Before carving “David” or covering the Sistine Chapel’s ceiling in frescoes, Michelangelo Buonarroti painted “The Torment of Saint Anthony.”
Created when he was either 12 or 13 years old, it is the Renaissance artist’s first painting — and the piece hangs on a wall at the Kimbell Art Museum of Fort Worth.
The prolific artist thought of himself primarily as a sculptor, and “The Torment of Saint Anthony” is one of four easel paintings by Michelangelo.
The work is also the only Michelangelo painting in North or South America.
Acquiring the painting was a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity, Kimbell Art Museum Director Eric Lee said, recalling his trip to see the painting in 2009.
At the time, there was strong evidence that it was the Italian master’s first painting, Lee said. But that view was not a consensus among scholars.
Lee was in his second day on the job when he learned the painting was for sale. Within a week, he boarded a flight to New York to examine the piece and make one of the most important decisions of his career.
“I said to myself at the time, ‘If we don’t buy it and it ends up being Michelangelo, it’s something I’ll regret for the rest of my life,’” Lee said. “‘But if we end up buying it and it ends up not being Michelangelo, it will be so much worse.’”
The fact that Michelangelo created a painting of Saint Anthony is well documented, but some questioned whether this particular depiction came from the artist.
“This painting was bought in the 1830s by this Italian sculptor. … He took the painting to Paris. At the time he thought that it was Michelangelo’s lost painting that was described by (biographers) Vasari and Condivi … and connoisseurs at the time believed that it was,” Lee said. “But then, as the course of the 19th century went on, it was in this private collection and people sort of forgot about it.”
In 1999, the piece was included in an exhibition dedicated to Michelangelo in Florence, but the painting was attributed to the “workshop of Domenico Ghirlandaio,” the artist whom Michelangelo trained under.
Sotheby’s listed the painting for sale in 2008, and Adam Williams, an art dealer, purchased it. That fall, he took the painting to the Metropolitan Museum of Art to have it cleaned and examined.
The cleaning allowed more detail to shine through and revealed a color palette that Michelangelo would later mirror while painting the Sistine Chapel. An examination with infrared reflectography showed underdrawings called pentimenti.
“Frequently, forms overlap previously painted details, while in other areas paint has been scraped away. This suggests a rather intuitive, piecemeal approach to the sequence of painting, as one might expect of a young, inexperienced, but bold artist,” the Met said of the painting on its website.
The Met’s curator of European paintings, Keith Christiansen, told The New York Times in May 2009 that he “firmly believed” the painting was Michelangelo’s work, but the timing was not right for the museum to purchase it.
Michael Gallagher, a Met conservator who previously worked at the Kimbell, invited Lee and Claire Barry, then serving as the Kimbell’s director of conservation, to see the work.
“We looked at it as critically as you possibly could and could not come up with a single convincing argument against that attribution,” Lee said.
Christiansen was in the same camp and agreed to fly to Texas and present his findings to the Kimbell’s board. The curator refused to accept an honorarium, or a payment for his services — a fact that impressed Lee.
“We offered him an honorarium and he said, ‘No, I don’t want to do that,’” Lee said. “He didn’t want people to say he was paid to say this.”
The Kimbell’s board agreed to the sale. “Everything just aligned,” Lee said.
A few years later, with the help of John K. Delaney, a senior imaging scientist at the National Gallery of Art, Barry and the Kimbell’s conservation team discovered another sketch hidden under the painting.
Michelangelo’s authorship was further bolstered by the Italian scholar Giorgio Bonsanti’s writing on the subject in 2018.
“When we first announced the painting, we didn’t have that evidence. … From that point on, I don’t think the attribution can be remotely questioned,” Lee said. “That’s about as good as it gets.”
Marcheta Fornoff covers arts and culture for the Fort Worth Report. Reach her at marcheta.fornoff@fortworthreport.org. At the Fort Worth Report, news decisions are made independently of our board. Read more about our editorial independence policyhere.
This article first appeared on Fort Worth Report and is republished here under a Creative Commons license.
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