Opinion

How to spot a Michelangelo

From the first time he saw the painting “St. John the Baptist Bearing Witness,” Everett Fahy had his suspicions.

The Metropolitan Museum of Art had snapped up the work in 1970 for $150,000. Fahy, then curator of European art at the museum, wrote, “the figures twist and turn with greater freedom, displaying the contrapposto typical of Michelangelo’s style on the Sistine ceiling.”

Forty years later and retired from the Met, Fahy is finally ready to go a step further: The 1506 painting isn’t just typical of the Renaissance master. “St. John” is by Michelangelo.

If Met officials and art scholars agree, the value of the painting could skyrocket to $300 million. And an art mystery that has puzzled experts for centuries will have been solved.

CLICK HERE FOR A LARGER GUIDE TO IDENTIFYING A MICHELANGELO PAINTING

The panel, “St. John the Baptist Bearing Witness,” is actually one of four, or possibly five, commissioned, historians believe, in the early 16th century by a wealthy Florentine family, which planned to unveil them at a wedding. Each panel was a famous Biblical scene from St. John’s life.

Two of the panels — now in different museums — have long been attributed to a pair of lesser-known Renaissance artists.

The other two, “St. John the Baptist Bearing Witness” and “Scenes from the Life of St. John the Baptist,” were bought by the Met, and were assumed by scholars to be the work of Domenico Ghirlandaio, a teacher to Michelangelo, and his close friend, painter Francesco Granacci. Then it was decided that Granacci had painted them both.

Later, historians deduced that the two panels were done by separate hands, said Fahy. One by Granacci, and the other by an unknown collaborator — perhaps Granacci contemporaries like Raffaellino del Garbo and Raffaello Botticini. But when Fahy got a good look at the panel attributed to an unknown collaborator, he saw something special.

“I came to suspect that Michelangelo painted the panel because of its extraordinarily high quality,” he said.

The harmonious elements in the picture — the bold and fluid painting — are not consistent with the styles of other painters, Fahy said.

He mulled his theory for years, compiling evidence bit by bit. He had plenty of opportunity for research — but little time to write about it. Last month, Fahy detailed his evidence in a 65-page article for Italian journal Nuovi Studi — but its foundation rests on these clues contained in the painting itself, plus the timing of Michelangelo’s travels to and from Florence and the artist’s unique techniques, as outlined by Fahy here.

THE SETTING

St. John the Baptist is traditionally in the desert in Bible stories, but here he’s shown in a setting reminiscent of a rock quarry. Michelangelo was intimately familiar with quarries, having made a dozen trips to Carrara, a place renowned for its marble. He spent eight months of 1505 there selecting marble for the tomb of Pope Julius II.

THE UNDERDRAWINGS

Infrared reflectograms taken by the Met conservation department show that Granacci’s panel had a very detailed underdrawing, a blueprint applied to the wood before the artist started painting. In fact, reflectograms of all five Granacci paintings in the Met reveal extensive underdrawings. This panel, in contrast, had minimal underdrawing, indicating the artist was working with a confident, bold hand — typical of Michelangelo.

PHARISEES

From their exotic clothing, the two elderly men on the far left likely were meant to be Pharisees, members of an ancient Jewish group. One of them, who points upward at Christ and the apostles walking down the ravine, is particularly similar to a pen-and-ink drawing in the British Museum known as “The Philosopher” (inset). Sketched by Michelangelo sometime between 1495 and 1500, it features an old man in an exotic costume holding a globe. It predates this St. John the Baptist painting by several years, and is typical of work the artist did as a young man.

THE STYLE

The painting is fluid and confident, not Michelangelo’s best work, but clearly better than Granacci’s painting. This panel was done in oils, then an innovative, untested medium that Michelangelo embraced. Granacci’s panel is done in the traditional Renaissance egg tempera paint.

ST. JOHN THE BAPTIST

Dressed in hair shirt and a red mantle, St. John is depicted with right leg forward and a pointing hand. The pose is similar to a beautiful pen-and-ink figure sketched by Michelangelo (inset) that belongs to the Louvre in Paris.

BACKGROUND FIGURES

One of the figures on the right — the young woman standing next to the old man leaning against the rocks — is in the same pose as a naked male figure in the “Doni Tondo” (he’s the smaller figure to the right, above), a painting Michelangelo probably produced for the wedding of Agnolo Doni and Maddalena Strozzi in January 1504 that now belongs to the Uffizi Gallery in Florence.

THE TIMING

Michelangelo’s whereabouts over his lifetime are generally well known, thanks to his letters and the artwork he left behind. Dates surrounding the “lost Michelangelo” include:

March 6, 1475 — Michelangelo is born outside of Florence.

1488 — 13-year-old Michelangelo goes to apprentice for the painter Domenico Ghirlandaio; a fellow apprentice and friend is Francesco Granacci. The apprenticeship doesn’t last long however, as Michelangelo goes to work for the powerful Medicis to train in sculpture.

August 1501 – January 1504 — Michelangelo is given a block of marble left neglected for 25 years by the cathedral works commission of Florence, and sculpts the masterpiece David.

August 1504 — “Italian Idol: Renaissance Edition.” Michelangelo is asked to paint a war mural in Florence’s Great Council Hall; a companion wall is painted by Leonardo da Vinci, 23 years his senior.

March 1505 — Pope Julius II calls Michelangelo to Rome to carve his tomb.

1506 — Unhappy with how the tomb is going, Michelangelo returns to Florence, according to letters. Art historian Everett Fahy believes it was during this period that Michelangelo lent his old friend Granacci a hand, anonymously painting one panel of a series on St. John the Baptist for a local wedding.

1508-1512 — Michelangelo returns to Rome to finish Julius’ tomb and work on a new project for him, the Sistine Chapel.

February 1564 —Michelangelo dies.

RECENT MICHELANGELO FINDS

“St. John” wouldn’t be the only work by Michelangelo found in this century. In December 2007, Vatican archivists found in their files one of the last sketches done by Michelangelo before his death in 1564. The sketch is of a partial plan for a column in St. Peter’s cupola and is extremely rare, since the artist destroyed his designs in the last years of his life. In 2009, a Vatican restoration team found a hidden treasure within the “Crucifixion of St. Peter” in the Vatican’s Pauline Chapel. Michelangelo painted it between 1545 and 1550, but for centuries the identity of one male figure in the fresco painting was unknown. Only after the five-year, $6 million restoration did art scholars realize it was Michelangelo’s sole self-portrait.

“St. John the Baptist Bearing Witness” (credited, for now, as “From the Workshop of Francesco Granacci”) is on display in Gallery 7 of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1000 Fifth Avenue.