{"id":382502,"date":"2026-03-13T04:04:15","date_gmt":"2026-03-13T04:04:15","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/382502\/"},"modified":"2026-03-13T04:04:15","modified_gmt":"2026-03-13T04:04:15","slug":"it-has-nothing-to-do-with-michelangelo-expert-wades-in-on-painting-newly-attributed-to-renaissance-master-the-art-newspaper","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/382502\/","title":{"rendered":"\u2018It has nothing to do with Michelangelo\u2019: expert wades in on painting newly attributed to Renaissance master – The Art Newspaper"},"content":{"rendered":"

Earlier this month, the Belgian art historian Michel\u00a0Draguet\u00a0published to much fanfare\u00a0a 600-page report on what he contends is<\/a> a newly discovered painting by Michelangelo.\u00a0Draguet\u00a0has\u00a0entitled\u00a0the controversial work the\u00a0Spirituali\u00a0Piet\u00e0 and dated it from the 1540s.<\/p>\n

This announcement\u00a0was met\u00a0with swift scepticism, with a series of unnamed experts reportedly expressing\u00a0doubt<\/a>. The art historian David\u00a0Ekserdjian,\u00a0an emeritus professor at the University of Leicester, UK\u2014and a leading authority on the Italian Renaissance with particular focus on Correggio, Parmigianino and Michelangelo\u2014tells The Art Newspaper: <\/strong>\u201cThis painting, in terms of artistic style, has nothing to do with Michelangelo.\u201d<\/p>\n

The painting was bought in 2024, from the\u00a0Wannenes\u00a0auction house in Genoa, Italy, which had listed it in its Old Master and 19th-century paintings catalogue (25\u00a0June 2020) as an anonymous work from the 16th-17th centuries.<\/p>\n

The buyers, two Belgian collectors, have not revealed their identities. Draguet\u00a0says they are not currently\u00a0seeking\u00a0to sell the painting, but to place it on loan with a museum,\u00a0in order to\u00a0further art historical study and discussion. “As long-term philanthropists, they are convinced this is a Michelangelo and should therefore be in a public collection.”\u00a0<\/p>\n

Draguet\u00a0had previously worked with the collectors, borrowing works from them, in his capacity as the director general of the Royal Museums of Fine Arts of Belgium for 18 years, until stepping down in 2023.<\/p>\n

When they found the two monograms that looked like Michelangelo signatures on the painting, they excitedly asked if he would take on the task of\u00a0determining\u00a0their validity. “I got into this as a bit of a challenge,” he says.<\/p>\n

Technical analysis by the Royal Institute for Cultural Heritage of Belgium confirms the palette and linen of the painting date back to the 16th century. It shows the monograms were painted before craquelure (dense cracking) formed on the painted surface and also confirms the presence of what looks like the numbers 1-5-4 beside one of the monograms, which could be be an incomplete date.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Draguet, whose further credentials include membership of the Royal Academy of Sciences, Letters and Fine Arts of Belgium and a professorship at the Universit\u00e9 Libre de Bruxelles, has based his proposed attribution primarily on those monograms being made at the time the painting was created. They align with monogram signatures attributed to the artist in reference books including Emmanuel B\u00e9n\u00e9zit\u2019s Dictionnaire\u00a0critique et documentaire des peintres , sculpteurs, dessinateurs\u00a0&\u00a0graveurs\u00a0(1924).<\/p>\n

He also cites reddish highlights around the shapes of the composition and the multidirectional brushstrokes\u00a0rendering\u00a0both flesh and fabric, as proof of the master’s hand. Mostly, and in a notably circular form of logic, he points to the sculptural pose of Christ supported by the Virgin Mary with his arms outstretched as a much-copied\u00a0Cinquecento\u00a0(16th-century)\u00a0compositional invention which can now be attributed to Michelangelo.\u00a0<\/p>\n

But Ekserdjian\u00a0highlights fundamental flaws, not within the granular detail of the analysis, but its premise and main focus.\u00a0Michelangelo was, as he puts it, \u201cincredibly famous for not liking to paint\u201d. <\/p>\n

\u201cThere are early paintings,\u201d says\u00a0Ekserdjian, \u201cand obviously there’s the Sistine Chapel ceiling, and there are two frescoes in the Cappella Paolina [in the Vatican Palace]. But that’s your lot.\u201d The other glaring question, to his mind, is, if this were a Michelangelo, and such an influential composition which would go on to be so copiously copied, why would nobody\u00a0have known by now that he had\u00a0painted it.<\/p>\n

What\u2019s more, Ekserdjian says, Michelangelo was \u201cnot a signer\u2026 he was legendary for not signing in a monogram\u201d. Famously, the only work, he says, that Michelangelo actually signed is the sculpted Piet\u00e0 in Saint Peter’s Basilica, in the Vatican. In his Lives of the Artists, Vasari recounts how the artist etched \u2018Michelangelo Buonarroti, Florentine, made this\u2018 on the Virgin’s sash, after overhearing visitors mistakenly attributing the work to \u2018il Gobbo\u2019 (the Hunchback), also known as Cristoforo Solari.<\/p>\n

Ekserdjian also points to how thoroughly recorded Michelengelo\u2019s output is. \u201cMichelangelo, among 16th-century artists, is incomparably, the most documented in terms of artistic biography, because you have Vasari in 1550, [Ascanio]\u00a0Condivi, who writes a completely separate biography of Michelangelo [in 1553]; then Vasari is expanded and\u00a0emended\u00a0in 1568,” he says.<\/p>\n

\u201cThese guys might, if he’d painted a picture of this sort, have had something to say about it.\u00a0It’s\u00a0true that you should normally be jolly careful about arguing from silence. In other words, saying nobody ever knew that such\u00a0a\u00a0thing existed\u2026 sometimes things do come\u00a0out of the blue\u00a0and surprise people. But Michelangelo is\u202fepically and\u202ffully documented.”\u00a0<\/p>\n

Draguet\u00a0says he is open to being\u00a0disproven\u00a0nonetheless. Citing Leonardo da Vinci\u2019s Salvator Mundi<\/a>\u00a0and the\u00a0Caravaggios<\/a>\u00a0that have\u00a0emerged\u00a0in recent years from Spain, he says he wants transparency, “a real public debate, which such works, alas, elicit too rarely.”\u00a0<\/p>\n

Claims relating to a Michelangelo attribution are not uncommon<\/a>. Last week, for example, an independent researcher in Italy claimed she had found<\/a> documents linking the artist to a bust depicting Christ the Saviour.<\/p>\n

Ekserdjian says he fields three to four requests a week from private collectors who think\u00a0they have\u00a0found something major. Very, very occasionally they have. But this, he argues, is “a non-event.”<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Earlier this month, the Belgian art historian Michel\u00a0Draguet\u00a0published to much fanfare\u00a0a 600-page report on what he contends is…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":382503,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":"","_share_on_mastodon":"0"},"categories":[75],"tags":[103898,57958,18,117,19,17,85313,95162,35503],"class_list":["post-382502","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-entertainment","tag-attribution","tag-caravaggio","tag-eire","tag-entertainment","tag-ie","tag-ireland","tag-michelangelo","tag-old-masters","tag-salvator-mundi"],"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@ie\/116219888544739586","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/382502","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=382502"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/382502\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/382503"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=382502"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=382502"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=382502"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}