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Michelangelo’s earliest painting should have been saved

 

A fishy tale: the 13-year-old Michelangelo went to the fish market to study scales, fins and wings so that his monsters might look suitably terrifying

Imagine Michelangelo, soon to be 72, the greatest painter of the Renaissance, idling away the dark days of winter in 1552-53 dictating an autobiographical résumé to Ascanio Condivi, an admiring young painter aged 28 or so.

We should take such an account most seriously. Intended for publication as a rebuke to Giorgio Vasari, who had already published a Life of Michelangelo in 1550 that was in error in tone and detail (he has “said things that never were and … omitted much that was most noteworthy …” Michelangelo complained), it tells a pretty tale of Michelangelo’s first venture into painting.

Hs was 13. A friend, Francesco Granacci, a boy of 18 or so, apprenticed to one of the major Florentine painters of the day, Domenico Ghirlandaio, perceived in him promise of a skill in drawing so considerable that in 1488 Michelangelo’s father was persuaded to apprentice his son too to Ghirlandaio for three years.

In that workshop, he was encouraged to copy an engraving by the inventive German artist Martin Schongauer, a generation older than Michelangelo and internationally the most important German artist before Dürer. This he did, not simply as a drawing, but as a painting on a wooden panel, in full colour, pure invention.

The details of the story are precise. The print, The Temptation of Saint Anthony its subject, was “placed before him” by Granacci, who also lent the boy colours and brushes. To give verisimilitude to the monsters tormenting Anthony, Michelangelo went to the fish market to study scales, fins, tails and wings. All this was accepted by Vasari, who knew and venerated Michelangelo, and was included in the second edition of his Life in 1568, with details of the contract of apprenticeship drawn up on 1 April 1488.

This very early painting was lost to view for centuries until a panel complying with the Condivi-Vasari account appeared in the hands of a dealer in Pisa in the 1820s. In 1859 it was seen by Charles Eastlake, first Director of the National Gallery, who was apparently convinced that Michelangelo had painted it.

It has been in the possession of a British family since before 1905. I saw it in 1960 and was convinced that it is a genuine painting of the late 15th century wholly consonant with what we know of technical practice in the workshop of Ghirlandaio. It is not a forgery.

It is not a slavish copy of Schongauer’s composition — the landscape is an entirely fresh invention — and there are small evidences of change during the course of painting. It is not very good but much the standard to be expected of an early adolescent in the first year of his trade as a painter. I could see no reason why it should not be accepted as by Michelangelo — and that is still my view.

It was not borrowed for the National Gallery’s exhibition The Young Michelangelo in 1994 — the curators, apparently expecting quality that pointed directly to the Sistine Ceiling, opined only that it is “very disappointing”.

Another British art historian asserts that it might be by Granacci. American scholars, however, have taken a different view. When presented for sale at Sotheby’s last year, cautiously catalogued as from the workshop of Ghirlandaio (9 July 2008, Lot 69), with an estimate of £100,000, it sold for within a whisker of a million.

It has since been sold to the Kimbell Museum in Texas for six million dollars. When cleaned it was found to be in wonderful condition, and it is to be the keystone of an exhibition in the Metropolitan Museum, New York, as the earliest surviving work by Michelangelo.

When a licence for the export of the Saint Anthony was required, the National Gallery did not oppose it, perhaps because curators there still find it very disappointing, perhaps because, after quite properly buying a half share in Titian’s Diana and Actaeon last year, not a penny was left in the Trafalgar Square piggy-bank. Was there really not one single British millionaire — even in the middle of the credit crunch — willing to step in and save it for the nation?

It may not be a great painting in any conventional sense but it is both a rare and extraordinary document and a wonderful curiosity.

Did no one think of asking Damien Hirst or the Chapman Brothers to act as bankers until the piggy-bank refills?

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