Michelangelo's Masterpiece Was a Lie?

Michelangelo the Forger? Before David, before the Pietà, before the Sistine Chapel, Michelangelo created a marble sculpture that was sold in Rome as an ancient work of art. And the man who bought it was one of the most powerful cardinals in the city. But when the truth came out, Michelangelo's career was suddenly on a knife edge. This is the mystery of Michelangelo's sleeping Cupid and what happened to it. So let's go back to Florence in around 1495 because Michelangelo at this point is only 20 years old. There's no David, there's no Pietà, and the Sistine Chapel ceiling is more than a decade away. But Michelangelo has already had quite an extraordinary education in Florence, particularly through the circle of Lorenzo de' Medici, where he had access to something which was going to become enormously important to him and his career. What was it? Ancient sculpture. And we need to remember just how obsessed Renaissance Italy was with the ancient world of the Greeks and Romans. Greek and Roman sculptures weren't simply beautiful things to look at. They were collected by princes and cardinals, fought over by wealthy patrons, and increasingly they were sold for very large amounts of money. And they represented something else as well. They were the standard. If you were an ambitious young sculptor in Renaissance Florence, these were the artists you were effectively competing against. Michelangelo had studied them closely and sometime around 1495 or 1496 he carved a marble sculpture of a sleeping Cupid. We don't have the sculpture today, which is going to become rather important later in our story, but we do have a description from Ascanio Condivi, Michelangelo's biographer, who said, a god of love, six or seven years of age, lying down in the manner of one sleeping. So this wasn't some tiny decorative Cupid. It was a substantial marble figure of a sleeping child based on a subject which went all the way back to antiquity. And apparently what Michelangelo did was very good. Good enough, in fact, to raise an intriguing possibility. Could Michelangelo's new sculpture actually be mistaken for an ancient one? According to Condivi, Lorenzo de' Medici thought it could. He suggested that Michelangelo deliberately make the Cupid appear as though it had spent centuries buried underground. Then it could be sent to Rome and offered for sale as an antiquity where it would command a much higher price. Condivi says Lorenzo told him it would pass for an antique. Michelangelo apparently agreed. And with that, what had begun as a young sculptor testing himself against the works of the ancient world became something very different indeed, because the Cupid was going to Rome and someone was going to buy it, believing it was ancient, which sounds fairly straightforward. Michelangelo makes a fake antique. Somebody buys it. Fraud exposed. Except that isn't quite what happened because almost immediately our sources start disagreeing about who actually carried out the deception. When you look at it, Condivi's version certainly puts Michelangelo right in the middle of it. He says Michelangelo treated the sculpture to make it appear old and actually compliments him on his ingenuity in doing it. But then we have Giorgio Vasari who gives us a different version. He says Michelangelo was advised to bury the Cupid so that it would look ancient, but then adds that other people said it was actually a dealer, Valdisari del Milanese, who took the sculpture to Rome, buried it there and then sold it as an antiquity. So already we've got a bit of a problem. Michelangelo unquestionably made the sculpture, but did Michelangelo himself set out to deceive the eventual buyer? Or did he make the sculpture look old and then somebody else decided to sell it as the real thing? We simply can't be certain. But what we do know is that the Cupid eventually appeared on the Roman art market. And this is where the stakes suddenly became much higher because the man who eventually bought it was Cardinal Raffaele Riario. Riario wasn't some gullible tourist wandering around Rome looking for a souvenir. He was enormously wealthy, politically powerful and he was a serious collector of antiquities. And when he bought the Sleeping Cupid, he believed he was buying an ancient sculpture. That's why he paid 200 ducats for it. Of that, Michelangelo received only 30. Keep that in mind because according to Condivi, Michelangelo hadn't been told about the enormous difference in the sale price and what he received. In fact, he'd been led to believe that 30 ducats was what the sculpture had been sold for. So there's a rather wonderful irony here. While Cardinal Riario had been deceived about who made the sculpture, Michelangelo too had been deceived about how much it had actually sold for. Someone had made an enormous profit and it wasn't Michelangelo. But one extraordinary fact remained. A sculpture carved by a 20-year-old Florentine had been accepted by one of Rome's great collectors as a genuine antiquity. Until Riario learned that the sculpture had actually been made in Florence and what happened next survives in one of the best anecdotes of Michelangelo's early life. After Riario found out, according to Condivi, a gentleman was sent to Florence by the Cardinal to investigate. But he didn't arrive saying, I'm looking for the person who faked the Cardinal's cupid. What he did, he pretended he was looking for a sculptor to undertake work in Rome. And eventually he was directed to Michelangelo and he asked the young artist to demonstrate what he could do. Michelangelo took a pen and drew a hand. Condivi says it was drawn with such skill that the gentleman was astonished. The visitor then began asking Michelangelo about his sculpture. Had he worked in marble? What had he made? And Michelangelo mentioned he'd made a sleeping cupid and described its size and pose. And at that very point, the investigator knew the truth. The Cardinal's ancient sculpture wasn't ancient at all. It had been done by the young Michelangelo. Cardinal Riario demanded his money back and the cupid ended up back with the dealer Baldassare del Milanese. You might think Michelangelo himself would want to put the whole embarrassing business behind him and create some distance from the scandal. Except he didn't. He wanted his sculpture back. And we know that not just because of Condivi or Vasari's records. We know it because Michelangelo tells us that himself. On the 2nd of July 1496, writing from Rome to Lorenzo de' Medici, Michelangelo described confronting Baldassare del Milanese and demanding the cupid back. He offered to repay the money the dealer had originally paid for it. Michelangelo says Baldassare answered him very roughly, insisted that he had bought the sculpture and therefore owned it, and then declared that he would sooner break it into a hundred pieces than give it back. Michelangelo even says he asked other Florentines in Rome to intervene, but Baldassare still refused. You can almost hear how badly that conversation went, which tells us something about Michelangelo as well. He's 21, he's been paid a fraction of what his sculpture actually fetched, and he's furious. But here's the really strange part. This scandal hasn't ruined him, quite the opposite, because critically Michelangelo is now in Rome. I have to be honest, this is the part of the story I find particularly interesting, because if we told it today, we'd probably assume Michelangelo's career was over. Young artist involved in fake antiquity scandal, powerful cardinal humiliated, money demanded back, not exactly an ideal start. Instead, Michelangelo arrived in Rome at the end of June 1496, and his own writings give us a glimpse of what happened when he arrived. And extraordinarily, he wasn't lying low and avoiding the person who'd been duped into buying a fake antique sculpture of a sleeping Cupid, quite the opposite. Michelangelo recounts how he immediately went to Cardinal Riario, carrying a letter of introduction from Lorenzo de' Medici. The cardinal told the young artist to go and look at the genuine antique sculptures in his collection. The next day, Riario asked Michelangelo what he thought of them, and then he set him an extraordinary challenge. Could he make something beautiful himself? Michelangelo was wonderfully restrained in his response. He said he couldn't promise anything as great as the works he'd just but he would see what I could do. A block of marble was bought for a life-size figure, and Michelangelo ends this part of the letter with an almost absurdly ordinary sentence, given what was about to happen to his career. On Monday, I shall begin to work. What a brilliant quote. I love the understatement, given what was about to happen. He doesn't tell us in that letter what the sculpture was going to be, but the cardinal's surviving financial records help give us a hint to fill in the gap. They record payments for a sculpture Michelangelo worked on over the following year. The Bacchus, a drunken, unsteady god of wine, more than two metres tall, holding a cup as a small satyr, eats the grapes behind him. And there is another twist. Riario apparently never took possession of it. The Bacchus instead ended up with the Roman banker and collector Giacoppo Galli, in whose garden it was later recorded. Exactly why Riario rejected or relinquished the sculpture remains uncertain. Modern scholarship confirms that Riario commissioned and paid for the work, but never possessed the finished sculpture. But think about what has just happened. The scandal of the fraudulent sale of the alleged antique to the cardinal hasn't ended Michelangelo's career. It had put him into exactly the Roman world in which his career would be transformed. And while Michelangelo was beginning the career we all know today, his Cupid was still circulating in Rome, and people were still arguing about what it actually was. And just before we follow what happened to Cupid itself, if you're enjoying this story and you're new to Painter Vale, please consider subscribing. It really does help make more investigations like this one. This is where we get to one of my favourite parts of this entire story. On the 27th of June 1496, Anton Maria Pico della Mirandola wrote to Isabella d'Este about a sculpture being offered for sale in Rome. Isabella was one of the great collectors of Renaissance Italy, so people regularly sent information about interesting things appearing on the market. And Mirandola tells her about Sleeping Cupid. He describes it as intact, around four spans long, resting on one hand, and a very beautiful work. But then he says something extraordinary. Ancient or modern? After the extraordinary events surrounding Cardinal Riario, people in Rome were still looking at Michelangelo's Cupid and genuinely arguing about what it was. Was it a remarkable survivor from antiquity, or something knocked up more recently by a deeply talented young Florentine? Critically, Mirandola basically says he doesn't care, because he thinks it's so good that if he owned it, he wouldn't sell it for less than 400 gold ducats. Apparently the owner was asking 200 the same amount Cardinal Riario had paid for it. And remember, Michelangelo only got 30 of those 200. Now Mirandola is effectively valuing it at twice the amount the Cardinal paid, despite the uncertainty surrounding its age and provenance. The surviving letter gives precisely this 200 ducat asking price, and Mirandola's 400 ducat personal evaluation. Isabella didn't buy it then, but we do know she eventually got it. Her opportunity came in 1502 when Cesare Borgia seized Urbino, and the Cupid was among the objects which fell into his hands, and Isabella, she wanted it. She wrote to her brother Cardinal Ippolito d'Este, asking him to approach Borgia on her behalf, and within weeks the Cupid was with Isabella in Mantua. And Isabella did something rather wonderful with it. She displayed it alongside another sleeping Cupid, which was believed to be ancient and possibly associated with Praxiteles. The pairing is supported by modern Met scholarship on the lost sculpture. A later inventory records the two opposite one another, including another Cupid who sleeps of Carrara marble made by the hand of Michelangelo the Florentine, which is almost the perfect conclusion to the original scandal. The sculpture that had once been passed off as ancient was now sitting opposite one believed to actually be ancient, except this time there was no deception. Michelangelo's Cupid was proudly displayed for what it really was, and there the Cupid remained for more than a century before another twist in the extraordinary story of its journey. By the 17th century the Gonzaga family in Mantua, of which Isabella was a member, had accumulated one of Europe's great art collections. The problem was they also desperately needed money, and in England Charles I was doing almost the opposite. He was spending enormous amounts of money assembling one of the greatest royal collections in Europe. So in the late 1620s a substantial part of the Gonzaga collection was sold to Charles I. Titian, Raphael, Mantegna, Antiquities, an extraordinary body of art crossed Europe and entered the English royal collection. Michelangelo's Cupid is generally traced as being part of the Gonzaga material acquired for Charles I, and contemporary agents specifically referred to the extraordinary sculpture holdings being transferred from Mantua to England. But Charles I's collection was about to suffer a catastrophe which had nothing whatsoever to do with art. Civil war, Charles lost, and on the 30th of January 1649 he was executed outside the banqueting house at Whitehall. His collection was subsequently broken up and sold. While some of those extraordinary works eventually did find their way back into the royal collection after the many others disappeared across England and Europe. And somewhere in all of that upheaval the trail of Michelangelo's sleeping Cupid starts to become very difficult to follow. There is one clear possibility. Later tradition places the sculpture at Whitehall, but in January 1698 Whitehall Palace caught fire and much of it was destroyed. Which led to a tempting conclusion that Michelangelo's sleeping Cupid burned with it. Except we don't actually know that for certain. So where else could it possibly be? It's an undeniable fact that Michelangelo's do turn up in the darndest of places. Just look at the one found in the French cultural offices in Manhattan in the 1990s. It had been sitting there for decades visible from Fifth Avenue. It's attribution to Michelangelo effectively forgotten. Until the sculpture caught the attention of art historian Kathleen Vile-Garris Brandt who recognized this wasn't simply another decorative Renaissance sculpture. She believed it was a Michelangelo. The attribution was initially controversial but the Met today describes the Cupid also known as the young archer as attributed to Michelangelo. And I think that example matters enormously to our story. Because if one possible Michelangelo can spend decades hiding in plain sight in Manhattan, why couldn't another be sitting somewhere else? And what might be helping the sleeping Cupid remain hidden in plain sight is we don't actually know precisely what it looked like. We have no securely identified contemporary drawing which gives us a definitive image of it. What we have are descriptions. Condivi tells us Michelangelo's Cupid was a sleeping boy of around six or seven. The 1496 letter to Isabella tells us it was roughly four spans long, intact, resting on one hand. Vasari described it as life-size while Isabella's inventory identifies it as being made of Carrara marble. There are later works which may preserve elements of the composition but nothing which really allows us to reconstruct Michelangelo's sculpture with absolute certainty. Indeed the Met notes that a 17th century royal collection drawing includes reclining Cupids, at least one of which could possibly record Michelangelo's lost work. So if the Cupid survives we're looking for something whose identity may already have been lost or indeed mistaken. I mean what if it's sitting in a collection of antiquities? The original fraud still perpetuating its deception 500 years after it was played out on Cardinal Riario. Or like the possible Michelangelo in Manhattan, maybe it's just hidden in plain sight. I think that gets to the heart of this story. Could the sleeping Cupid be sitting somewhere today described as something else? There's no evidence that it did survive but equally there's no evidence which allows us to say with certainty that it was destroyed. And after everything we've discovered about this sculpture perhaps we shouldn't be surprised that nobody can tell us exactly what it is or where it is. I'd love to hear what you think. Did the sleeping Cupid disappear in the Whitehall fire or could Michelangelo's lost sculpture still be out there somewhere? And if you've enjoyed this episode please like, subscribe and share with your friends. Thanks for your company and until next week bye for now.