Show dares to expose an art master’s tricks

A new exhibition in London gives audiences a chance to see the creative process behind such Renaissance masterpieces as the ceiling of the Vatican’s Sistine Chapel and the interior of the Medici Chapel in Florence.

Michelangelo would not have approved.

The British Museum is billing “Michelangelo Drawings: Closer to the Master” as a show of “works that Michelangelo, the perfectionist, wouldn’t have wanted anyone to see.”

They reveal the painstaking preparation behind the great artworks -- a process Michelangelo did his best to disguise. He regularly destroyed his sketches so that rivals could not steal his work.

The exhibition opens Thursday and has already sold more than 10,000 tickets -- a record for the museum.

Using pieces from the British Museum, the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford and the Teyler Museum in the Netherlands, the show brings together drawings and sketches that have not been in one place since they were removed from the artist’s studio after his death in 1564.