The Michelangelo of Buffalo? Uncanny Resemblance to Gardner’s Drawing (plus the Met’s Giaquinto find)

Cover of new book, depicting the purported Michelangelo of Buffalo

By now, we've had enough of the Michelangelo of Fifth Avenue, which was taken off view at the Metropolitan Museum and dispatched to its conservation department (as Keith Christiansen, the museum's chairman of European paintings, recently told me, when I asked why it wasn't on view).

But we now have a new aspirant---the Michelangelo of Buffalo. (It rhymes!)

I'm late in commenting on last month's NY Times piece, The Pietà Behind the Couch, by Kevin Flynn and Randy Kennedy. They, in turn, were late catching up with Colin Dabkowski's Oct. 14 story in the Buffalo News about the "discovery" of the supposed Michelangelo painting in Tonawanda (about 12 miles north of Buffalo), and Melissa Klein's Oct. 11 NY Post story about this Pietà-on-panel.

What I don't understand is why Flynn and Kennedy lavished 2,600 words on an audacious attribution that seems to have scant support among the experts (aside from William Wallace, who commented that "there is at least enough evidence to merit a more extensive examination," according to Flynn/Kennedy). The Times reporters never said a word in their story about the fact that Martin Kober's family heirloom, long couched behind the couch, bears an uncanny resemblance to this Michelangelo drawing from the collection of the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, Boston:


Michelangelo, "Pietà," about 1538-44, Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum

The online version (linked above) of the Times article makes this resemblance clear by displaying images of the two similar works side-by-side, with a single caption. But in the print version, one image was on the front page of the Sunday "Arts & Leisure" section; the other on the jump page. The text of the story doesn't say a word about why the image of the drawing is there, leaving readers to make their own comparisons and draw their own conclusions.

It would have made sense to quote the Gardner Museum's online entry (excerpted from a book by James Saslow) about its "Pietà," which suggests the possible origin of Kober's painting:

The drawing enjoyed a widespread and influential afterlife. It was copied by Michelangelo's assistants and adapted by artists such as Lavinia Fontana.

Acknowledging that the Kober painting could well have been a manifestation of this "widespread...afterlife" might have turned the Times' long story into a non-story.

A more interesting mystery, which Christiansen solved for me, is why the Met recently bought an overlooked painting by Corrado Giaquinto. It was snapped up by the Met (presumably at a bargain price) after it failed to sell at Sotheby's, New York, on Jan. 27 (at the same old masters auction where the Met more famously bought Perino del Vaga's The Holy Family with the Infant Saint John the Baptist for $2 million).

Everyone else had regarded the Giaquinto as a wreck. Here it is (as pictured in Sotheby's online catalogue), greatly in need of cleaning:


Giaquinto, "Medea Rejuvenating Aeson," estimated at $100,000-150,000, unsold at Sotheby's Jan. 27 auction

And here's a blown-up detail (from the upper right) that shows the compromised condition of the paint surface:



"It looked like a piece of brown wrapping paper," Keith told me during a recent chat. Although it was correctly catalogued as a tapestry design for the Spanish royal court in Madrid, no bidder would touch it. But Michael Gallagher, the Met's chief paintings conservator, told the curator that he thought this invalid could be nursed back to health. (Gallagher has recently been in the news for his ministrations to two works by Velázquez---Philip IV and Portrait of a Man---as well as The Torment of St. Anthony, a painting now owned by the Kimbell Museum, which Christiansen attributed to the very young Michelangelo.)

When I discussed the Giaquinto with Christiansen last month, the restoration was in progress, and a scholarly article about the painting and its treatment was envisioned.

While the Giaquinto acquisition was unremarked (as far as I can tell) by the local press, French blogger Didier Rykner, in his Art Tribune, reported on this and several other acquisitions that occurred during what seems to have been an old masters shopping spree by the Met.

The painting is now listed in the Met's online collections catalogue. Its colors appear to be more vibrant than in the auction catalogue, but the contrasts between light and dark passages seem jarring (although it's hard to judge from a photograph):



A conservation exhibition, I presume, may be in the offing. Since this painting was envisioned as a design for a tapestry (which was "probably never produced," according to the Met), might the museum's director and former tapestry curator, Thomas Campbell, provide some scholarly input?