Has Belgium discovered an unpublished work by Michelangelo Buonarroti? The possibility of having recovered a hitherto unknown painting by the Renaissance genius – it would be only the fifth attributed to the author of the frescoes in the Sistine Chapel dome – is beginning to revolutionize the world of national and international art, despite the fact that there is still a lot of caution about what, no one doubts, would be a spectacular find.
The work now attributed to Michelangelo by a Belgian expert, after multiple tests on the painting and a deep analysis of the work and its context, is the Spiritual Pieta, an oil painting on linen canvas that represents the dead Jesus Christ with his arms in the shape of a cross and supported by a Virgin Mary who cries inconsolably.
Until it was acquired in 2024 by two Belgian collectors, it was identified simply as a work by “an anonymous artist of the 16th-17th century.” It was put up for sale in 2020 by the Waennes auction house in Genoa. The catalog noted that “the iconography of the painting expresses a heterogeneous figurative culture, dictated by Tuscan-Roman influences inspired by the models of Andrea del Sarto, Pontormo, Francesco Salviati and, of course, Michelangelo.” The starting price was low, the appraisal ranged between 2,000 and 3,000 euros. Still, no one acquired it. Finally, it ended up four years later in the hands of Belgian collectors. One of them, a few days after receiving the painting, and after a more careful inspection of the canvas, which had been cleaned and restored before being sent to its new owners, discovered two monograms barely discernible in the lower part of the painting.
The story of one of perhaps the most unexpected discoveries in the world of contemporary art had just begun.
What happened next, worthy of a novel full of intrigue and historical twists, is told by the professor of Art History at the Free University of Belgium (ULB) Michel Draguet, an expert whom the collector who detected the monograms, and who prefers to remain anonymous, contacted to confirm his suspicions. “The collector tells me: ‘The monograms prove it, the painting is signed, it’s a Michelangelo!’ At that moment, I tell him that we have to hit the brakes. Anyone could have placed a monogram on the canvas at any time. I tell him that we have to wait for the analyzes from Irpa (the Royal Institute of Artistic Heritage) to see things more clearly,” Draguet tells the newspaper. The evening, one of the Belgian media chosen to carry out a visit to the work this week in an unidentified location in Brussels.
But the collector insists: “He asks me if, in case the analyzes show that the canvas is good, that the pigments are good and that the monograms are from the same period, I am willing to carry out an in-depth study of the painting. Since I don’t believe it, I think that I am not taking any risks and I accept,” adds Draguet, member of the Class of Arts of the Royal Academy of Sciences, Letters and Fine Arts of Belgium, as well as high representative of the Belgian Federal Heritage and honorary director general of the Royal Museums of Fine Arts of Belgium.
Draguet’s surprise is capital: the tests carried out by the Royal Institute of Cultural Heritage of Belgium (KIK-IRPA), considered one of the five most prestigious heritage science and conservation institutes in the world, do not find any modern pigment in the painting. On the contrary, the use of a color palette typical of the 16th century is confirmed. Furthermore, carbon tests suggest, with 95.4% probability, that the canvas was painted between 1520 and 1580, a time frame consistent with Michelangelo’s last period (1475-1564). And macro X-ray fluorescence confirms that one of Michelangelo’s widely documented monograms was applied twice by the artist onto the original dried paint surface, prior to the natural formation of the crackedwhich rules out the possibility that someone falsified this identifying mark of the artist.
“The presence of two indexed monograms of the artist, integrated into the material of the work itself, allows us to consider this work as an autograph of Michelangelo,” says Draguet in a statement with which he presented his conclusions. “If they were intact, it would be a sign that they were added later. Here, they are part of the material,” he said in statements to The evening.
With the scientific evidence in hand, Draguet, whom the Belgian newspaper nicknames the “Sherlock Holmes of art” for his almost detective approach to the task entrusted to him, launched into a stylistic analysis of the work that, in 600 pages, considers Michelangelo’s authorship confirmed. Despite his extensive career, Draguet specializes in Belgian art of the 19th and 20th centuries. But he maintains that it was precisely for that reason, because his view would not be prejudiced like that of an expert on the Renaissance, that the owners of the work wanted him to lead the investigations.
According to his conclusions, for which he has studied both the style of the Renaissance genius and the historical context of the work, the identification of the Spiritual Pieties, A work closely linked to the Ecclesia Viterbiensis, a circle of reformers gathered around Cardinal Reginald Pole between 1541 and 1545 in the hope of restoring the unity of Christendom, “challenges the established narrative by demonstrating that the master practiced easel painting to express his evangelical convictions within this group.” And, if ratified by other experts more specialized in Michelangelo –Draguet published all his conclusions on a website this Friday and now leaves the field open to new research–, the new Pietà would also refute the statement, assumed for centuries as dogma, by the Tuscan painter, writer and architect Giorgio Vasari (1511-74) in his “Lives of the most excellent painters, sculptors and architects”, that Michelangelo painted only four canvases. during his career and that he abandoned easel painting after completing the Tondo Doni (c. 1503-1507) to dedicate himself to frescoes and sculpture. The debate is served.
