The first blockbuster of the season, “Michelangelo, Vasari, and Their Contemporaries: Drawings From the Uffizi,” opens tomorrow at the Morgan Library & Museum. Conceived by the former director of the Uffizi, Annamaria Petrioli Tofani, and curated by the Morgan’s Rhoda Eitel-Porter, it comprises nearly 80 16th-century Italian drawings, many of them by artists at the top of their game. Though specialized — and, as with most of the Morgan’s offerings, mild-mannered and midsize in scale — it is an accessible and manageable show that was built to please the scholar and the general public alike. And please it most certainly does.

The exhibition includes two astounding drawings by Michelangelo, as well as masterpieces by Pontormo, Bronzino, Salviati, Allori, Tito, Poppi, Vasari, Naldini, and Giovanni Stradanus. Not every work is a show-stopper. A few so-so sheets, and second-tier artists, round out the bunch. But, as this exhibition demonstrates, many artists are more fluid as draftsmen than as painters. Drawings can allow us to see more directly and quickly into how an artist is seeing, thinking, composing, rethinking, and recomposing. Drawings give us the rapid-fire experience of call-and-response. And not since the Met’s Leonardo drawing show have so many remarkable and illuminating Florentine drawings been available in New York under one roof.

Focusing mainly on the maniera, the Mannerist period or school influenced by Michelangelo and founded by, among others, Giorgio Vasari in Florence between the High Renaissance and the Baroque, “Drawings From the Uffizi” comprises mainly Mannerist works that belong to neither of the more-esteemed periods. The exhibition focuses on artists who, under the auspices of Cosimo I de’ Medici, Grand Duke of Tuscany (1519–74), and the creative direction of the artist-historian Vasari, were involved in the redecoration of Florence’s Palazzo dei Priori (the Palace of the Priors) or, as it is more commonly known, the Palazzo Vecchio. Vecchio, meaning “old,” was the name given to Arnolfo’s 14th-century republican city hall after the Medici family, who had lived there for a period, moved across the river to their “new” palace, the Palazzo Pitti.

“Drawings From the Uffizi” includes works that range from heavenly to academic. The show is a tumble of battle scenes, portraits, nudes, copies, and allegories, and mythological and religious narratives. On the heavenly side is Salviati’s “Age of Gold,” a study for a tapestry that weaves nudes, foliage, fauna, and scrollwork-frame into a languorous, light-filled orgy. Stradanus’s pen-and-ink “The Fox and Hare Hunt,” another tapestry design, and one of the most beautiful works in the exhibit, rivals the detail, life, and density of Dürer’s etchings.

The show begins with two drawings by Michelangelo — “Studies of a Male Leg,” in metalpoint, and the black chalk “Bust of a Woman, Head of an Old Man, and Bust of a Child.” “Studies of a Male Leg” resembles Eve’s bent left leg in the Sistine Ceiling’s “The Fall of Adam and Eve,” and it is almost certainly a study for the allegorical figure of Night in the artist’s tomb of Giuliano de’ Medici, in the New Sacristy of the church of San Lorenzo. An overlapping work in which the bent knee of one study becomes the hipbone of another, the drawing is airy and linear in most areas but, within one rippling hip and thigh, is worked up into bulging tonal striations. The bulges look like rock or possibly fruit or even like animals wrestling in a bag. But it is like no leg — male or female — you have ever seen.

In Michelangelo’s drawing “Bust of a Woman, Head of an Old Man, and Bust of a Child,” a firmly articulated bust of a woman, possibly Venus, is sandwiched diagonally between two studies, both more faint and loose, of a head of an old man and a bust of a child. The man and child drop back and into the sheet, opening the flatness of the ground plane. They are studies, but they read as memories, dreams, allegories, or apparitions. The man and child feel invisible to her, but she is held by their presence. She is natural, to a point: Drapery flows over her shoulders and her throat moves as if she is in the act of swallowing. Her volume, majesty, and solidity are softened by a quivering tonal veil — a light that caresses her neck, face, and breasts. Not everything is right with the world, however: Her head — which turns toward us, as if attempting to escape from the sinuous sea horse of a headdress — is in profile, and yet her eye, as if out of an Egyptian face, stares frontally and starkly at the viewer. Like the nipples on her breasts, her eye rotates, opening her body and splaying it outward. She is beautiful, contained, thoughtful, and assured, but we are made aware that forces are working deep within her.

What immediately becomes clear is that Michelangelo may be using nature as a source, but he is distorting and reinventing the world to his own ends. During the Renaissance, artists were inspired to look at the art of the past and at man and at nature — but, as these drawings demonstrate, they were never merely objective (as the show’s wall labels suggest) or enslaved by what they saw. Compared to the work of Michelangelo, the art of the maniera is certainly less inventive, more exaggerated, predictable, and imitative — more mannered — but it is certainly not more distorted.

Michelangelo’s drawings, arguably the most astonishing works in the exhibit, set the stage for what was — and what was not — to come in the wave of maniera that flooded Florence in the 16th century. Vasari is the most represented artist here and, although he is occasionally melodramatic or conventional, some of his drawings, including a mesmerizing fiery study he did of Michelangelo’s “The Damned Soul,” are much more than merely accomplished. Nothing in the show, however, equals the sheer power, discovery, and inventiveness of Michelangelo, and certainly he was aware of the ubiquity and reach — as well as the downside — of his influence: When Vasari boasted to Michelangelo that he and his pupils had painted a series of Roman frescoes in 100 days, Michelangelo replied, “So one sees.”