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“Is it or isn’t it a Michelangelo?” This is the question with which, a few days ago, the New York Times, influential US newspaper, started an article about the attribution to the great Renaissance master of the small wooden-carved crucified Christ, recently bought by the Italian State for 3 million 250 thousand euros from the Turinese antiques dealer Giancarlo Gallino.
It took about two years to purchase it, because the sculpture had to be examined three times by the technical-scientific committee. Furthermore, the purchase met the approval of a relevant part of the Italian cultural world. The antiques dealer Gallino, which had bought the work from a Florentine colleague, had initially evaluated the work for about 18 million euros. However, afterwards the Crucifix was bound by the former superintendent for Florence’s State Museums, Antonio Paolucci and claimed to be of particular cultural interest. This bond made the price fall. The technical-scientific committee, on the other hand, had given a mandate to buy the sculpture for a figure between three and five million euros.
The crucified Christ attributed to Michelangelo Buonarroti is made of polychromous linden wood and is believed to have been realised between 1492 and 1495. The perfectly proportioned Christ has a streamlined and delicate structure, which recalls fifteenth-century examples of Christ on the cross: The wooden one carved by Michelangelo himself for Santo Spirito (1492-93 approx.) or the one painted by Perugino in Santa Maria Maddalena de’ Pazzi (1496).
With a service realised in Rome by Elisabetta Povoledo, the New York Times allowed the experts to express their perplexities about the retrieved masterpiece, admired last December by Pope Benedict XVI, then displayed at Montecitorio, and in Palermo and now at the Castello Sforzesco in Milan. A tour around Italy which will end at the Museo del Bargello in Florence, where the work will be definitely placed.
The New York newspaper welcomed the art historians’ opinions, according to which the Crucifix may not be a work by Michelangelo Buonarroti but by a skilled artisan from the late fourteenth century who would have made at least ten similar statues.
Tommaso Montanari, professor at the University of Naples, talked about a “political strategy” and defined “overblown and unusual” the way that the work has been attributed and purchased by the State. A similar opinion was given by Maurizia Migliorini, professor at the University of Genoa, who helped draft a letter, signed by many experts who protested the “propagandistic use” of the sculpture.
Francesco Caglioti, professor at the University of Naples is sure that, behind this small work there is not the same genius that forged the Pietà or the David. He believes that it is “a mistake” to attribute the Crucifix to Buonarroti, and that the work in question is not worth more than 100 thousand euros.
The New York Times also points out that among the supporters of the attribution to Michelangelo there are many experts of Renaissance Art like the historian Giancarlo Gentilini, Cristina Acidini, superintendent of Florence’s state museums, and the former minister of Cultural Heritage Antonio Paolucci, now director of the Vatican Museums. According to these experts the vigorous and notably modulated body, the delicate and composed features of its face propose similar traits to the Christ of the Vatican Basilica Pietà. Even the animation of the body with cavities and protuberances, which create vibrant outlines and a strong chiaroscuro effect, suggests anticipations of the huge marble David.
Moreover, the technique is compatible with Michelangelo’s artistic life passages. Although he was famous for the monumental marble statue, he worked with wood to create the Crucifix of Santo Spirito and when he was 88, in 1563, he got the best equipment to carve a small wooden Crucifix for his grandson, recognisable in the unfinished figure in the Casa Buonarroti museum in Florence.
The experts who agree that the work was executed by Michelangelo Buonarroti claim that, according to the diagnostic tests, the Christ was made with some inventive singularities. In the figure obtained by a block of wood made up of glued pieces, a small wedge was inserted in the left side of the head, with the purpose of accentuating its extreme inclination. It is an original “repentance” in the structure itself of the sculpture, which forces the verisimilitude of the natural fact, to achieve a deeply pathetic expressivity. A masterful reconsideration that only a genius like Michelangelo could have adapted to a pre-existing compositional solution.
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