Michelangelo's The Torment of St. Anthony

Michelangelo's first known painting is The Torment of St. Anthony, which is on display at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York through September 7, 2009.

He was 12 or 13 years old when he painted it, which goes to show you that the kinds of things that intrigue 12 year old boys haven't changed much in the last 500 years.

NY Times slide show with details of Michelangelo's The Torment of St. Anthony

Mark Frauenfelder is the founder of Boing Boing and the editor-in-chief of MAKE and Cool Tools. Twitter: @frauenfelder. Come and hear Mark speak at the ALA conference in Chicago on July 1.

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Takuan

w: “It shows the common medieval subject, included in the Golden Legend and other sources, of Saint Anthony being assailed in the desert by demons, whose temptations he resisted; the Temptation of St Anthony (or “Trial”) is the more common name of the subject. But this composition shows a later episode where St Anthony, normally flown about the desert supported by angels, was ambushed in mid-air by devils.[3]“
Anonymous

I wasn’t thinking about education but rather that kids that age in Michelangelo’s time were by and large functioning as adults with lives and responsibility that outpaces many modern people in their 20-30′s. Again, I’m not idealizing his time or any other, just wondering out loud about how modern notions of childhood might have played on the developing Michelangelo. And yeah, it is a pointless thought experiment which doesn’t even factor in things like class, privilege, etc but this is the internet what did you expect?
- Antinous / Moderator
  
  kids that age in Michelangelo’s time were by and large functioning as adults with lives and responsibility that outpaces many modern people in their 20-30′s.
  
  In Michelangelo’s time, you wouldn’t have hit puberty until you were 17 or 18. You would have lived with your parents and grandparents and wouldn’t have had much independence until they died when you were in your 40s or 50s.
thequickbrownfox

Probably the most detailed landscape in Michelangelo’s career.

His mature works in painting display a contempt for locating his subjects in any but the most casual attribute of the picture plane.

The miserable, stunted tree at bottom left is similar to that in the Sistine Chapel.
robulus

@Anonymous

Don’t go and post a reasonable reply!!!

Can’t you just pretend to be a complete nutter? I was very happy with that comment, it took ages, and now you’ve gone and made it look all misguided and presumptuous.

If you’re just going to be reasonable and make intelligent clarifying additions to your earlier comments, no one will have any fun at all.
Anonymous

“He was 12 or 13 years old when he painted it, which goes to show you that the kinds of things that intrigue 12 year old boys haven’t changed much in the last 500 years.”

Did Michelangelo play a lot of guitar hero too?
mikerbaker

The Torment of St. Anthony was that one elusive Pokemon? Gotta catch ‘em all!
License Farm

I get to guard this sometimes. What people expect to see never seems to jibe with what they get.

It’s not very clear in this pic, but you can see one of the female demons has mandible labiae and her rectum is also the mouth of another face. Kids are hilariously gross.
clementchau

@9: The 12 years old Michelangelo hardly represents what 12-year-olds could do at that time, just as we do not use Mozart as a model of what kids could do with music in the 1760s, and just as we don’t take a spelling bee champion to represent how well kids of our time can spell.
TroofSeeker

Granted, Anthony was having a pretty rough day, but he never sat in the DMV with my sister-in-law for hours. Even the protective halo wouldn’t help much.
d8^P
Tdawwg

Adding to Anonymous@15, Michelangelo actually purchased the fish from the marketplace himself, looking for especially picturesque ones. From Vasari:

When a copper engraving by Martin of St. Anthony beaten by the devils reached Florence, Michelangelo made a pen drawing and then painted it. To counterfeit some strange forms of devils he bought fish with curiously coloured scales, and showed such ability that he won much credit and reputation.

Smart kid, that Michelangelo.
Chanttojah

I prefer Martin Schongauer version better.
You can get a print of it here:

http://shop.transmissionatelier.com/thetemptationofstanthonyantiquereligiousprint-p-11.html
Anonymous

@25 Good point. So, lets step back and take a look at what most 12 year olds of Michelangelo’s day could and did do – still seems there is pretty vast gap. Just wondering if a modern Michelangelo might not get stunted along with the rest and if there isn’t some way to help / let kids mature without stunting them AND without revisiting the perils of past times.
TharkLord

Tragically, Michelangelo was subsequently sued for copyright violation, his family fined 500 ducats, and he spent the rest of his life doing community service for the Catholic church.
Rich Keller

I’m not familiar with this work of Michaelangelo’s. I’m not surprised at all, though, that it’s after a Schongauer print. To get really good visions of Hell, you have to go north of the Alps for some reason. The Italians never did anything quite as scary as the Northern artists. Luca Signorelli comes close.

Check out some of Breughel’s “Fall of the Rebel Angels” some time. It’s like Bosch after some ergot-tainted bread.

Kids today could do this, too. It’s just that nobody has any expectaions of them, so why should they bother?
TroofSeeker

Rich- go to a county fair and look at some of the works produced by kids. Some are quite amazing, especially the CGI graphics.
I was sort of the darling of the art dept. in high school and college, but the stuff some kids are doing these days put me to shame.
leviathan

LOL at your last line! Of course the difference now is that if a kid draws something like that in school, there’s a full-blown intervention with social workers, psychologists, doctors, and the like.
glamaFez

Today a child can easily buy such demons and bring them home. They’re clogging up driveways throughout suburbia every weekend, piled on blankets and in boxes, for a quarter apiece.
noen

I see that World of Warcraft has been around a long time. I wonder what clan Michelangelo was in?
Phikus

How Boschian! I love it! I have days like this.
popnwave

Scary what talent the guy had at that age, I still can’t draw more than stick figures at 30.
OrcOnTheEndOfMyFork

@#1

Only these days, the “divine intervention” wouldn’t be over the demons, but the depiction of St. Anthony. (OMG! A favorable religious icon in school! Seize that child!)
GammaBlog

It’s a tiny painting. In person the colors are much deeper and the detail is much sharper than in this image. Went to the Met for the Bacon exhibit but this was an unexpected treat.
Brainspore

I’m going to show this to the middle school students I teach design to see if it makes them stop complaining that I ask them to draw too much.
Anonymous

I now know that Michelangelo was intrigued by boats.
Anonymous

Wondering this says about relative cultural development. Not that Michelangelo’s time represents any sort of ideal but it had a less idealized version of childhood. Perhaps if we were less adamant about stunting people’s development and maturation we’d see more of this sort of thing from 12-13 year olds today. I know we have done a lot for good for kids relative to that time but looking at the level of suffiency for a 12 year old of that time versus today it does seem we have lost something.
W. James Au

“… and then I’ll paint an arrow-shooting engine on St. Anthony’s back (pew! pew! pew!), and a bunch of swords on springs coming out of his robes everywhere stabbing them all (“Swish! Swish! Argh! Argh!”) and then glowey lines around his halo because it’s a spinning blade that… DAD DON’T COME IN I’M WORKING HERE!”
TikiHead

Well I commented already here anonymously, and don’t see it. This is from Martin Schongauer’s engraving.

http://thewholegardenwillbow.files.wordpress.com/2008/11/schongauer-martin-anthony103.jpg

Maybe young Michelangelo saw the very popular engraving, and copied its subject matter (lmost line for line). It might be the other way around, but I doubt a hugely famous engraver of the time would be cribbing work from twelve or thirteen year old boys.
Hentosz

@#8: XD

Now was this on the cover of his Trapper Keeper or on his skateboard deck?
Wirelizard

“the kinds of things that intrigue 12 year old boys haven’t changed much in the last 500 years”

Nah, there’s no nudie bits, not even badly-disguised attempts at nudie bits. (cough)notthatieverdidthat,honest…(cough)
wylkyn

I thought there was still some doubt that this particular St. Anthony painting was actually Michelangelo’s. Has there been some definitive proof uncovered lately?
Ray Drainville

I agree with Tikihead, that’s Martin Schongauer’s [fantastic] imagery. I know it well, I created a print (and a t-shirt!) as a teenager. Mark was at least right about that :)
freshacconci

#34: The nudie bits came later, when he matured as an artist. Of course, it wasn’t boobs he was particularly interested in rendering.
Anonymous

It was based on the other image by Schongauer. What made this one unique was that Michelangelo (and they have artistic proof it is his) added depth and texture to the colors of the demons, giving them fish scales, as if to base these other-worldly creatures in human reality.
I saw it a couple of weeks ago, and yes, it was a great treat to see.
Anonymous

@Aintinous

Thanks. damn, I knew it was shifting but…wow.
Anonymous

@Antinous

Can you provide a reference for puberty at 17 or 18 – I was unaware of this.
- Antinous / Moderator
  
  Can you provide a reference for puberty at 17 or 18 – I was unaware of this.
  
  Google ‘age of puberty historical’. There are loads of references buried in loads of crap. It was 15 – 16 only about a century ago. Now they’re ready to go by kindergarten.
Anonymous

But where is the “liger” with the giant breasts?!
Brainspore

@Anonymous #9 & #29:

@25 Good point. So, lets step back and take a look at what most 12 year olds of Michelangelo’s day could and did do – still seems there is pretty vast gap.

There certainly is- for one thing, nowadays most 12-year-olds can read. It’s also kind of hard to make a fair comparison since most 12-year-olds don’t create anything noteworthy enough to warrant preserving for 500 years.
Cowtown2

Lest some folks get the wrong idea from these comments, the engraving is in the slideshow, and it also mentions that the similarities are an argument in favor of the painting’s authenticity, as little Mikey was known to have made a copy of the engraving.

Oh, and ballsy move buying the piece, Fort Worth — best art museums outside of NYC, LA, and Chicago, especially if one throws in the stuff in that unfortunate city 30 miles to the east.
eti

I wish I had seen this when I was 11. I would have tried harder.
buddy66

So you copied the same source as Michaelangelo? Cool. So how’s your career turning out?
stegodon

… it seems like the demon on the bottom right has a rectal prolapse issue.. explains his facial expression i suppose
TroofSeeker

Hey Wire Lizard, guess what?
[What?]
Monkey butt!
Hah!
Same shift, different century.
johnofjack

Goatse has been around longer than I thought.
Nylund

At 12 or 13 I was obsessed with the painting by Matthias Grunewald depicting the same event.

http://betterlivingwithherbs.com/wp-content/uploads/2008/05/fire.jpg

There was something very “Where the Wild Things Are” meets Labyrinth / Dark Crystal that I loved.

I’m still amazed that it was painting circa 1510-1515.
robulus

I think anonymous makes an excellent point about the declining standards of education since the late medieval 1400′s.

The fact that our 12 year olds are coming out of our schools demonstrating few signs of genius, unable to attract the sort of patronage that will see them create some of the most enduring works of art in human history, having difficulty rivalling Da Vinci as one of the greatest minds of the renaissance, is a devastating endictment of modern education systems.

Why, just the other day I saw a bunch of 12 year olds working on computers, performing complex tasks that I didn’t quite understand, and I asked them “have any of you been commissioned by the Pope for a large fresco?” Nope. Not a single one. I asked them which of the great masters they were apprenticed to, and all I got was blank looks.

In all honesty, I don’t think there was a promising charcoal sketch between them.
Takuan

while in Boschian territory; GÃ©rard Depardieu appeared in a film with a mushroom trip sequence reminiscent of such art… title, anyone?
Gloria

@8: You win for cutest comment.
insomma

This is by no means a universally accepted attribution. Let’s hope the Kimball really got their money’s worth.
Fred H

I just love the vaguely irritated, grumpy look on St. Anthony’s face. He looks like he just got off the bus, and he’s loaded down with grocery bags, and just discovered it’s raining. Totally not the expression I would have if I were being tormented by demons. I guess that’s why he’s a saint.