Giorgio Vasari, in The lives of the best painters, sculptors and architects, wrote that already in the Sixteenth century that michelangelo, the perfectionist, absolute, had not hesitated to burn his first works of his youth, which he deemed imperfect. The possible attribution to the sculptor of the uncanny and marvelous Pietà a drawing called The Seated man, that he would have achieved in the years 1487 at the age of 12 years, is therefore a sensational revelation that could have an impact on the understanding of the artistic training of the future great master.
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It is a british collector of which are of unknown identity who has purchased this work, yet anonymous, in an auction house in French in 1989. The man , pen drawing, full of brown ink, a little more than 10 x 20, depicts a man dressed in a kind of toga of the Renaissance, seated on a throne with a sceptre in the hand.
Museum of Budapest, The unique way of a pupil of Ghirlandaio
A distinguished historian of English art, Sir Timothy Clifford, has entrusted to our colleagues in the Daily Mail that it finds here the manner characteristic of Michel-Angel: «With the roundness of the chin, this line is very straight to the nose, you know that no other pupil of Domenico Ghirlandaio does drew like this.»
Michelangelo Bunarotti will have worked in the studio of the author of the fresco Saint Jerome, sainte Barbe, and saint Anthony the abbot in his early youth. Ghirlandaio was not slow to see in this apprentice a budding genius. And soon, he will recommend to the Medici in the person of lorenzo the Magnificent. The art history was on the march. Waiting to have an authentication official, art lovers will admire this design at the Museum of fine arts in Budapest, where it is exposed until June 30.
«If we take into account the fact that the design drawings of the apprentices were rarely preserved, this coupled with the mania of Michel-Angel to destroy his drawings when he had longer useful, man sitting deserves a prominent place in the work of the master,» says the exhibition curator Zoltán Kárpáti.
● A day with michelangelo in the Louvre
