The Most Controversial Christ Ever Carved in Marble

Look at his left cheek. There is a thin, dark line in the marble, a vein of black running across the face of Christ. When Michelangelo saw it, he walked away from the statue. He left it unfinished and never came back, and it vanished. For centuries, it stood in a small country church credited to an unknown sculptor. Now look at the rest of him. He is completely naked. That was not Michelangelo's idea. It was written into the contract. By the end of this video you will know who may have finished the face you are looking at. You have heard his name before and you will know how that black line, the thing that ruined this statue, is the thing that saved it. First the contract. Rome, the 15th of June 1514. A Roman nobleman named Matteo Vari signs an agreement with Michelangelo. He wants a statue of Christ, Life-size. Standing. Holding the cross, naked, to be finished and installed within four years. Everything else, the pose, the face, the feeling, is left to Michelangelo. By 1514, he was already one of the most famous artists alive. He had carved the David. He had just finished the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel. So he chose a block and began. And somewhere inside it, waiting was that vein. Think about what it meant. A dark stain across the face of Christ in a church forever. There was no fixing it. Marble does not take a patch. Within a year or two, Michelangelo gave up on the block. He left it roughed out in his workshop in Rome, but he still owed Rome a Christ. And the second one was nearly ruined before it ever reached the church. Hold that thought. First, look at what he had already made. Look at the pose. His weight is on one leg. The other knee bends. His head turns. Look at what he holds. The cross itself, a rope, a sponge. These are the instruments of his death. The rope that bound him, the sponge that was lifted to his mouth. He is holding them the way a soldier holds his weapons after a battle he has already won. This is the risen Christ. Death is behind him and that is why he is naked. One art historian argued that the nudity is the whole point. A body with nothing to hide, fully human and untouched by sin. Rome did not stay comfortable with that for long. We will come back to it. Now the second statue. Michelangelo carved it in Florence in a hurry in 1519 and 1520 then he sent it to Rome with his young assistant Pietro Urbano to put on the final touches. Urbano damaged it. On the advice of the painter Sebastiano del Piombo another sculptor Federico Fritzi was brought in to finish the work. On the 27th of December, 1521, the second Christ was finally installed in the church of Santa Maria Sopra Minerva, beside the main altar. Sebastiano said the knees alone were worth more than all of Rome. Michelangelo was not happy with it. He blamed the men who had finished it. And remember the nudity? In 1546, someone covered it. A cloth of bronze was fixed across the hips of the Minerva Christ It is still there today. So that is the statue everyone knows. Now the one nobody knew, the one with the vein. Two weeks before the second statue was installed, Matteo Vari wrote to Michelangelo. The letter survives. It is dated the 13th of December 1521. In it he mentions the dark vein that had appeared in the face. A month later the abandoned statue was his. Michelangelo gave it to him. And in return, the story goes, Vari gave Michelangelo a horse, a purebred colt, a Michelangelo for a horse. The first Christ went into Vari's garden in Rome. In 1556 a naturalist named Ulisse Aldrovandi saw it standing there. And then it vanishes from the record. Hold on to this next part because the number matters. In 1607 the statue was offered to Michelangelo's own family. His great-nephew could have bought it for 300 Scudi. A painter went to look at it for him and he advised against it. His reason was this. The statue had been touched by another hand. Someone had been working on Michelangelo's marble. Who? There is a letter from 1618. It mentions a plan to complete the statue and it names a young sculptor who could perfect it, the son of the sculptor Pietro Bernini, Gian Lorenzo Bernini. He was 19 years old. 30 years later, he would carve the Ecstasy of Saint Teresa. No document proves that Bernini put his chisel to this face. One historian has proposed it. Others suggest a different sculptor entirely, but the letter puts the young Bernini right beside Michelangelo's abandoned Christ. What we do know is what happened next. The statue ended up with the Giustiniani, one of the great collecting families of Rome. By 1638 their inventory A naked Christ holding the cross, With a modern metal cloth draped across him, covered again, that cloth is gone today. What you are looking at is the marble as it was carved. In 1644 the family moved it to their church in a small town north of Rome, Bassano Romano, and there it stayed. For more than three centuries it was credited to an unknown sculptor of the 1600s. Then in 2000, an art historian named Irene Baldriga put two things side by side. The letter from 1521 describing a dark vein in the face of Christ and the statue in Bassano Romano. Look at the left cheek one more time. There it is. The Christ that Michelangelo walked away from had been standing in a country church the whole time. Since then, it has been shown in Rome, in Berlin, In London and in Palermo, and here is the one last thing, that black line is the reason Michelangelo abandoned this statue. It made the face unworthy of a church and nearly 500 years later that same black line became the decisive proof that it was his. The flaw that ruined it is the flaw that proved it. So there are two Christs, one in the Minerva finished by assistants Michelangelo blamed and one he walked away from. Finished perhaps by the young Bernini. Which one do you think is more Michelangelo? 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