I don't trust this for one bit. For the owners there is quite the incentive to label this as the work of a genius. But in reality, this is just pretty complex for a 12 year-old to produce by yourself.
Edit: as others have pointed out, and if I were to actually read the article carefully before commenting, the composition is not attributed to Michelangelo. So it is just a copy. Quite the achievement, but possible for a twelve-year old.
I once confronted a gallery owner who was proudly presenting a newly discovered work by Mondriaan [1]. An original black and white photo in an old newspaper [2] was shown as proof of authenticity. But many details such as the creases in fabric differ in the original and the new painting. No OpenCV required to see that. Mind you, the picture is already framed with Mondriaan standing next to it. Unlikely that he's still working on it.
Instead of responding, the gallery owner simply turned away.
Just to engage with your “12 year old to produce by yourself” , here are some examples of art made by Picasso in his early teens to mid teens.
It’s absolutely possible to be that good. Especially in the middle ages / early renaissance with the work you did for guilds and working for masters as an apprentice.
But he had not been an apprentice before making this, he started the apprenticeship that year, and this is supposed to be the first thing he ever painted.
> Michelangelo's biographers—Giorgio Vasari (1511–1574) and Ascanio Condivi (1525–1574)—tell us that, aside from some drawings, his first work was a painted copy after a well-known engraving by Martin Schongauer (1448–1491) showing Saint Anthony tormented by demons. Made about 1487–88 under the guidance of his friend and fellow pupil Francesco Granacci, Michelangelo's painting was much admired; it was even said to have incited Ghirlandaio's envy.
[https://www.metmuseum.org/exhibitions/listings/2009/michelan...]
More broadly, we're doing people a disservice today by treating them as juveniles until they graduate college. When someone's that good, we shouldn't waste four years of his life in school he doesn't need, but instead let him be productive immediately out of college.
Christ a-fucking mighty, in some states, the law says that Michelangelo, had he been alive today,would have had to sit on a booster seat at the age at which he made this painting. Absurd.
One of my more heretical beliefs is that tech companies should do more hiring of high brilliant people right out of high school.
I don't have an opinion on whether the attribution is correct, but I don't think the complexity of the composition is a strong argument against it considering the artist was copying the engraving by Schongauer exactly (maybe even painting on top of it?) which takes a lot of the complexity out of it.
You might be right but the gallery owner has probably learnt that disputing the authenticity of his pieces with walk in punters rarely leads to a fruitful discussion
Every single one of those demons is also a chimera and so if you look, there’s a half elephant, half fish in the top left corner. If you look in the top right, there’s like a half fish half horse. So if you look at the gaping demon butthole again, and look at the rest of the features around the gaping opening. You’ll realize that it is the lower half of the creature and it is a sea creature you can see there’s like a coral tentacles thing behind it. It’s just a fish‘s mouth. That does also happen to function as the demon‘s butthole, apparently
Something about this painting is reminiscent of the way I(and I'm sure many others) would paint my comic-book heroes at around that age, albeit perhaps lacking some of Michelangelo's talents and skills.
This painting makes me feel like the bible was pretty much a comic book to the adolescent Michelangelo, and I like that thought. He later went on to paint the ceiling of a huge temple dedicated to his equivalent of Charles Xavier.
He hated painting the Sistine Chapel ceiling because he saw himself primarily as a sculptor. You can read some of the graphic language he used to describe his perspective of having to do it. Also, he was constantly in pain and would go temporarily blind from holding his head in certain positions for hours at a time.
my father made reading The Agony and The Ecstasy a requirement to go to Italy when I was a sophomore in high school. It's a thick tome, but a great read if you're a curious kid.
as the others said Michelangelo hated doing that painting. He's a very tragic, albeit heroic to me, man. I'd recommend that book if you're at all fascinated by him.
There were two St. Anthony's. The one in this painting is the first St. Anthony. He was celebrated by Athanasius in a widely read biography and was famous for fighting off demons in the Egyptian desert. He lived from ~251-356 AD. (But yes, a post-Biblical figure.)
This painting is a masterstudy of Schongauer's engraving "Saint Anthony Tormented by Demons". If you look closely you can see how its a study but not a 1:1 copy, but aside from some color and light all of this "style" was michaelangelo copying Schongauer as he learned.
It seems like we do know the year it was painted fairly reliably, but we don't know that it was Michelangelo specifically that painted it (the article exudes more confidence that I would give based on the inherent uncertainty of these identifications).
Why? There were other talented people who produced masterful works at an early age. From the same time as this there's a Dürer self-portrait, also aged 12-13:
I came here to agree with you but then I had the good sense to read the original page which is at the Met (https://www.metmuseum.org/exhibitions/listings/2009/michelan...), and has a lot of background on this painting, including that it WAS actually painted from an existing image (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Temptation_of_St_Anthony_(... - worth a look to compare), so my primary skepticism "how could a kid even come up with that" makes a lot more sense that he had an existing image he was copying.
The article/video only points to this being proven by research done by Giorgio Bonsanti. If you're curious, you'll have to investigate that angle.
It is frustrating that the article is so coy about the evidence around the premise of the article! But, this website and the youtube video this article is based around both lean more towards pop than investigative.
"As a young boy, Michelangelo was sent to the city of Florence to study grammar under the Humanist Francesco da Urbino.[13][16][d] Michelangelo showed no interest in his schooling, preferring to copy paintings from churches and seek the company of other painters."
It seems like this painting would be from his time at Urbino's grammar school. His first apprenticeship started when he was 13. You might expect a renaissance artist to do a lot of work on their master's paintings (detail work, etc.) before ever putting their own name to a canvas, but this is, apparently, Michelangelo doing his own thing before ever being apprenticed.
So, while he likely did paint things before this that didn't survive, it's pretty amazing that this is the work of a kid who has yet to be apprenticed and is just pursuing it on his own with nothing more than the advice of people he was hanging out with.
It's mentioned in the article that this is a (really good!) painted version of The Torment of Saint Anthony, an engraving by Martin Schongauer.
Michelangelo would go on to find his first patron, a Cardinal named Raffaele Riario, by forging a sculpture and artificially aging it (which, back then, was a conventional practice to demonstrate expertise and skill: https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/how-a-forged-sculpture...)
Dishonesty aside, both stories are reminders that there's a power to doing stuff with your own two hands (not genning it), as well as not to let today's emphasis on originality take away from using imitation/transcription to practice your craft: https://herbertlui.net/in-defense-of-copycats/
Do they mean that he grabbed a paintbrush one day and painted this out of the blue? Or does "painting" here mean "specifically painted on a canvas" or whatever?
>... it became "the only painting by Michelangelo located anywhere in the Americas, and also just one of four easel paintings attributed to him throughout his entire career," during most of which he disparaged oil painting itself.
It is less obvious than you think. Obvious to you and me, perhaps. But a significant portion of the population genuinely believes that you are born with the talent to just do this like it's nothing, or born with the talent to be a piano prodigy, etc, and as a result never bother to apply themselves, even though with the wealth of educational resources available today anyone[1] could make paintings of this quality if they were to put in the effort to learn. I think that article headlines that reinforce this popular misconception are rather damaging.
[1] Given the level of pedantry on this site, I suppose I should say "almost anyone", since a small minority of people with severe disabilities may not be able to.
Cmon, even famous virtuosos still have to go through a period of being children without fine motor control.
I won’t argue about the obviousness as that’s a tarpit of comparing each others social circles, but let say it’s reasonable to assuming this wasn’t his first ever brush stroke to touch canvas.
You could find, for example, a journal entry attesting that it was his first painting he'd ever done. (Either his own, or by somebody who knew him). While that's not proof, it's at least reason to believe that it is his first.
As far as I can tell, nobody in this case is claiming that it is or even might be the first, except the headline, which makes the headline misleading.
I'm willing to bet this was assigned to him as part of his training or something, but I don't know that.
On the subject of the content, in actual seriousness, this was a pre-modern, pre-secularized age before the traditionally religious was privatized and viewed as some kind of optional quirky fantasy for adults, subject to taste, one as good as the other. So, moral instruction would have been more overt and crisp, and the subject matter prominent in public. The challenges and difficulties of the moral life would have been taught and spoken of more openly.
I know the OP is joking, but this would be no cause for alarm, as the image is noble in its content. It depicts St. Anthony's triumph over the demonic. It does not glorify the demonic or debase the good.
In this context, Man's fallen state predisposes him toward sin. He is tempted to do things he should not and knows he should not. Add to that the malice and opportunism of the fallen angels - the demons - who, while on a short divine leash, nonetheless can exploit the weaknesses and evil in men to lead them toward their doom. The image would then be received as quite inspiring, perhaps helping to inspire and concentrate the viewer's own efforts to resist temptation, combat evil, and to progress on his own journey of conquering the self.
I'm surprised at how few parents understand what it takes to create a great artist. You need to start when they're 5 (or preferably younger), put them in a workshop with great artists/pedagogues etc. (costly!) where they work full time (forget school), evaluate potential and there is a tiny chance they themselves will become great. Annoyed by parents talking about their 5 year olds as "too young" or when they recommend their teenager to 'pursue their dream' when they don't provide a fraction of above. It's still possible but odds go down dramatically.
Many of the comments here are expressing disbelief that this could have been created by a 12 year old, but people fail to recognize that, not only did Michelangelo have tremendous natural talent, but grow up in a world where, as a child, he was allowed to spend enormous amounts of his time and energy studying with professional artists.
He wasn't being dropped off a school at 7am, squirming in a chair until 3pm, playing video games before dinner and then doing homework until bed all while squeezing in a bit of time for sketching.
The vast majority of people probably benefit more from our current structure, but it does make it much less likely to have "genius" of the type we see in Michelangelo, Mozart, etc.
> at the age of 13, Michelangelo was apprenticed to Ghirlandaio. The next year, his father persuaded Ghirlandaio to pay Michelangelo as an artist, which was rare for someone that young
He was literally getting education in art. It is not like there was no structure.
Contrapoint is that you do not need to pressure kid ever since they are 5 for them to be good artist as adults.
And the second point ... why should parents to do that with their random kid before that kid even shown interest? It is not like art represented some kind of career or lifetime security or even happiness in life.
St. Anthony is a fascinating figure. Father of wilderness monasticism, left Egypt to hear god, spent the night in a cave fighting the devil and won; the patron saint of psychedelics or at least Ergotism, the affliction of entire towns when the grain was infected with ergot fungus, which would later by synthesized into LSD.
I am actually in the process of curating a museum quality coffee table book in collaboration with Getty of at least 117 of the variations on this theme from Dali to Bosch to Michelangelo.
(1/17 is St. Anthony's day, and my birthday, and my name is Anthony - coincidentally).
Shoot me an email if you'd like to collaborate or would like an update when the project officially launches! a+st@175g.com
I don't want to compare anyone to Michelangelo, but the opening sentence of the aticle is more than flawed. My daughter got some painting classes in that age, and I saw work of some gifted kids. A bit better than "directionless doodles, chaotic comics, and a few unsteady-at-best school projects".
yeah it’s more like the earliest one that was worth preserving or considering “a finished piece” however that worked back then, the first shippable code
What a crazy coincidence... I had not been to the Kimbell art musesum that is only about 20 minutes away from me in many years. We had a family outing this weekend to go see the Torlonia Collection exhibit there and this painting was just sitting there in their permanent collection! I even got to listen to the guided tour group that happened to be at that painting as I was walking by.
The Torlonia collection was recently in Chicago and had some truly stunning pieces. The Ostia relief was tucked away in a corner and I nearly missed it. The traveling exhibition is well worth seeing for anyone remotely interested in ancient history.
The interesting thing in Michelangelo's case is that he viewed himself primarily as a sculptor. He was more or less forced against his will to paint the Sistine Chapel. And yet he was a master of the medium.
The first presupposition behind this painting is that Man is fallen. That means we have a predisposition to sin, that is to say, to voluntarily choose to do what we should not - in short, sin is an abuse of free will, which can only be licitly used to choose the good. A person might feel the temptation to do something he should not. We are enticed. It seems to promise happiness. "I could have X, if I only did this evil thing Y." Do we give in? Do we indulge? When we do, we have sinned. We have lost the spiritual battle. Ultimately, the smoke evaporates, the mirrors crumble, and we are left with empty hands and the damage done, above all to ourselves.
Then, there is the fallenness of some angels, the demons, immaterial beings of various species of superior intellect and power who - while on a short leash - are still able to act on fallen men in malicious ways to lead them toward self-destruction. This "short leash" should be expanded. If God did not constrain the power of the demons, it is anyone's guess the devastation of the universe they could wreak. But since God is master of all creation, even the demons are pressed into the service of the good, but instrumentally. Even evil is made to further the divine plan. Thus, God permits the demonic assaults on St. Anthony as a kind of spiritual training for him, part of which involves developing a greater surrender of self to God.
Now, someone who doesn't believe in demons won't find demonic activity and role in human sin compelling. I suspect that is the motivation behind your question. Someone who doesn't can at least recognize the struggle with various temptations and the struggle of the moral life. In that sense, if these are the sorts of things you struggle with, then you may find the image you have in mind helpful. But, of course, to know how one should act and choose, one should also know where one is going. St. Anthony knew his destination, and this destination is not arbitrary. That's what he suffered for and a large part of the reason how he came to know how to move in that direction and why he was able to bear it all.
I also didn't expect that, but then I realized that's the work of a teenage boy with a catholic education!
Teenage boys love badass, edgy stuff. And what's badass and edgy in Catholicism? Demons! As for the art style, it is the style that was popular at the time.
In a sense, it is not so different from today's kids drawing scenes inspired from their favorite comic. Of course, the painting here shows incredible talent, he is Michelangelo after all, but that doesn't make him less of a kid.
as a 20th century dude, i expected edgy medieval stuff to be more like knights in armor with 2 swords and dragons.. but maybe that is a distortion from our era.. maybe most of what people talked about was god, good and evil
Not his first painting. Nobody picks up a brush for the first time and paints like that. Not an original work either. Just a practice masterstudy, one of many many many he'd made up to that point I'm sure.
It's impressive that he did it at 12, but like you said, he had years of focused practice under his belt before he did this one. Anyone can do this level of work - they just need to actually learn it. It doesn't require someone be born with talent.
Articles like this contribute towards the gatekeeping feeling people get about the arts in my opinion.
>Anyone can do this level of work - they just need to actually learn it.
Sorry, that's like saying with enough math practice, any kid could perform at the level of young Terry Tao (e.g. teaching himself calculus at 8, winning a gold medal at the International Math Olympiad at 12). Some people are just intrinsically talented at certain things, and no amount of hard work in people lacking those intrinsic talents will get them to that level. This is indisputable when it comes to athletic talent; everyone would agree that no matter how much an average tall person practices basketball, they will never play at the level of Michael Jordan, LeBron James, or even the lowest ranked NBA player [0], for that matter. Artistic and intellectual talent is no different.
I didn't say anyone can become Michelangelo. I said anyone can do this level of work.
That is, the exact same thing he did when he was 12, which is a master study. He didn't create the design - he copied a previous work and added color to find out what Schongauer's thought process was when making the original piece.
I very much doubt the majority of adults with sufficient practice could do this level of work. I can say with 100% certainty that an infinitesimal minority of 12 year olds with sufficient practice could do this level of work.
What are you basing this off of? Do you actually have any experience making art? Or is this just learned helplessness talking?
Also please stop implying I said any 12 year old can do this. I didn't. Once again, I said anyone who puts in the time can do what 12-year old Michelangelo did.
>What are you basing this off of? Do you actually have any experience making art? Or is this just learned helplessness talking?
I've done ≥weekly life drawing classes for 20+ years, and have observed the distribution of progress people make over time. Based on my observations and conversations with my teachers, I agree with you that a nontrivial fraction of adults starting with zero artistic ability can be trained to an advanced degree. But I disagree that this holds true for "anyone"; a larger fraction cannot be trained beyond a basic level.
>Also please stop implying I said any 12 year old can do this. I didn't.
You literally said: "It's impressive that he did it at 12, but he had years of focused practice under his belt before he did this one. Anyone can do this level of work - they just need to actually learn it." To me, that heavily implies any 12 year old with sufficient training is encompassed by that "anyone."
Most of human history we didn't have electronic distraction devices and we have one Michelangelo; the answer is probably not as many as the question implies.
I'm not educated in painting but will just assume it's similar to music and someone like Mozart. I genuinely believe you wouldn't get as many as you'd imagine. There were few people making music at that time and only a small portion of the population ever had the chance to listen to it (.5-1% around 1750, 5-10% around 1850). We didn't get 10x the number of Mozarts. We got some people who were as talented as him for sure and pushed boundaries and some got famous for it We also got many talented people who wrote very great music which doesn't get played at all anymore, many of those didn't push the boundaries.
Even with people like Beethoven who're seen as disruptors and wildly popular by general audiences there were talented disruptors at the time who actually did things he's 'known' for and they don't get played at all. Bach himself had largely fallen into obscurity for +-100 years. There's probably only so many Michelangelos or Mozarts people can be taught about in middle school, high school, university.... I believe it's more about the institutions that basically allowed someone like mozart or michelangelo some kinda 'patronage oligopoly', something which barely exists these days. Free market didn't really exist here well into the 1800s, even then you still had gatekeepers. In the end history picked a few winners very loosely related to their 'musical worth'.
The same as any other century. The whole point of Michelangelo is that he went beyond the limits of his time. To be the Michelangelo of today you need to go beyond the limits/tastes of today, not of Michelangelo's time. And the Michelangelo of today would not be identifiable in any way with Michelangelo given where modern art ended up in terms of style.
It's like that quote about it taking Picasso 4 years to learn to paint like Raphael but a lifetime to learn how to paint like a child.
Or think of it this way: Your average math PhD today is way better at math than Galois, Bernoulli, Gauss, etc. But they are nowhere near them because the field moved into a different stratosphere entirely.
I don't think there is that significant amount of artists that do not draw because entertainment. Artist communities online are doing pretty fine. There might not be enough money for all of them, but drawing is still popular enough hobby.
Children today are expected to go to school and get a well rounded education. They don’t start specializing as apprentice to some master at an early age
Rather ironic when you consider that Michelangelo, along with many of his contemporaries of the era, are precisely where the term 'Renaissance man' comes from.
Also consider the tools and materials available today. I don't know much about Michelangelo, but I imagine people's opportunity for sheer iteration (due to availability of qualitys pens, pappers, ink etc) is magnitudes higher (and cheaper) today.
I am by no means an expert art historian but I'm not sure I 100% follow the logic of their conclusion.
"pentimenti, or correction marks, a common indication that “a painting is not a copy, but an original work created with artistic freedom.”"
How often are they analyzing copies made by 12 year old. Is a 12 year old more likely to have made errors or drifted from the source during the process of the copy? Could the corrections be attempts to bring the painting closer to its source, because it wasnt close enough?
If you're copying from another painting, you don't paint a figure and then decide to move it a centimeter to the left. But original paintings often have such changes.
Of course it's much better, Schongauer was ~25 when he did the engraving. Michelangelo was 12 when he copied it. Likewise, it goes without saying that Haydn's symphonies circa 1765 were much better than Mozart's from the same time, since Haydn was ~30 years old and Mozart was ~10 years old.
The remarkable thing about the early painting/symphonies isn't the absolute quality of the work, it's that they showcase the artists' intrinsic baseline talents, which they would then leverage as their skills improved with maturity to become some of the greatest artists of all time.
At this point in his life, Michaelangelo was probably apprenticed to Ghirlandaio. This wasn't a freeform doodle, but likely something of a homework assignment. It was common for young artists to be given famous works to copy, or common religious scenes to remake.
there's a cool background to Dali's Temptation of St. Anthony.
In 1946, 11 surrealist painters were asked to submit a painting to be used in a film (Albert Lewin's "The Private Affairs of Bel Ami"). Among the contestants were Max Ernst (who won), Leonora Carrington, Dalì, Stanley Spencer, Dorothea Tanning. Among the judges was Marcel Duchamp. The painting is then shown in color - the only color scene in an otherwise black and white movie.
I think the reason why they specifically wanted the temptation of Saint Anthony had to do with censorship, but sadly I can't remember the details
It's just a reflection of his education. Even today, many children are raised with religious education that includes stories of demons attacking people. Kids love scary stuff; monsters, battle, etc.
It makes me wonder what his home environment was like where he could put such detail into a painting. Something like that isn't made in an afternoon or weekend; and it definitely requires parents to provide resources and moral support.
In modern representations, I think you'd be hard-pressed to find red-dude-with-horns. Seems like we shifted towards hot-dude-with-something-off (Lucifer series, Good Omens), when we do see red-dude-with-horns I feel like it's meant to be somewhat ironic/on-the-nose (south park, preacher).
Hehe, not that that hard pressed. IMDB has a whole horned-demon category keyword: https://m.imdb.com/search/title/?keywords=horned-demon&explo.... And those results don’t even include South Park, nor Hellboy. If I Google image search for “Satan” I get nothing but red horned demons for pages.
There have always been wolf-in-sheep’s-clothing stories about The Devil too, it’s just a separate category.
12 years old is pretty old for a kid. I remember trying to reason through my grandparents’ religious beliefs at or before age 9, and they had taught me about lots of different demons, gods, etc.
Edit: as others have pointed out, and if I were to actually read the article carefully before commenting, the composition is not attributed to Michelangelo. So it is just a copy. Quite the achievement, but possible for a twelve-year old.
I once confronted a gallery owner who was proudly presenting a newly discovered work by Mondriaan [1]. An original black and white photo in an old newspaper [2] was shown as proof of authenticity. But many details such as the creases in fabric differ in the original and the new painting. No OpenCV required to see that. Mind you, the picture is already framed with Mondriaan standing next to it. Unlikely that he's still working on it.
Instead of responding, the gallery owner simply turned away.
[1] https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/b/bb/Cavalini...
[2] https://www.vrt.be/vrtnws/nl/2022/03/02/nieuwe-werken-mondri...
It’s absolutely possible to be that good. Especially in the middle ages / early renaissance with the work you did for guilds and working for masters as an apprentice.
At eleven years old: https://www.pablo-ruiz-picasso.net/work-3939.php
At fourteen at his sisters wedding: https://www.pablo-ruiz-picasso.net/work-9.php
At fifteen https://www.pablo-ruiz-picasso.net/work-11.php
> Michelangelo's biographers—Giorgio Vasari (1511–1574) and Ascanio Condivi (1525–1574)—tell us that, aside from some drawings, his first work was a painted copy after a well-known engraving by Martin Schongauer (1448–1491) showing Saint Anthony tormented by demons. Made about 1487–88 under the guidance of his friend and fellow pupil Francesco Granacci, Michelangelo's painting was much admired; it was even said to have incited Ghirlandaio's envy. [https://www.metmuseum.org/exhibitions/listings/2009/michelan...]
Sure, but not if this is your first painting. Humans can't one-shot art like this
Christ a-fucking mighty, in some states, the law says that Michelangelo, had he been alive today,would have had to sit on a booster seat at the age at which he made this painting. Absurd.
One of my more heretical beliefs is that tech companies should do more hiring of high brilliant people right out of high school.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Michelangelo_Buonarroti_-...
I've cropped that little blue sailing ship at the bottom of the canvas to make a wallpaper.
Edit: the butthole is in the original engraving his painting is based on, so not his own vision, fortunately I guess.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Temptation_of_St_Anthony_(...
for someone bad at naming things that gives me an idea! a software named gdb ?
You know, that might actually be the demons mouth. There are eyes and whiskers and stuff next to it.
And if that's the case, it would mean the demon's butthole has teeth.
This painting makes me feel like the bible was pretty much a comic book to the adolescent Michelangelo, and I like that thought. He later went on to paint the ceiling of a huge temple dedicated to his equivalent of Charles Xavier.
I bet that felt pretty cool for him =)
as the others said Michelangelo hated doing that painting. He's a very tragic, albeit heroic to me, man. I'd recommend that book if you're at all fascinated by him.
Edit: as below a more famous and earlier St Anthony was indeed much closer to the time of the gospels
https://www.dutchfinepaintings.com/michelangelos-sistine-cha...
I could believe even quite a bit younger, there are some wildly talented children and it's easy to believe Michaelangelo to have been one.
Why? There were other talented people who produced masterful works at an early age. From the same time as this there's a Dürer self-portrait, also aged 12-13:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Self-Portrait_at_the_Age_of_13
> We don't have any really reliable records from that time.
Uh, no. There's no documented attribution of that painting to Michelangelo; that doesn't mean that other things weren't reliably recorded.
Source: know how to draw really well.
https://www.metmuseum.org/exhibitions/listings/2009/michelan...
It is frustrating that the article is so coy about the evidence around the premise of the article! But, this website and the youtube video this article is based around both lean more towards pop than investigative.
------------------
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michelangelo#Early_life_and_ca...
It seems like this painting would be from his time at Urbino's grammar school. His first apprenticeship started when he was 13. You might expect a renaissance artist to do a lot of work on their master's paintings (detail work, etc.) before ever putting their own name to a canvas, but this is, apparently, Michelangelo doing his own thing before ever being apprenticed.
So, while he likely did paint things before this that didn't survive, it's pretty amazing that this is the work of a kid who has yet to be apprenticed and is just pursuing it on his own with nothing more than the advice of people he was hanging out with.
Michelangelo would go on to find his first patron, a Cardinal named Raffaele Riario, by forging a sculpture and artificially aging it (which, back then, was a conventional practice to demonstrate expertise and skill: https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/how-a-forged-sculpture...)
Dishonesty aside, both stories are reminders that there's a power to doing stuff with your own two hands (not genning it), as well as not to let today's emphasis on originality take away from using imitation/transcription to practice your craft: https://herbertlui.net/in-defense-of-copycats/
Still impressive of course, but remember that it's not straightforward to compare how things are today with other time periods.
All of that misses the forest for the trees, which is he did it at an incredibly young age!
[1] Given the level of pedantry on this site, I suppose I should say "almost anyone", since a small minority of people with severe disabilities may not be able to.
I won’t argue about the obviousness as that’s a tarpit of comparing each others social circles, but let say it’s reasonable to assuming this wasn’t his first ever brush stroke to touch canvas.
As far as I can tell, nobody in this case is claiming that it is or even might be the first, except the headline, which makes the headline misleading.
So he was re-rendering a religious folk story.
On the subject of the content, in actual seriousness, this was a pre-modern, pre-secularized age before the traditionally religious was privatized and viewed as some kind of optional quirky fantasy for adults, subject to taste, one as good as the other. So, moral instruction would have been more overt and crisp, and the subject matter prominent in public. The challenges and difficulties of the moral life would have been taught and spoken of more openly.
I know the OP is joking, but this would be no cause for alarm, as the image is noble in its content. It depicts St. Anthony's triumph over the demonic. It does not glorify the demonic or debase the good.
In this context, Man's fallen state predisposes him toward sin. He is tempted to do things he should not and knows he should not. Add to that the malice and opportunism of the fallen angels - the demons - who, while on a short divine leash, nonetheless can exploit the weaknesses and evil in men to lead them toward their doom. The image would then be received as quite inspiring, perhaps helping to inspire and concentrate the viewer's own efforts to resist temptation, combat evil, and to progress on his own journey of conquering the self.
He wasn't being dropped off a school at 7am, squirming in a chair until 3pm, playing video games before dinner and then doing homework until bed all while squeezing in a bit of time for sketching.
The vast majority of people probably benefit more from our current structure, but it does make it much less likely to have "genius" of the type we see in Michelangelo, Mozart, etc.
He was literally getting education in art. It is not like there was no structure.
And the second point ... why should parents to do that with their random kid before that kid even shown interest? It is not like art represented some kind of career or lifetime security or even happiness in life.
St. Anthony is a fascinating figure. Father of wilderness monasticism, left Egypt to hear god, spent the night in a cave fighting the devil and won; the patron saint of psychedelics or at least Ergotism, the affliction of entire towns when the grain was infected with ergot fungus, which would later by synthesized into LSD.
I am actually in the process of curating a museum quality coffee table book in collaboration with Getty of at least 117 of the variations on this theme from Dali to Bosch to Michelangelo.
(1/17 is St. Anthony's day, and my birthday, and my name is Anthony - coincidentally).
Shoot me an email if you'd like to collaborate or would like an update when the project officially launches! a+st@175g.com
https://www.kasmingallery.com/artworks/4717-walton-ford-fall...
It’s wild that someone could be that good that young.
Or the massive chemical swings we self-induce, and how those might tear at (or help??) our soul?
Then, there is the fallenness of some angels, the demons, immaterial beings of various species of superior intellect and power who - while on a short leash - are still able to act on fallen men in malicious ways to lead them toward self-destruction. This "short leash" should be expanded. If God did not constrain the power of the demons, it is anyone's guess the devastation of the universe they could wreak. But since God is master of all creation, even the demons are pressed into the service of the good, but instrumentally. Even evil is made to further the divine plan. Thus, God permits the demonic assaults on St. Anthony as a kind of spiritual training for him, part of which involves developing a greater surrender of self to God.
Now, someone who doesn't believe in demons won't find demonic activity and role in human sin compelling. I suspect that is the motivation behind your question. Someone who doesn't can at least recognize the struggle with various temptations and the struggle of the moral life. In that sense, if these are the sorts of things you struggle with, then you may find the image you have in mind helpful. But, of course, to know how one should act and choose, one should also know where one is going. St. Anthony knew his destination, and this destination is not arbitrary. That's what he suffered for and a large part of the reason how he came to know how to move in that direction and why he was able to bear it all.
Teenage boys love badass, edgy stuff. And what's badass and edgy in Catholicism? Demons! As for the art style, it is the style that was popular at the time.
In a sense, it is not so different from today's kids drawing scenes inspired from their favorite comic. Of course, the painting here shows incredible talent, he is Michelangelo after all, but that doesn't make him less of a kid.
Articles like this contribute towards the gatekeeping feeling people get about the arts in my opinion.
Sorry, that's like saying with enough math practice, any kid could perform at the level of young Terry Tao (e.g. teaching himself calculus at 8, winning a gold medal at the International Math Olympiad at 12). Some people are just intrinsically talented at certain things, and no amount of hard work in people lacking those intrinsic talents will get them to that level. This is indisputable when it comes to athletic talent; everyone would agree that no matter how much an average tall person practices basketball, they will never play at the level of Michael Jordan, LeBron James, or even the lowest ranked NBA player [0], for that matter. Artistic and intellectual talent is no different.
[0] https://old.reddit.com/r/todayilearned/comments/1oxpng5/til_...
That is, the exact same thing he did when he was 12, which is a master study. He didn't create the design - he copied a previous work and added color to find out what Schongauer's thought process was when making the original piece.
Also please stop implying I said any 12 year old can do this. I didn't. Once again, I said anyone who puts in the time can do what 12-year old Michelangelo did.
I've done ≥weekly life drawing classes for 20+ years, and have observed the distribution of progress people make over time. Based on my observations and conversations with my teachers, I agree with you that a nontrivial fraction of adults starting with zero artistic ability can be trained to an advanced degree. But I disagree that this holds true for "anyone"; a larger fraction cannot be trained beyond a basic level.
>Also please stop implying I said any 12 year old can do this. I didn't.
You literally said: "It's impressive that he did it at 12, but he had years of focused practice under his belt before he did this one. Anyone can do this level of work - they just need to actually learn it." To me, that heavily implies any 12 year old with sufficient training is encompassed by that "anyone."
Without anyone wanting to buy this and spend resources on that, finding claims to proof the contrary might be a quite futile task.
The whole board of the Museum is non-experts. Nobody has any interest in devaluing that expense.
In that era even attributing works definively to a single artist and not a school or workshop just feels a bit off.
https://kimbellart.org/content/nuestro-kimbell
absurdly well citing reddit comment on the provenance:
https://www.reddit.com/r/museum/comments/x6k3mm/comment/in89...
Either that or genius has coincidentally clustered around where the resources have been.
The world could be so much more vibrant if everyone was supported and nurtured.
In such a world, many might find much less need to distract themselves with trivialities.
Even with people like Beethoven who're seen as disruptors and wildly popular by general audiences there were talented disruptors at the time who actually did things he's 'known' for and they don't get played at all. Bach himself had largely fallen into obscurity for +-100 years. There's probably only so many Michelangelos or Mozarts people can be taught about in middle school, high school, university.... I believe it's more about the institutions that basically allowed someone like mozart or michelangelo some kinda 'patronage oligopoly', something which barely exists these days. Free market didn't really exist here well into the 1800s, even then you still had gatekeepers. In the end history picked a few winners very loosely related to their 'musical worth'.
It's like that quote about it taking Picasso 4 years to learn to paint like Raphael but a lifetime to learn how to paint like a child.
Or think of it this way: Your average math PhD today is way better at math than Galois, Bernoulli, Gauss, etc. But they are nowhere near them because the field moved into a different stratosphere entirely.
Movies, video games, music.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Temptation_of_St_Anthony_(...
"pentimenti, or correction marks, a common indication that “a painting is not a copy, but an original work created with artistic freedom.”"
How often are they analyzing copies made by 12 year old. Is a 12 year old more likely to have made errors or drifted from the source during the process of the copy? Could the corrections be attempts to bring the painting closer to its source, because it wasnt close enough?
The remarkable thing about the early painting/symphonies isn't the absolute quality of the work, it's that they showcase the artists' intrinsic baseline talents, which they would then leverage as their skills improved with maturity to become some of the greatest artists of all time.
In 1946, 11 surrealist painters were asked to submit a painting to be used in a film (Albert Lewin's "The Private Affairs of Bel Ami"). Among the contestants were Max Ernst (who won), Leonora Carrington, Dalì, Stanley Spencer, Dorothea Tanning. Among the judges was Marcel Duchamp. The painting is then shown in color - the only color scene in an otherwise black and white movie.
I think the reason why they specifically wanted the temptation of Saint Anthony had to do with censorship, but sadly I can't remember the details
There have always been wolf-in-sheep’s-clothing stories about The Devil too, it’s just a separate category.