Just to engage with your “12 year old to produce by yourself” , here are some examples of art made by Picasso in his early teens to mid teens.

It’s absolutely possible to be that good. Especially in the middle ages / early renaissance with the work you did for guilds and working for masters as an apprentice.

At eleven years old: https://www.pablo-ruiz-picasso.net/work-3939.php

At fourteen at his sisters wedding: https://www.pablo-ruiz-picasso.net/work-9.php

At fifteen https://www.pablo-ruiz-picasso.net/work-11.php

I don't have an opinion on whether the attribution is correct, but I don't think the complexity of the composition is a strong argument against it considering the artist was copying the engraving by Schongauer exactly (maybe even painting on top of it?) which takes a lot of the complexity out of it.

You might be right but the gallery owner has probably learnt that disputing the authenticity of his pieces with walk in punters rarely leads to a fruitful discussion

It seems unbelievable that this is the first time the child ever picked up a paintbrush and applied paint to a surface.

It's probably more like: this is the first "published" final painting he ever did, after doing hundreds of other practice paintings/sketches that don't "count"

Also on Wikimedia at various resolutions

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Michelangelo_Buonarroti_-...

I've cropped that little blue sailing ship at the bottom of the canvas to make a wallpaper.

Jesus Christ, you can see he was going to be an unusual artist by the way he focused on that gaping demon butthole.

Edit: the butthole is in the original engraving his painting is based on, so not his own vision, fortunately I guess.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Temptation_of_St_Anthony_(...

He hated painting the Sistine Chapel ceiling because he saw himself primarily as a sculptor. You can read some of the graphic language he used to describe his perspective of having to do it. Also, he was constantly in pain and would go temporarily blind from holding his head in certain positions for hours at a time.

my father made reading The Agony and The Ecstasy a requirement to go to Italy when I was a sophomore in high school. It's a thick tome, but a great read if you're a curious kid.

as the others said Michelangelo hated doing that painting. He's a very tragic, albeit heroic to me, man. I'd recommend that book if you're at all fascinated by him.

St Anthony was alive in the high middle ages. So not a biblical figure. Much closer to the artists own time.

Edit: as below a more famous and earlier St Anthony was indeed much closer to the time of the gospels

This painting is a masterstudy of Schongauer's engraving "Saint Anthony Tormented by Demons". If you look closely you can see how its a study but not a 1:1 copy, but aside from some color and light all of this "style" was michaelangelo copying Schongauer as he learned.

Fun fact ! Michelangelo hated doing the ceiling thing.

https://www.dutchfinepaintings.com/michelangelos-sistine-cha...

Yes probably first known work. The salient point though is that he did this at 12.

and also keep in mind, you probably make many sketches before putting brush to canvas...

"As a young boy, Michelangelo was sent to the city of Florence to study grammar under the Humanist Francesco da Urbino.[13][16][d] Michelangelo showed no interest in his schooling, preferring to copy paintings from churches and seek the company of other painters."

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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michelangelo#Early_life_and_ca...

It seems like this painting would be from his time at Urbino's grammar school. His first apprenticeship started when he was 13. You might expect a renaissance artist to do a lot of work on their master's paintings (detail work, etc.) before ever putting their own name to a canvas, but this is, apparently, Michelangelo doing his own thing before ever being apprenticed.

So, while he likely did paint things before this that didn't survive, it's pretty amazing that this is the work of a kid who has yet to be apprenticed and is just pursuing it on his own with nothing more than the advice of people he was hanging out with.

I assume by "painting" they mean something akin to "published work" but it very well could just be his earliest "known work".

No. He was an apprentice to a master which would have shown him tools and techniques.

At that time kids spent their lives training under other masters. By this time he's been painting and assisting full time for many years already.

Still impressive of course, but remember that it's not straightforward to compare how things are today with other time periods.

>... it became "the only painting by Michelangelo located anywhere in the Americas, and also just one of four easel paintings attributed to him throughout his entire career," during most of which he disparaged oil painting itself.

Ft Worth hits above it's weight WRT high art. The Kimbell, the Modern, the Amon Carter... all world class. (And if you're an architecture nut, the main Kimbell building was designed by Louis I. Kahn and is a delight to wander around in.) The local symphony is better than you would expect, given the city's size.

I have too many memories of dead friends and family to want to live in Fort Worth, but if you get a job offer in Tarrant County, it's not just pickup-trucks, guns and C&W clones trying to be extras on Landman. (And pickup-trucks and C&W clones aren't as bad as you might think. And I lived there for decades and was, surprisingly, shot when visiting a different city.)

The Torlonia collection was recently in Chicago and had some truly stunning pieces. The Ostia relief was tucked away in a corner and I nearly missed it. The traveling exhibition is well worth seeing for anyone remotely interested in ancient history.

The Caravaggio was incredible too.

I would say they still do this... it's just called "fan art" now.

A certain type of modern day artist voraciously consumes art in order to develop its taste, skill and style. More so than ever in history.

The names of these artists are less traditional, however, eg Nano Banana.

His painting is based on a prior work, an engraving by Martin Schongauer ... "The Temptation of St Anthony" ... see here https://www.wikiart.org/en/martin-schongauer/the-temptation-... ...

So he was re-rendering a religious folk story.

Seriously. Both because of the talent but also because wtf Mikey don't you want to draw a knight in shining armor or a cow or something.

This sounds like a strongly held opinion with no evidence.

Many of the comments here are expressing disbelief that this could have been created by a 12 year old, but people fail to recognize that, not only did Michelangelo have tremendous natural talent, but grow up in a world where, as a child, he was allowed to spend enormous amounts of his time and energy studying with professional artists.

He wasn't being dropped off a school at 7am, squirming in a chair until 3pm, playing video games before dinner and then doing homework until bed all while squeezing in a bit of time for sketching.

The vast majority of people probably benefit more from our current structure, but it does make it much less likely to have "genius" of the type we see in Michelangelo, Mozart, etc.

Contrapoint is that you do not need to pressure kid ever since they are 5 for them to be good artist as adults.

And the second point ... why should parents to do that with their random kid before that kid even shown interest? It is not like art represented some kind of career or lifetime security or even happiness in life.

Can you recommend any reading for that methodology ? Sounds intuitively correct, but would love to get more context

Too right! There must have been dozens of works before that one.

yeah it’s more like the earliest one that was worth preserving or considering “a finished piece” however that worked back then, the first shippable code

The first presupposition behind this painting is that Man is fallen. That means we have a predisposition to sin, that is to say, to voluntarily choose to do what we should not - in short, sin is an abuse of free will, which can only be licitly used to choose the good. A person might feel the temptation to do something he should not. We are enticed. It seems to promise happiness. "I could have X, if I only did this evil thing Y." Do we give in? Do we indulge? When we do, we have sinned. We have lost the spiritual battle. Ultimately, the smoke evaporates, the mirrors crumble, and we are left with empty hands and the damage done, above all to ourselves.

Then, there is the fallenness of some angels, the demons, immaterial beings of various species of superior intellect and power who - while on a short leash - are still able to act on fallen men in malicious ways to lead them toward self-destruction. This "short leash" should be expanded. If God did not constrain the power of the demons, it is anyone's guess the devastation of the universe they could wreak. But since God is master of all creation, even the demons are pressed into the service of the good, but instrumentally. Even evil is made to further the divine plan. Thus, God permits the demonic assaults on St. Anthony as a kind of spiritual training for him, part of which involves developing a greater surrender of self to God.

Now, someone who doesn't believe in demons won't find demonic activity and role in human sin compelling. I suspect that is the motivation behind your question. Someone who doesn't can at least recognize the struggle with various temptations and the struggle of the moral life. In that sense, if these are the sorts of things you struggle with, then you may find the image you have in mind helpful. But, of course, to know how one should act and choose, one should also know where one is going. St. Anthony knew his destination, and this destination is not arbitrary. That's what he suffered for and a large part of the reason how he came to know how to move in that direction and why he was able to bear it all.

Yeah… was not really expecting that!

I sure could find some experts for hire to drive up the price of my cultural artifact.

Without anyone wanting to buy this and spend resources on that, finding claims to proof the contrary might be a quite futile task.

The whole board of the Museum is non-experts. Nobody has any interest in devaluing that expense.

In that era even attributing works definively to a single artist and not a school or workshop just feels a bit off.

https://kimbellart.org/content/nuestro-kimbell

absurdly well citing reddit comment on the provenance:

https://www.reddit.com/r/museum/comments/x6k3mm/comment/in89...

It's impressive that he did it at 12, but like you said, he had years of focused practice under his belt before he did this one. Anyone can do this level of work - they just need to actually learn it. It doesn't require someone be born with talent.

Articles like this contribute towards the gatekeeping feeling people get about the arts in my opinion.

You shouldn’t be getting downvoted. If people would read the article they’d see it’s not an original.

Most of human history we didn't have electronic distraction devices and we have one Michelangelo; the answer is probably not as many as the question implies.

I'm not educated in painting but will just assume it's similar to music and someone like Mozart. I genuinely believe you wouldn't get as many as you'd imagine. There were few people making music at that time and only a small portion of the population ever had the chance to listen to it (.5-1% around 1750, 5-10% around 1850). We didn't get 10x the number of Mozarts. We got some people who were as talented as him for sure and pushed boundaries and some got famous for it We also got many talented people who wrote very great music which doesn't get played at all anymore, many of those didn't push the boundaries.

Even with people like Beethoven who're seen as disruptors and wildly popular by general audiences there were talented disruptors at the time who actually did things he's 'known' for and they don't get played at all. Bach himself had largely fallen into obscurity for +-100 years. There's probably only so many Michelangelos or Mozarts people can be taught about in middle school, high school, university.... I believe it's more about the institutions that basically allowed someone like mozart or michelangelo some kinda 'patronage oligopoly', something which barely exists these days. Free market didn't really exist here well into the 1800s, even then you still had gatekeepers. In the end history picked a few winners very loosely related to their 'musical worth'.

The same as any other century. The whole point of Michelangelo is that he went beyond the limits of his time. To be the Michelangelo of today you need to go beyond the limits/tastes of today, not of Michelangelo's time. And the Michelangelo of today would not be identifiable in any way with Michelangelo given where modern art ended up in terms of style.

It's like that quote about it taking Picasso 4 years to learn to paint like Raphael but a lifetime to learn how to paint like a child.

Or think of it this way: Your average math PhD today is way better at math than Galois, Bernoulli, Gauss, etc. But they are nowhere near them because the field moved into a different stratosphere entirely.

I don't think there is that significant amount of artists that do not draw because entertainment. Artist communities online are doing pretty fine. There might not be enough money for all of them, but drawing is still popular enough hobby.

Children today are expected to go to school and get a well rounded education. They don’t start specializing as apprentice to some master at an early age

Also consider the tools and materials available today. I don't know much about Michelangelo, but I imagine people's opportunity for sheer iteration (due to availability of qualitys pens, pappers, ink etc) is magnitudes higher (and cheaper) today.

They are busy making other stuff. Its OK if you don't appreciate their work.

Not many at all. In the past 100 years there have been a staggering number of people alive, vastly more than in the 13th century. Comparatively very few of them had electronic distraction devices. Adding some small faction additional people-without-electronics-hours won't move the needle.

Do we want more Michelangelos?

They're making art all around you. Some of them are extraordinarily famous.

Movies, video games, music.

There are plenty, but the value of Michelangelo’s brand is in its’ scarcity.

It isn't an original work, but actually a painted version of a famous engraving by Martin Schongauer.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Temptation_of_St_Anthony_(...

At this point in his life, Michaelangelo was probably apprenticed to Ghirlandaio. This wasn't a freeform doodle, but likely something of a homework assignment. It was common for young artists to be given famous works to copy, or common religious scenes to remake.

It looks like the figure they're attacking is meant to be St Anthony, rather than God.

As the article says, it's based on Schongauer's The Temptation of St. Anthony. There's even a version by Salvador Dali.

It's just a reflection of his education. Even today, many children are raised with religious education that includes stories of demons attacking people. Kids love scary stuff; monsters, battle, etc.

It makes me wonder what his home environment was like where he could put such detail into a painting. Something like that isn't made in an afternoon or weekend; and it definitely requires parents to provide resources and moral support.

Demons look like that in Medieval and Renaissance paintings. "Red dude with horns" didn't become the standard depiction of demons until much later.

12 years old is pretty old for a kid. I remember trying to reason through my grandparents’ religious beliefs at or before age 9, and they had taught me about lots of different demons, gods, etc.