If you want, think about the works of art I created when I was twelve or thirteen. For many, perhaps most of us, our output at that stage of adolescence amounted to directionless doodles, anarchic comics and some shaky-at-best school projects. But then again, most of us didn’t grow up to be Michelangelo. In the late fourteen-eighties, when the towering Renaissance artist was still what we now call a “tween”, he painted agony of saint anthonyIllustration of the titular religious man surrounded by demons in the desert. Although it is based on a widely known engraving, it nevertheless shows evidence of rapidly advancing technology, inspiration and even creativity – especially when held under an infrared scanner.
For almost half a millennium, agony of saint anthony It was not thought to be painted by Michelangelo. As explained in Inspiragio’s video below, when the painting sold at Sotheby’s in 2008, the buyer took it to the Metropolitan Museum of Art for examination and cleaning.
“Beneath the layers of grime that had accumulated over the centuries,” the narrator says, “a very particular color palette appeared. “The tones, the mixing, the way the human figure was treated: all of it resembled a style that Michelangelo used years later in none other than the Sistine Chapel.” Infrared reflectography emerged later. Pentimentior the correction mark, a common indication that “a painting is not a copy, but an original work created with artistic freedom.”
It was the Kimbell Art Museum in Fort Worth, Texas that first made a big bet on its origins agony of saint anthony. Its newly appointed director purchased the painting after “not finding a single solid argument against this allegation”. Thus acquired, it became “the only painting by Michelangelo located anywhere in America, and one of only four easel paintings he made during his entire career”, during most of which he shunned oil painting. Nearly a decade later, and after further analysis, the art historian Giorgio Bonsanti put his considerable authority behind the definitive confirmation that it is indeed the work of the young Michelangelo. Undoubtedly, skeptics remain, and even the notorious artist himself would have considered it an immature work worthy of its name. But who else could have created such an immature work?
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Located in Seoul, Colin mAArshal will write and broadcastT.S. on cities, language and culture. He is the author of the newsletter books on cities as well as books it’s a good idea (no summary of Korea) and Korean Neutro. Follow him on the social network formerly known as Twitter @colinumArshall.
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