u/_animaLux_

This is Michelangelo's earliest surviving work, something he painted when he was only twelve or thirteen years old. I want to be sure you can feel the energy of it. Imagine you are floating in a strange, empty sky, because that’s where this story begins. The painting is a small panel, but it holds a whole world of chaos.

At the center of it all you see a monk suspended in the air, an Egyptian hermit-saint named Anthony the Great. The early Christian texts, like the "Golden Legend," tell of how he lived deep in the desert, and how, as a test of his faith, he was lifted into the air by a vision and set upon by a legion of devils. You can see him there, high above the ground, but his face is completely calm, though. His gaze is turned away from the chaos around him, looking somewhere else entirely.

And what a chaos it is. From every side, a swarm of grotesque, hybrid creatures claws and pulls at him. There must be nine or ten of these beasts, all snouts, claws, scales, and leathery wings. Each one of them is a separate invention. One of them, a spiny, fish-like monster with silvery scales, holds on to the saint from above, swinging a fiery club. The artist actually paid close attention to the fish market to study their coloring and the texture of their scales to make these demons feel weirdly real. There’s a beaked creature with a body of fiery, sulfurous colors, and others with wings that look like they belong to a dragon.

What I find so moving is how Michelangelo changed the scene from the engraving he was copying. The German artist Martin Schongauer had made a famous print of this same subject, but Michelangelo took it and made it his own. He set it in the familiar hills of the Arno River Valley in Tuscany, the only landscape he really knew. You can see a river winding toward a distant blue mountain, and a little boat carrying people on their daily business.

You can’t help but think of the boy who painted this. The story goes that Michelangelo saw this engraving and, wanting to test his skills, borrowed some paint and brushes from his older friend, Francesco Granacci, and set to work in his own room. The artist’s own biographers later told how he went to the local market to buy fish so he could study their strange colors and fins to make his demons look more frighteningly alive. That dedication and desire to look at the real, fishy world and turn it into something terrifying, is the mark of an artist who was already seeing things differently.

If you find yourself in Fort Worth, Texas, you can actually go see this painting at the Kimbell Art Museum. I think it's a painting that holds a secret: that sometimes the greatest art begins not with grand plans, but with a young person’s determination to make a monster look alive.

You can support this write-up with a small coffee, and I will pour that energy right back into the next deep dive. https://buymeacoffee.com/pmamtraveller