In New York on Monday I stopped by the annual press preview of the Metropolitan Museum, where the Met’s new director Thomas Campbell gave a power point summary of the shows the museum has planned for the next year or so. For me the main takeaway was that, as predicted, with the New Austerity upon us, museums will be doing fewer big loan extravaganzas, more “drawn from the collection” shows. The Met has five of those opening before the end of 2009, plus 19 loan shows of various sizes.
And even some of those loan exhibitions will be pretty modestly scaled. This doesn’t have to be a bad thing. In a shrewd bit of scheduling— shrewd means good here — the Met has quickly arranged a June 19 opening for a bullet-point show around a single painting, The Torment of Saint Anthony. That’s the little picture, purportedly by the very young Michelangelo, that was purchased recently by the Kimbell Museum in Fort Worth.
The Torment of Saint Anthony, newly attributed to Michelangelo, c. 1487/88 — Kimbell Museum of Art
The attribution of that picture to Michelangelo is too recent to be a settled matter. No new attribution is ever “settled”. (Many old attributions are in the same category, but never mind.) What we know is that both of Michelangelo’s contemporary “biographers”, Vasari and Condivio, claimed that during his years as a teenage apprentice in the workshop of the Florentine painter Domenico Ghirlandaio, Michelangelo made his first painting, a copy of a print that showed Saint Anthony set upon by demons.
The Kimbell painting re-emerged in the 19th century, and was usually attributed to “Workshop of Ghirlandaio.” But over the years its been proposed as a candidate for the picture Vasari and Condivio described. Last July it was sold at a Sotheby’s auction in London for around $2 million, still under the Ghirlandaio workshop attribution. The buyer was an American art dealer who brought it to the Met for cleaning. Details that became visible after the cleaning have convinced Keith Christiansen, the Met’s well known curator of European Paintings, that it must be by Michelangelo, who would have been 12 or 13 when he painted it. Christiansen’s seal of approval may have helped to convince the Kimbell to spend the $6 million they’re said to have paid for it.
For some reason the Met passed on buying the picture itself, though it was just a few years ago that Philippe de Montebello, the Met’s former director, found a way to cobble together $45 million to buy a tiny Duccio. Christiansen told the New York Times that “The timing wasn’t right. We had other acquisitions on the dock.”
As it happens, the Met also has a show scheduled for Nov. 3 that will be built around another (relatively) recent Michelangelo attribution. The Young Archer is a fragmentary marble of a nude youth that stood for years in the lobby of the New York offices of the French Cultural Services on Fifth Avenue before it was spotted in 1990 by James David Draper, a Met curator. After that it was researched and re-examined by him and other scholars, some of whom have been arguing ever since that it’s by the young Michelangelo.
Will either of these attributions hold? Connoisseurship on that level is not part of my job description. The arguments seem plausible but not definitive. As we used to say at Time, only time will tell. But you can be sure a lot of people will want to swing by the Met to see them both. I will. Sometimes you can get a lot of mileage out of a little show.
And while we’re at it, it seems to be enlarge-the-supply-of-Old-Masters season.