A trip to the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s collection of Old Masters usually feels like an encyclopedic affair, leaving one to saunter through a charming labyrinth of masterpieces throughout the ages. Such visits are typically not slated for seeing one specific work, however this Summer has provided a worthwhile exception to the rule, with the unveiling of “Michelangelo’s First Painting.”
The title of the show pretty much provides all the motivation for even the slightest art enthusiast.Yet this painting is of particular note for showing the delightful penchant of the Old Masters market to produce diamonds in the rough.
A small oil and tempera work on panel, titled “St. Anthony Tormented by Demons,” is a work that had taken on a holy grail like identity of sorts, having been out of sight for centuries. Its existence had long been known through the account of the artist’s formative years by Giorgio Vasari, Michelangelo’s friend and biographer, who mentioned it as being derived from an engraving by the great Northern Renaissance engraver Martin Schongauer.
It finally reappeared at a Sotheby’s auction last July as an intriguing mystery, obscured by layers of grime and carrying a murky attribution as a work from the workshop of Domenico Ghirlandaio, Michelangelo’s tutor. Amidst insider speculation that the painting was indeed by the hand of the young master, New York dealer Adam Williams went with instinct and ponied up $2 million USD for the piece. After the piece cleared through British customs, Mr. Williams had it immediately cleaned examined by the Met’s curators. Claire M. Barry, chief curator at the Kimbell Museum of Forth Worth, caught wind of the discovery, and later convinced her museum’s board to purchase it for a reported $6 million USD.
The painting is exciting on a couple of different levels. On one hand, it has a phenomenal set of circumstances surrounding it. Here’s a work by an artist who many consider to be the greatest of all time, and besides having been lost for ages it’s also one of four known easel paintings by Michelangelo and the only one on American soil.
Then there is the work itself, which displays the vivid imagination and ambition of a young virtuoso, as well as giving us a glimpse into the greatness that followed. Holland Cotter, art critic from the NY Times, described the painting, as a “modest spark” to a “supernova” :
“The image of the hermit-saint, locked in a midair tangle of straining, pulsating figures, created a template that Michelangelo would repeat in sculpture and painting for the rest of his life. It’s there in the knotted nudes of the early marble relief “Battle of the Centaurs,” from around 1490 and it’s still there decades later in the images of frantic sinners and doom-trumpeting angels in the “Last Judgment.
Mr (Keith) Christiansen (Curator of European Paintings at the Metropolitan Museum of Art) finds promising inventiveness. He points out that Michelangelo doesn’t merely replicate Schongauer’s composition in paint; he bulks it up, makes it denser and more monumental. He introduces Renaissance naturalism to Gothic fantasy: Vasari reports that the young Michelangelo shopped for fish in Florentine markets to get the scales on the bodies of his demons right.”
“Michelangelo’s First Painting” remains through Sept. 7 at the Metropolitan Museum of Art; (212) 535-7710, metmuseum.org.
Special Exhibitions: “Michelangelo’s First Painting” [Metropolitan Museum of Art]
By the Hand of a Very Young Master? [Carol Vogel, NY Times]
A Saint, Demons and a Leap of Imagination [Holland Cotter, NY Times]
The work’s value, commercial and historical, rests entirely on the willingness to accept that it indeed is a work by Michelangelo. Without that name, the painting is merely a curiosity. The Schongauer engraving, which it essentially copies, is a great work of art. The painting looks like a student attempt to co-opt an existing work of art to make another work in a different medium — which is precisely what it is. The “vivid imagination” is virtually all Schongauer’s; only the landscape is new. Once again we are asked to look with our ears rather than our eyes. You tell us it is by a master. We then must accept it as a masterpiece. Nuts!
To me the most interesting element is precisely that of COPYING or interpretation; a young italian after a valued northern PRINT. We no longer value “copying” or prints in the same way as the Renaissance did, yet reevaluation of the work of ones peers was a major part of artistic production at the time.
Congrats on the wonderfully geeky, well written art history website, refered to me by my friend Lia whom you met at the Frick.