Los tormentos de San Antonio

A saint hangs in mid-air, pulled and clawed by a swarm of demons. If the attribution holds, the hand that painted them belonged to a boy of twelve or thirteen named Michelangelo.

The story behind the painting

The Torment of Saint Anthony is attributed to Michelangelo, though his authorship is disputed. If it is his, it is his earliest surviving work, made around 1487 to 1488. It is an oil and tempera copy of an engraving by Martin Schongauer, made several years earlier. Giorgio Vasari wrote that Michelangelo painted Saint Anthony after a print by Schongauer, and Ascanio Condivi recorded that the young artist went to a market to draw fish scales for it. The panel was long given to the workshop of Domenico Ghirlandaio, where Michelangelo served his apprenticeship.

What to look for

The small panel, about 47 by 34 cm, shows Saint Anthony being assailed by demons who try to tempt him. Schongauer's composition apparently shows a later episode in which the saint, normally carried about the desert by angels, is ambushed in mid-air. Look at the demons' scaly bodies: the fish scales Condivi mentions are not in the engraving. The young painter also added a landscape beneath the figures and changed the saint's expression. Experts pointed to stylistic hallmarks such as emphatic cross hatching.

Meaning and intent

The Temptation of Saint Anthony was a common medieval subject, included in the Golden Legend. Copying a celebrated print was a way for a young artist to learn, and the changes show a student thinking for himself: observing real fish rather than inventing scales, grounding the scene with landscape, and reshaping the saint's face. Anthony's calm resistance amid chaos is the heart of the story. Schongauer's late-Gothic style also stands in strong contrast with everything else Michelangelo is known for.

Legacy

Under the Ghirlandaio workshop attribution, the panel was sold at Sotheby's in London in 2008. It was then cleaned of discoloured varnish and later overpainting at the Metropolitan Museum of Art and examined closely for the first time, which led to the attribution to Michelangelo. The Kimbell Art Museum in Fort Worth, Texas, then acquired it. If the attribution holds, it is one of only four surviving panel paintings by Michelangelo and the only one from his adolescence, though experts disagree whether it is the copy Vasari described.