Michelangelo — The Torment of Saint Anthony (c. 1487)

The earliest painting attributed to Michelangelo, made when he was twelve or thirteen years old and still a pupil in Domenico Ghirlandaio's Florentine workshop.

The subject comes from the Golden Legend: Saint Anthony, assailed in the desert, is carried into the air by a swarm of demons that claw at his habit, drag his beard and beat about his head. The boy took his composition from Martin Schongauer's celebrated engraving of the same scene, but he did not simply copy it. Where the German printmaker left the background empty, Michelangelo set the struggle above a river valley and low rocks, and he gave the demons colour — scales, fins, feathers, horned and beaked heads. Vasari and Condivi both tell the story that he went to the fish market to study how such surfaces catch the light.

The panel passed through a New York sale in 2008 and a long technical examination at the Metropolitan Museum of Art before entering the Kimbell Art Museum, where it hangs today. The attribution to Michelangelo is widely accepted, though not unanimously.

• Artist: attributed to Michelangelo Buonarroti (1475–1564)
• Date: c. 1487–1488
• Original: tempera and oil on panel, 47 × 35 cm, Kimbell Art Museum, Fort Worth
• Museum-quality reproduction on fine art paper

Part of our medieval and knightly collection — see also our digital art book Knight, Death and the Devil.