Is that a Michelangelo you see before you? Could be.
News out of the Italian art history community this week is that a marble tondo depicting a bearded man is a portrait (possibly even a self-portrait) of Michelangelo. The tondo, or circle, is 14 inches in diameter and shows a man in three-quarter profile. It has been dated to about 1545.
The celebrated artist whose last name has come down to us as Buonarroti lived from 1475 to 1564, so he was definitely alive when this tondo was completed. That's the first clue.
Another fine clue is that the marble used to create the tondo in question came from the same place as that used to create the famed tomb of Pope Julius II — from the Polvaccio quarry in Carrara, in northwest Tuscany. Julius, of course, was the pope who commissioned Michelangelo to build a tomb for the emperor, then told him to put that on hold and get on with painting the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel.
Julius wanted such a massive tomb and Michelangelo wanted such a massive building project that the tomb wasn't finished in the pope's lifetime. Indeed, Michelangelo continued work on it off and on for 40 years, so he must have had some marble left over with which to create the tondo in question. And the dating of the tondo to about 1545 is consistent with the cessation of work on Julius's tomb (1545).
The fresh news was from the director of the Museo Ideale, in Vinci, who corroborated an assertion made by a noted Michelangelo scholar back in 1999 and affirmed by another leading art historian not long ago. Some art historians even think that the artist intended the tondo to appear in the tomb, alongside other massive statuary, such as the celebrated Moses.
This is news because portraits (self- or otherwise) of Michelangelo are a bit on the rare side. If this is indeed one of those, it's a rather good one, capturing a moment in the existence of a man who was larger than life.
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