The Met’s "Michelangelo" Show: A Truth-in-Advertising Alert

James Draper with the purported Michelangelo

At the Metropolitan Museum's recent press preview unveiling The Young Archer, James Draper, the museum's curator of European sculpture and decorative arts, made it clear that he thoroughly believes that the waif, labeled as "attributed to" Michelangelo, is in fact the real deal---a very early Michelangelo owned by Jacopo Galli in Rome, which had been described as an Apollo or Cupid by commentators from the mid-16th century.

The damaged and weathered marble figure of a youth has been relocated for at least the next 10 years from the French Embassy's Cultural Services mansion to the Metropolitan Museum, across the street and one block north.

If you have any doubt about what Draper thinks about his new charge, take a look at this banner announcing the boy's arrival:



If you're having trouble reading the camouflaged blue words "attributed to" (after "Young Archer"), so are all the people driving by. What they're seeing is, "Young Archer MICHELANGELO."

The texts and illustrations that now occupy one wall of the museum's Vélez Blanco Patio are intended to bolster the case for the master's authorship---a matter of considerable dispute among Michelangelo experts.

This wasn't the show I was expecting to see. According to the Met's press release:

The exhibition will include illustrated text panels outlining the "Young Archer's" history and indicating various scholarly schools of thought so that viewers can make up their minds accordingly.

The show gave no attention whatsoever to any "scholarly schools of thought" that differ from Draper's. But the case he makes here for Michelangelo's authorship seems far from airtight.

Most of the illustrations he provides seem to undermine his argument. Here's the "Battle of the Centaurs," 1490-91,  which, as Draper says, is "generally acknowledged to be his [Michelangelo's] earliest sculpture":