Michelangelo wrote in a poem to a friend that he was not a painter, and he wrote it while working on the commission he is remembered for. He saw himself as a sculptor all his life, yet he kept returning to the brush, from a twelve-year-old copying a German print to a man of seventy-five finishing his final fresco.
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Why Michelangelo Painted So Little
Michelangelo thought of himself as a sculptor, and he painted far less than most people assume. Only four easel paintings are generally accepted as his, and nearly everything else that survives is fresco, painted straight onto wet plaster. Twelve works can therefore cover a whole life.
So the choice here is less a selection than a map: all four easel paintings, scenes from each of his three large fresco commissions, and two works that no longer exist. His marble statues stay out.
One habit shows in all twelve: the body comes first, and the setting is whatever the body leaves room for.
12. The Torment of Saint Anthony (about 1487)
The scales on the monster on the panel's left side are not in the print it copies. A twelve-year-old added them. The Torment of Saint Anthony is the earliest painting known by Michelangelo: a small panel on which a saint is lifted into the air by winged demons above a rocky shore.
The boy is learning to paint in the Florence workshop of Domenico Ghirlandaio, and his model is an engraving by the German artist Martin Schongauer. He copies it in color and sets the scene in a river valley like the Arno's. The biographer Giorgio Vasari says he bought fish at the market to study their strangely colored scales.
A brush sketch along the lower edge of the panel, made readable in 2015, shows a coffered ceiling, a bed and a few figures. It matches a fresco that Ghirlandaio's team was painting in the autumn of 1487 in the Tornabuoni Chapel. So the sketch supports a date of 1487 and ties the panel to that wall: while the team painted the chapel, a pupil was copying a German print of demons.
At a Glance
Artist: Michelangelo Buonarroti (1475 to 1564)
Painted: About 1487 to 1488, when he was twelve or thirteen
Medium: Tempera on panel
Size: 47 × 34.9 cm (18.5 × 13.7 in)
Where to see it: Kimbell Art Museum, Fort Worth, Texas
11. The Battle of Cascina (1504)
Soldiers scramble out of a river half dressed, grabbing for clothes and weapons as an alarm sounds. This is The Battle of Cascina, which Michelangelo, 29 and fresh from finishing the David, is hired in 1504 to paint on a wall of the great council hall in Florence. The wall opposite has gone to Leonardo da Vinci, 52, so whatever Michelangelo paints will be seen across the room from Leonardo's work.