of materials such as red chalk, typical of painters, and in his ready use of brushwork to lay down the basic composition and the patterns of light and shade.
It is an example worth emulating for curators of architecture exhibitions and of drawings alike: The combination of a difficult medium and subject makes such contextual materials doubly necessary.
The process of recreating these ballets involves not only studying the original materials left by the choreographers and designers, but a wealth of detail in contemporary newspapers, drawings, diaries, letters and personal recollections.