Rediscovered Michelangelo? “Saint John the Baptist Bearing Witness,” oil and gold on wood, 29 3/4 x 82 1/2 in., Metropolitan Museum of Art
Having recently mounted Velázquez Rediscovered, a show that convincingly proposed that a painting by that master had been hiding for years in plain sight in the permanent collection, will the Metropolitan Museum soon be presenting “Michelangelo Rediscovered”?
Milton Esterow‘s article for for the June issue of ARTnews (online now), Why It’s a Michelangelo, details the reasons why Everett Fahy, the Met’s recently retired chairman of European paintings, believes that the painting above, in the Met’s collection since 1970 and catalogued as “Saint John the Baptist Bearing Witness,” Workshop of Francesco Granacci, ca. 1510, was actually painted by Michelangelo in 1506.
The Met has been on a Michelangelo roll, having put on two other attribution exhibitions last year—Michelangelo’s First Painting and The Young Archer (the latter still on display, on loan from the French government; the former now at the Kimbell Museum, which purchased it).
While the article by ARTnews’ editor and publisher describes many of the stylistic and technical reasons why Fahy feels confident about his attribution upgrade, it doesn’t name any of the experts whom Fahy said agreed with him, other than the late Edmund Pillsbury, former director of the Kimbell. Nor does it cite any written sources from Michelangelo’s time that mention his working on such a painting. The case for Michelangelo’s first painting, “The Torment of Saint Anthony,” was supported by mentions of the young artist’s having painted that subject by both of his 16th-century biographers, Vasari and Condivi.
As Michelangelo expert and Yale professor Creighton Gilbert once told me (back in 1996, when I was writing about the “discovery” of the “Young Archer”), Michelangelo was famous in his own lifetime. “The likelihood that one [of his works] would go unnoticed is very peculiar and would
need to be explained,” Gilbert said.
Perhaps these missing pages from Fahy’s detective story will be found in his 65-page article, to be published by the Italian journal Nuovi Studi—“An Overlooked Michelangelo?” According to the brief description of the article in the Met’s bibliography for “Saint John” (click “References” on the left), Fahy posits that the painting is part of a series that “was commissioned to decorate the bedchamber of
Giovanni di Lorenzo Tornabuoni upon the occasion of his marriage to
Caterina di Alamanno Salviati in January 1507.”
Is the Met going to build an exhibition around Fahy’s findings, which were bolstered by technical analysis performed by the museum’s own conservation department? I have a query pending with the museum. I’ll update here if I learn more.
UPDATE: The Met informs me that no dossier exhibition about the maybe-Michelangelo is planned for now. The Met’s attribution for the work, in the online catalogue and on the label for the painting in the permanent collection galleries, remains, “Workshop of Francesco Granacci.” The next step, according to Elyse Topalian, the Met’s spokesperson, “will be discussion among scholars.”