All of this material, now scattered among museums — the Louvre, the Uffizi, the Albertina in Vienna — has been brought together at the Met. This is how the exhibition, organized by Carmen C. Bambach, a curator in the museum’s department of drawings and prints, works. It ingeniously reconstructs Michelangelo projects by assembling related designs in dense, connect-the-dots clusters.

This is, of course, the only way to present architecturally scaled art, or long-vanished things. The show is as close as we can now get to seeing the massive sculptural tomb of Pope Julius II in its many aborted iterations; it was this “urgent” commission (years before Julius’s death) that pulled Michelangelo off the battle fresco. And a selection of plans — scribbled on paper scraps, spread across pasted-together sheets — for the facade of the Medici parish church of San Lorenzo adds up to a beguiling archive of thinking-in-progress. Rarely has architectural design felt more expressively personal, moody, painterly, calligraphic.

Part of Ms. Bambach’s goal, and one that she pursues in her labor-of-love catalog, is to revisit the original Renaissance concept of design — disegno — as a theoretical category, an aesthetic and ethical end in itself. A basic idea was that just as the physical world represented, in every shade and contour, divine labor so, on a human level, did (or could) art. Michelangelo benefited mightily from this elevation of the artist from workshop drone to deity (and brand). In his later megastar years, people actually referred to him as God. The Sistine Chapel ceiling is a work of disegno in excelsis: the story of the Creation told through superhuman craft.