Michelangelo's painting, "The Torment of Saint Anthony," will be displayed at the Kimbell Art Museum in Fort Worth
This image provided Wednesday, May 13, 2009 by the Kimbell Art Museum in Fort Worth, Texas shows the 1487 oil and tempera painting on a wood panel 'The Torment of Saint Anthony' by Michelangelo, believed to be his earliest known work. The Kimbell will be the first U.S. museum to display a Michelangelo painting after it acquired this rare piece.
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Michelangelo's delicate parallel-hatching is faintly visible in the face of Saint Anthony. There is also a correction to the upper contour of the bat-like demon's arm, where the artist applied a stroke of light paint (lower right)
Photograph: Kimbell Art Museum, Fort WorthThe Kimbell Art Museum, based in Fort Worth, paid an undisclosed figure for The Torment of St Anthony
- guardian.co.uk, Wednesday 13 May 2009 18.59 BST
- Article history
A work of art believed to be Michelangelo's first painting, completed when he was just 12 or 13 years old, has been acquired by a museum in Texas in deal that leaves other major galleries taking notice.
The Kimbell Art Museum, based in Fort Worth, paid an undisclosed figure for The Torment of St Anthony. Though the provenance of the painting has long been disputed, expert opinion has shifted in recent months to the view that it is indeed the earliest known painting of the master.
The work, oil and tempera on a poplar panel measuring 47cm x 34cm, is dated 1487 or 88. At that time Michelangelo had befriended an assistant in the workshop of Domenico Ghirlandaio in Florence and is known to have copied an engraving of St Anthony by a German master called Martin Schongauer.
The disagreement has focused on whether this painting was created by Michelangelo's own hand or whether it was produced by other artists in the workshop.
If confirmed as the missing Michelangelo, its acquisition by the Kimbell would amount to an astonishing coup by the museum.
It would make the Torment of St Anthony only one of four known easel paintings to have been created by Michelangelo, two others being in the National Gallery in London and the fourth in the Florence Uffizi.
It potentially provides new clues as to how Michelangelo came to settle on the colour palette he used in the Vatican's Sistine Chapel.
"This is a painting that will be studied for years and years to come," said Eric Lee, the Kimbell's director.
The painting depicts a sour-faced, white haired St Anthony being teased and tugged by monsters. It is based on the Schongauer engraving but differs from it in such ways that many experts now believe prove its provenance.
For instance, among the monsters are fish-like images. A contemporaneous early biographer of the master notes that Michelangelo visited a fishmarket while painting the Torment in order accurately to portray fish scales.
Further evidence that leans towards the Michelangelo interpretation has been uncovered in the past year when the painting was restored at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. Layers of dirt and grime were removed to unveil the original oils, while modern technologies including infrared scans and X-rays revealed the underlying pentimenti - the artist's changes that were made as the work progressed.
The pentimenti convinced Lee and the Kimbell board that the painting could not have been a copy produced by the workshop but had to be the original article.
The Torment was owned from 1905 until last summer by a British private collector. It was sold by Sotheby's for just $2m (£1.3m) - a breathtaking bargain if it is the Michelangelo - to a New York-based art dealer who was convinced that it came from the master.
The Met museum, having completed the restoration, was also convinced but was unable to find the purchase price amid the current financial crisis.
Article: HERE
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Michelangelo painted the scales of the spiny fish-demon after visiting the local fish market. This detail reveals how he scraped away the background paint to reveal the primer beneath, helping to create the curve of the fish
Photograph: Kimbell Art Museum, Fort Worth
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until the full "technical data" is made known, it is useless to argue whether or not it supports an attribution of this painting to the 13 year old Michelangelo. and while the pentimenti indicate that an artist worked this panel, rather than simply slavishly copying from another, the so far undefined nature of the pentimeti found, may or may not prove to provide arguments that pertain to michelangelo's authorship. another hand, that of a freer copyist of another michelangelo original or an artist creating an unrecorded copy of the schongauer print might also have made changes and be responsible for a non-michalenagelo image here. what we do see, despite the observations provided in support of michelangelo authorship by met curator keith crhistenson, is a use of change de color that may remind of us michelangelo's use of change de color in the sistine ceiling, but in no way provides a basis for connecting the two. on this tiny scale and in oil, the use of such coloration is not unique and the startling contrasts in scale and medium attended to by michelangelo in the ceiling, can hardly find reasonable basis here.
what is truly startling about this image, which mr. christiensen and others have not commented on here, is the disconnect between the quality of drawing and coloration in the figure grouping based on schongauer's print, and the lack of assured drawing, cohesive coloring, and well articulated spatial relationships in he landscape foreground and background landscape scene from mixed looking up and looking down views. a bland series of gray blues for the city scene, is drab and the ship and the course of the river in front are awkwardly articulated in the same awkward manner. the rock cliffs in front hardly convince one of the even the young adolescent michelangelo, whom already an apprentice in ghiralndaio's workshop, at the center of early renaissance painting in florence, would have exposed even the young genius to landscape examples much more credible, up to date and successful than those included here. it is a leap of faith, unaffected by technical findings whatever they prove to be, that the hand here is certainly michelangelo, as it stumbles most decidedly in those areas of form and composition are not dependent on the brilliance of schongauer. what we really have here so far, as presented to the public to date, is a work that connects itself with a sentence of text that connects subject to michelangelo, with almost no substantive evidence for a michelangelo attribution presented so far.
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