This Study of Jupiter represents one of the most exciting old master discoveries to have been made in recent decades, and is an important addition to the small group of extant drawings by Michelangelo. Acquired at auction in Paris over thirty years ago as the work of an anonymous hand, this Study of Jupiter is now held by many leading scholars to be the Renaissance master’s earliest known drawing, completed shortly after the Kimbell Museum’s Torment of Saint Anthony.

The sketch, in two tones of brown ink, depicts the profile of a bearded man wearing a toga, seated and facing left, looking downward. He reaches forward with his right hand and holds a staff or sceptre in his left, which rests on his lap; his feet are bare, the right in profile while the left points out towards the viewer. The antique throne on which he sits features ornamental carved arms with lyre-shaped volutes, and a decorative central section with E-shaped mouldings to either side of an animal skull.

The figure itself is based on a fragment of a Roman marble, the lower half of a Jupiter Enthroned (1st – 2nd c CE). Due to the distinctive stylistic elements of the draftsmanship, since the discovery of the drawing there has been a wide scholarly consensus that the author was a young apprentice or assistant working in the studio of Domenico and Davide Ghirlandaio in late quattrocento Florence, as Michelangelo was. There, he studied alongside other talented apprentices, honing his skills and beginning to develop his own identifiable, sculptural style of drawing. At this time, Michelangelo was also benefitting from the protection and patronage of Lorenzo de’Medici, who facilitated his access to antique sculpture and encouraged his ambition. Based on comparisons to other early drawings, and the telling presence of the distinctive two tones of ink, many leading scholars in the field, including Paul Joannides, Timothy Clifford, Zoltán Kárpáti, Miles Chappell, and David Ekserdjian, have argued that this drawing is the earliest known work on paper by the young Michelangelo.

The Jupiter Enthroned:

The figure in this drawing is based on a fragment of a colossal Roman marble of Jupiter Enthroned, which was in the collection of the collector-dealer Giovanni Ciampolini (d. 1505) in Rome at the end of the 15th Century. This marble, which was later restored with the addition of the upper body and head of Jupiter, is now in the National Archaeological Museum in Naples.

When Ghirlandaio was engaged in painting the Life of the Virgin cycle in the church of Santa Maria Novella in Florence, Michelangelo was introduced to Lorenzo de’Medici, known as Il Magnifico, possibly through his friendship with a fellow apprentice, Francesco Granacci. The introduction proved valuable to Michelangelo, whom Lorenzo permitted to sketch from his collection of antique sculpture at his residence near San Marco. Michelangelo went to live with Lorenzo’s family in 1490, and there he would have met a number of influential figures: the sculptor Bertoldo di Giovanni, who had been Donatello’s assistant and looked after Lorenzo’s collection; Angelo Poliziano, Lorenzo’s children’s tutor, a humanist, poet, and collector of antiques; and Giovanni Ciampolini, an early collector of Roman antiquities, among them Jupiter Enthroned.

The survival of other contemporaneous drawings of Jupiter Enthroned is evidence of the wider fascination with recently-excavated ancient sculpture, as well as of the high regard for this fragment in particular held by artists of the Florentine school. Another example from this period, noted by Sir Timothy Clifford in his discussion of the drawing, is the so-called Codex Escurialensis, dated circa or after 1491, for which an attribution to Baccio Pontelli has been suggested. In the 16th Century, the marble was sketched by the Dutch artist Maerten van Heemskerck (1498 – 1574) when it was in the collection of Cardinal Giulio de’Medici at the Villa Madama in Rome, after it had been restored with a replacement for the figure’s missing torso and upper body.

Michelangelo’s drawing is not a straightforward copy of the Jupiter Enthroned, but rather presents some distinct differences. As David Ekserdjian noted, the position of the right foot, which is raised upwards from the heel in the marble, is laid on the footstall in Michelangelo’s study. In addition, the folds of drapery between the figure’s legs are more squared off than they appear in the marble. The upper half of the drawing is evidently an invention, which may account for the detailed description of the lower half the body, which tails off into an altogether briefer study of the face and right hand.

In his discussion of the Study of Jupiter, David Ekserdjian suggested that Michelangelo was not working from the marble but instead was working from another, intermediary, drawing. This would be in line with Florentine quattrocento workshop practice, where apprentices would copy drawings by their master to further their craft. As Clifford has pointed out, the ultimate source for the drawing, the marble fragment of Enthroned Jupiter, was in Rome at the time, and Ghirlandaio is known to have travelled to Rome regularly to study recently excavated marbles. In the 1568 edition of his Lives, Vasari explained how Michelangelo learned from his study of drawings by Ghirlandaio: ‘At this time Michelangelo had formed a friendship with Francesco Granacci, who, likewise a lad, had placed himself with Domenico Ghirlandaio in order to learn the art of painting: wherefore Granacci, loving Michelangelo, and perceiving that he was much inclined to design, supplied him daily with drawings by Ghirlandaio, who at that time was reputed to be one of the best masters that there were not only in Florence, but throughout all Italy.’

It is believed that it was Granacci who first introduced Michelangelo to the Ghirlandaio studio and motivated him to apply for an apprenticeship. This would also account for the retention of certain Ghirlandaio-esque details in this drawing, such as the teardrop shapes of the folds. As Zoltán Kárpáti reminds us in the catalogue of the recent Michelangelo exhibition in Budapest, Michelangelo was a master copyist who was able to mimic Ghirlandaio’s technique from his early days as an apprentice.

Ghirlandaio’s workshop:

When the current owner acquired the drawing over three decades ago, nothing was known of its history and it was unknown to scholarship. Initial research by scholars confirmed that the work originated in the studio of Domenico Ghirlandaio. The presence of the teardrop shapes of the folds led Nicholas Turner, formerly Deputy Keeper in the Department of Prints and Drawings at the British Museum and an expert in Italian Renaissance drawings, to suggest an attribution to Domenico Ghirlandaio himself. This attributed was rejected by Chris Fischer, author of Fra Bartolommeo: Master Draughtsman of the High Renaissance, who also dismissed Everett Fahy’s attribution of the drawing to Fra Bartolommeo, an artist who, like Michelangelo, spent a period of time working in Ghirlandaio’s studio. Other scholars convinced that the drawing was made by an artist working in Ghirlandiao’s studio included Francis Ames-Lewis, Jean Cadogan and Michael Hirst.

Consensus around Michelangelo:

The connection of the drawing to the early work of Michelangelo was first made by Miles Chappell, an expert on Florentine drawings of 15th and 16th Centuries. Following extensive research, the drawing was first published as a work by the young Michelangelo in 2019 in the catalogue accompanying the Budapest Museum exhibition Triumph of the Body: Michelangelo and Sixteenth-Century Italian draughtsmanship. This research was supported by Paul Joannides, who catalogued the drawings by Michelangelo in the Louvre, the Ashmolean Museum, Oxford, and published the drawings by Michelangelo in the Royal Collection for an exhibition in the National Gallery of Art, Washington. Joannides (private communication, October 2015) noted the astonishing fluency with which the quotation from the antique is fused with an upper body and gesture from the artist’s invention, characteristic of the way Michelangelo worked and developed at this period. Subsequently, David Ekserdijan concurred with these findings.

The attribution to Michelangelo is based on a number of factors, above all the fact that the subject, materials and style of draughtsmanship all accord with what we know of Michelangelo’s early development. The drawing features two tones of brown ink: this was a technique Michelangelo often used, but not one that we ever see in drawings by Ghirlandaio himself. The reason for this technique is not known, but it may be that Michelangelo was experimenting with means of achieving a broader range of tonality in his drawings; indeed, at a later point we do see him employing mid-tone paper with white heightening. It was not, however, a technique used to revise or edit his drawings, as he employed the two tones from the outset, rather than using the darker ink to correct passages drawn originally in the lighter one.

Joannides, Clifford and Ekserdijan have suggested Michelangelo’s Study of Jupiter is his earliest extant work on paper, dating to around 1490. Prior to the discovery of the present drawing, the earliest known work accepted by scholars is a Study of two figures, after Giotto today in the Louvre, dating to circa 1490-92. Of all the known drawings by Michelangelo, the Louvre one is the closest, stylistically speaking, to Ghirlandaio himself, when the lessons of his apprenticeship were most strongly felt and expressed. Clifford describes the ‘mellifluous flow and flutter of draperies’ from Ghirlandaio’s own hand, observing: ‘They are caught and tossed into curls, pools, and troughs, the latter often assuming a “teardrop” form.’ This he compares this to Michelangelo’s weightier, more solid, and overall more sculptural handling of the ink medium in his figural drawings. As Clifford observes, the present drawing still features those ‘teardrop’-shaped folds, due to its being the earliest of the group. He does, however, point to the drapery gathered around the stomach of the figure leaning forward in the Louvre drawing, which he likens to the bunched and gathered folds of material in Jupiter’s toga in the present example, described using a network of hatching.

Slightly later still, dated circa 1492-93, is the Male figure after Masaccio now in Munich. By considering the progression from our drawing, through the Louvre example and to the Munich drawing, we can see how Michelangelo’s hatching technique is becoming more confident within even this brief period of time. Clifford observes the increasing weightiness and solidity, developed as Michelangelo begins to understand carving and modelling alongside his study of draughtsmanship and painting. The description of the head of the figure, its profile described in lively contours, with the pen evidently pressing firmly in some moments and lightly in others, is very similar to that seen in our drawing. Similar, too, are the bolder dash of ink beneath the nose, and the v-shape of the eye socket in profile, and the rounded, slightly bulbous chin. A wavering line describes the contours of the sleeves while the hatching runs parallel to the arm as well as cross-wise, to add depth and dimension.

Further comparisons:

A drawing of Three Standing Men in the Albertina, Vienna, depicts three upright figures in cloaks likely copied from a scene in Masaccio's destroyed fresco in the cloister garth of Santa Maria del Carmine, Florence. It is dated to circa 1492-96, at which point Michelangelo is moving even further away from Ghirlandaio, and the hatching used to describe the folds in the cloaks is becoming denser and more complex, with multiple layers of parallel strokes running at angles to each other. These figures are once again shown in profile, and, while the anatomy is more confident, certain stylistic hallmarks remain: the v-shaped eye sockets, for instance, or, as Clifford notes in relation to the Louvre and Munich drawings, the slightly rounded chins. Scholars have also noted certain weaknesses in the drawing, typical of a young artist working on his craft, seen for example in the flat and only faintly sketched-in foot of the figure at the back. The hands, notoriously difficult to master, are notably absent.

The most recent drawing from this period to come to light is another copy after a Masaccio fresco: this time, an illustration of the life of Saint Peter in the Brancacci chapel, which was sold at Christie’s in 2022. This drawing was reworked by Michelangelo at a later date using a brush and ink, but the network of hatching that forms the robes of the figures flanking the central nude can be compared to that seen in our drawing. As with all these early drawings, Michelangelo's method of hatching is comparable to his later chiselling of stone in the way the pen seemingly jabs at the surface of the paper, and it is consistently denser and more highly worked than the hatching we see in drawings by Ghirlandaio himself.

Stylistic Characteristics:

When the drawing was discovered in 1989, it was conserved by André Le Plat, previously head of conservation at the Cabinet du dessin in the Louvre. Le Plat observed that the drawing had been cut down from a larger sheet, probably one that included other studies, and that the irregular right-hand edge showed evidence of tearing which suggested that there had been some issues with humidity in the drawing’s history. In his opinion, the drawing would originally have been stronger and denser in feel, and this is evident in comparison with some of the other studies by Michelangelo from the 1490s, in which the density of the cross-hatching is more pronounced. However, as Clifford noted, there are close parallels between the slightly looser method of cross-hatching in the present drawing and the hatching used in the figure leaning over in the Louvre drawing, particularly on the right arm and in the curve where the arm meets the back.

A particularly interesting feature of the Study of Jupiter is the depiction of the left hand, which is in many ways unconvincing and awkward. This hand was an invention of the artist, and unlike the lower half of the drawing, not copied from a prior model. Michelangelo was known to have been more preoccupied with the monumentality of his figures than he was with details of the extremities, as noted by Jean Cadogan, who observed that ‘Michelangelo was not interested in the detailed drawing of hands and heads when copying after the antique and Renaissance masters. His principal interest was rendering volume, mass and the monumentality of his subjects. I think that this is evident when you look at all his copies after Renaissance masters.’

It was only later that Michelangelo became interested, or indeed obsessive, in his study of anatomy, and in these early drawings there is a consistent weakness in the hands and feet, typical of an artist without significant experience. In the Louvre drawing of a comparable date, the figure bending over is shown with a hesitant and flaccid hand, with its heavier, darker outline suggestive of an attempt to rework and refine it, with limited success. Keith Christiansen has also drawn our attention to this feature, writing: ‘The poorly drawn and bluntly modelled hand of the bent over figure is an example of the clumsy effect the young Michelangelo was capable of producing, and the anatomical misunderstandings in describing the neck, wrists and heads of the standing figures are no less indicative of a still inexperienced artist. At the same time there is a consistent effort towards monumentality.’ (K. Christiansen & M. Gallagher, ‘Michelangelo’s First Painting’, in Nuovi Studi, Rivista di Arte Antica e Moderna, Florence, vol. 15, 2009, Anno XIV, pp. 7-46.) We can also consider the awkward, pointing gesture of the figure in the Munich drawing.

Michelangelo in Ghirlandaio’s studio:

Michelangelo was by every measure a precocious talent, but he did not appear as a fully mature artist, as records of his apprenticeship demonstrate. He began his career in the studio or Domenico and Davide Ghirlandaio around the age of 12, running errands for the master and apprentices. The following year, he was enrolled as an apprentice himself for a period of three years, although he remained for only two. Vasari observed the young artist’s rapid progress, writing: ‘The way Michelangelo’s talents and character developed astonished Domenico, who saw him doing things quite out of the ordinary for boys his age and not only surpassing his many other pupils, but also very often rivalling the achievements of the master himself.’ Not only was he quick to progress, but Michelangelo was conscious – particularly at the end of his life – of the myth of his own genius, which he sought to protect and perpetuate. According to Vasari, it was for this reason that, ‘Just before his death, [Michelangelo] burned a large number of his own drawings, sketches and cartoons to prevent anyone from seeing the labours he endured or the ways he tested his genius, for fear that he might seem less than perfect.’

Although Vasari wrote to dispel the legend of Michelangelo the autodidact, other authors perpetuated it, presumably on the word of Michelangelo himself. One such author was the early biographer Ascanio Condivi, who published his Life of Michelangelo Buonarroti in 1553, three years after the first edition of Vasari’s Lives appeared. This, unlike Vasari’s text, was an authorised biography overseen and largely dictated by Michelangelo himself. Condivi writes, for instance: ‘I am told that Domenico’s son attributes the excellence and divinità of Michelangelo to a great extent to his father’s teaching, whereas he gave him no help whatsoever.’ In an effort to dispel the myth, Vasari published, in the second edition of the Lives (1568), the contract of apprenticeship drawn up between Domenico Ghirlandaio and Michelangelo’s father, Ludovico, signed on 1 April 1488 with the stated intent being to tutor Michelangelo in the art of painting (‘a imparare a dipingere’).

It was through Ghirlandaio’s instruction that Michelangelo came to appreciate, copy and study the work of trecento masters Giotto and Masaccio, whose painted figures communicate a sense of weightiness and solidity that contrasts against the ethereal lightness of the competing style at the time, International Gothic. Ghirlandaio’s work also incorporated classical details and architecture, the product of his study of Roman antiquities, and these preferences would have been passed on to his apprentices.

Conclusion:

According to certain estimates, only around 600 drawings survive from the entirety of Michelangelo’s career (see Charles de Tolnay’s Corpus (1975-80), with additions and deletions). Compare this to, for instance, the 4,000 or so drawings by Leonardo, or the 450 that remain from Raphael’s relatively short life. Why are there so few? Beyond the obvious fact that drawings are fragile by nature to begin with, and were used and re-used as tools of the workshop rather than stored carefully with an eye to preservation, we have Michelangelo himself to hold accountable. Numerous reports confirm that Michelangelo ordered burnt, or burned himself, piles of his drawings towards the end of his life. In February 1518, Michelangelo’s friend in Rome Leonardo Sellaio stated that Michelangelo instructed him to burn the chartoni that remained in the house, and the scholar Pietro Aretino wrote to Michelangelo at least twice from Venice, in 1538 and again in 1546, requesting any drawings that the artist might otherwise burn. Michelangelo’s nephew, also called Leonardo, recalled that, at the end of his life, Michelangelo burned practically all the drawings that remained in his studio in Rome in two enormous bonfires. According to Vasari, he was informed after Michelangelo’s death by Daniele da Volterra that only two drawings remained in the house, both highly finished examples of the type most prized by collectors; these were both presented to Vasari’s patron, Cosimo de’Medici.

Why did Michelangelo destroy his drawings? He could not have thought them useless, as, by the end of Michelangelo’s lifetime, drawings were beginning to be prized and collected. As mentioned previously, Vasari theorised that Michelangelo sought to destroy any evidence of the immense labour that went into his work, to lend credence to the notion that he emerged a fully-formed genius. This would certainly explain why so few examples remain, particularly from Michelangelo’s earliest years. But, as Hugo Chapman explains, we must also consider how secretive the artist was, and how jealously he guarded his ideas and innovations. Despite his success Michelangelo had no real studio for the instruction of apprentices, and certainly no close associates. Unlike, for instance, Raphael, who formed a successful partnership with the engraver Marcantonio Raimondi to print and disseminate his compositions, Michelangelo never authorised the printing of his works, fearing that others would steal his ideas. The burning of his drawings, therefore, would prevent them from being taken and used by other artists – a notion he seemingly could not bear, even if it were to happen after his death.

It was not typical for artists to sign drawings, which were considered tools rather than finished works in their own right, so attribution relies on subjective analysis and becomes a more complex question the more important an artist is – and the greater number of scholarly opinions there are to consider. What drawings by Michelangelo – including the Jupiter – do share is a distinct ‘vibrancy of line’, as it has been described: Michelangelo not only varied one pen mark from another, but he changed the character of the mark within the space of a single line.