How Did A 12 Year Old Michelangelo Paint This? Then it Disappeared

[00:00:00]A man levitates in the air. His body surrounded by nine demons creatures assembled from parts that do not belong together. Scaled like fish in some places and feathered in others. Their limbs twisted into configurations that no anatomy could sustain. They claw at him, drag at his robes, pull his hair, bite at his legs. He is St. Anthony, the Egyptian hermit who, according to tradition, was lifted into the air by demons and tormented until he prayed his way back to Earth. His expression, unlike the creature surrounding him, is calm, almost detached, as if the violence being done to his body is not quite reaching whatever is happening inside him. This painting is approximately the size of a piece of paper. It was made by a 12-year-old boy working in a painter studio in Florence, copying a German engraving he had borrowed from a friend, going to the fish market to study how fish scales caught the light so he could add them to a demon that the original engraving did not have. It was mentioned by Michelangelo's biographers, discussed at his funeral, passing through private hands for five centuries, accumulating layers of varnish and overpaint that made it look like an unremarkable workshop piece. In 2008, it sold at Sures in London for $2 million as a painting from the workshop of Gear Landio. The man who bought it believed it was something else. He was right.

[00:01:29]When conservators at the Metropolitan Museum of Art removed the centuries of yellowed varnish and overp paint from the panel, the first thing they noticed was the fish scales. Michelangelo had gone to the fishmunger to study which form and color the wings of the fish should be and the color of their eyes and all their parts, which he then faithfully represented in his painting.

[00:01:51]This detail, a 12-year-old going to a market to study fish so he could paint a demon with biological accuracy is recorded in Asano Kondivi's biography written under Michelangelo's direct supervision. The fish scales are not in the original Shongar engraving. He added them because he wanted the demon to look real and making it look real required studying something real until he understood exactly how light moved across a wet scale. Then infrared imaging revealed something hidden beneath the surface. On the lower part of the panel, invisible to the naked eye and not discovered until 2015 when hyperspectral imaging was applied, there is a casual doodle, a sketch of a coffered ceiling, a bed, and several figures. Art historians identified it immediately as a sketch of the birth of the Baptist, a fresco being painted by Gearando's workshop in the fall of 1487.

[00:02:46]In the same studio where Michelangelo was sitting, a boy working on one painting, absent-mindedly sketching the fresco being made around him, accidentally providing the most precise possible confirmation of when this painting was made. But neither the fish scales nor the doodle are what caused the Metropolitan Museum curator to look at this painting in 2008 and say without hesitation that it was self-evidently Michelangelo. To understand what this painting represents, you need to understand that Michelangelo at 12 was not supposed to be a painter at all. He was born in 1475 in a small village in Tuscanyany, the second son of a minor official who beat him for wanting to make art. His mother died when he was six. He grew up in the household of a stone cutters family where, as he later said, the stone dust was part of what he breathed from the beginning. His father eventually accepted the inevitable and placed him as an apprentice in Gilando's workshop in 1487, the most respected painters studio in Florence, producing fresco and alterpieces for the city's wealthiest families. What happened instead was that a fellow pupil named Franchesco Granachi gave Michelangelo a print by the German master Martin Shongawa, an engraving of St. Anthony being attacked by demons along with paint and brushes. Michelangelo produced a copy of it on a wooden panel that made Gilandio by some accounts deeply uncomfortable. Kondivi writing for Michelangelo himself was blunt. Gear Landio was jealous and falsely tried to claim the painting came from his workshop. Whether the jealousy is accurate or an old man's embellishment.

[00:04:30]The claim that a 12-year-old had produced something a master painter needed to assert ownership of is the detail that tells you who Michelangelo already was at the very beginning. If you want more art deep dives like this one, please like and subscribe to my channel. And if you think I missed something in the painting, don't forget to comment down below. I read every single one. The painting is not a copy.

[00:04:55]It is a transformation. Shong's original shows Anthony surrounded by demons, his expression one of suffering and distress. Michelangelo took the composition, made it larger by at least a third, and changed almost everything that mattered. He tightened the arrangement so the demons press from every direction simultaneously. He gave them fish scales, changed the proportions of their limbs, made each creature specific in its menace rather than generically monstrous. And he changed Anony's expression entirely. In the original, Anthony looks distressed.

[00:05:30]In Michelangelo's version, he looks detached, his head more erect, his face carrying the expression of someone experiencing something terrible and choosing not to be defined by it. The theological difference between those two expressions is enormous. A saint who suffers is a saint in pain. A saint who endures with detachment is a saint who already understands something about what is happening to him that the demons causing it do not. And he added a landscape at the bottom that is not in Shongar at all. A recognizably Florentine scene, the Arno River Valley with a green hill and a boat making its way through open water. Art historians have read this as an allegory Antony's detachment from torment as a kind of navigation. The boat finding its way while the demons above grab and thrash and accomplish nothing permanent. He was 12. He added an allegory to a copy. The painting spent 500 years in private hands. By the time it arrived at Sures in 2008, it was covered in centuries of varnish and overpaint and was cataloged as a work from Gearandio's workshop. A reasonable guess, but wrong. Adam Williams, an American art dealer, bought it believing it was something else. He took it to the Metropolitan Museum of Art. The conservator who removed the varnish, said afterward that it was incredibly dirty, but that once the centuries of grime were gone, its true quality was evident. Keith Christensen, the Writesman curator of European paintings, looked at it for the first time and said it was self-evidently Michelangelo. The specific quality he identified without hesitation was the cross-hatching in the rocks, an emphatic technique of parallel lines used to create shadow that Christensen said nobody else did in quite that way. The technical examination confirmed it.

[00:07:22]Infrared imaging revealed Pentimenti the changes and corrections an artist makes in the process of working, confirming this was an original composition rather than a mechanical copy. The underd drawing showed a young artist working intuitively, scraping back paint to clarify outlines, building up texture where he needed it, figuring things out in real time. And in 2015, the hidden doodle on the lower panel confirmed the date a casual sketch of a fresco being made in the same studio in the fall of 1487.

[00:07:56]Williams sold it to the Kimble Art Museum in Fort Worth, Texas for an undisclosed amount believed to be in excess of $6 million, three times what he had paid for a Gill and Dio workshop piece 18 months earlier. The Torment of St. Anthony has been in the Kimble Art Museum since 2009, the only painting by Michelangelo in a public collection in North America and one of only four surviving easel paintings by him anywhere in the world. The other three are the Donny Tondo in the Euphitzi in Florence and two unfinished works in the National Gallery in London. Four paintings in the entire world. From the artist who painted the cysteine chapel ceiling, Michelangelo spent most of his adult life dismissing painting as inferior to sculpture and speaking disparagingly of oil specifically. He considered himself a sculptor forced by popes and patrons into a medium he resented producing painted work at the highest possible level while maintaining that he was not qualified to be doing it. The cyine chapel ceiling was painted by a man who did not want to be there who fought the commission and lost who spent 4 years on scaffolding completing something he had argued against from the beginning. Thanks for sticking around to the end. If you want more videos like this one, please subscribe to my channel. And if you think I missed something in the painting, don't forget to comment down below. I read every single one. See you in the next video.