Kimbell Museum lands MichelangeloÂ’s earliest work
The earliest recognized painting by Michelangelo has become the most striking acquisition of the Kimbell Art Museum — first of the Renaissance master’s works to land in an American museum’s standing collection and one of only four such examples known to exist worldwide.
The painting is The Torment of Saint Anthony, created during 1487-1488 by Michelangelo Buonarroti (1475-1564). Two other such rare easel paintings repose in the National Gallery, London, and a third in the Uffizi Gallery (Florence).
The acquisition — sum undisclosed, per custom in the museum world — followed in rapid order a meeting between the Kimbell Art Museum’s new director, Eric McCauley Lee, and the museum’s former chief, Edmund “Ted” Pillsbury. The painting was known to exist, subject to controversy as to its authenticity, and was undergoing scrutiny and restoration at the Metropolitan Museum in New York.
Skepticism on the part of Lee was tempered by curiosity: The sanctified subject matter was right for Michelangelo, and for the Italian Renaissance Period. But such paintings are scarce and unlikely to surface in plain sight. Research and an in-person examination reconciled the controversy with a patent conclusion.
The painting depicts demonic torment in terms of a siege upon St. Anthony by what appears to be a mob of Hades’ lesser fiends. Read between the lines, as it were, the painting also depicts Michelangelo in a crucial formative stage — learning as a youngster to copy an established master (the inspiration lies in a 15th-century German engraving by Martin Schongauer, The Temptation of Saint Anthony) while developing an originality of technique and attitude. The frenzy of the central image, framed by a craggy mountainside, takes place above an ironically placid rustic setting.
Long held in private hands, apart from isolated showings during the 19th and 20th centuries, The Torment of St. Anthony has been hailed, by turns, as both a prototypical Michelangelo and as a work of questionable pedigree. The consensus today holds with Michelangelo.
A 2008 SothebyÂ’s auction in London offered the painting in a preliminary range of $200,000-$300,000. Once the acceptance of authenticity had spread, a bidding frenzy surged to approximately $2 million, paid by a New York-based dealer named Adam Williams. Williams cinched the authenticity further with a regimen of X-ray examinations, which revealed alterations that can only belong to a primary-source work-in-progress.
The painting will settle into a permanent home at Fort WorthÂ’s Kimbell following a showing during the summer at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York.
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