3 Cupid’s testes

In 1996 Schwartz waxed skeptical about the attribution of a sculpture to Michelangelo. Followed twenty-eight years later by an apology to the attributor.


One of the worst things that can happen to an art historian is to become convinced that she has discovered a new statue by Michelangelo. Frederick Hartt learned this ten years ago, and Kathleen Weil-Garris Brandt is finding it out right now.

The heart of the problem is that convincing your colleagues that the work is really by Michelangelo turns out to be more difficult than convincing yourself. If you could convince them, you would be a hero and whatever Schönheitsfehler you committed while becoming one would be forgotten. If you fall short, all that is left are your mistakes.

The Hartt case was spectacular. He thought that a small plaster figure shown to him in Paris by a bunch of international con men straight out of The Maltese Falcon was the model for Michelangelo’s David. He agreed with them that he would write a book in support of this theory, which he did, in a schmaltzy style he considered befitting for the occasion (“… watching the muscles quiver and palpitate, I started to tremble”). His big mistake was failing to reveal to his publishers, readers and colleagues that he was going to get 5 percent of the proceeds from the sale or $2,500,000, whichever was more. This came out after the attribution had stranded on the disbelief of other specialists. Leo Steinberg, for example, criticized the testicles of the figure, which were “crudely level [instead of] dropping unevenly, as male anatomy dictates.” Hartt’s rejoinder – that it might have been cold in the studio that day or that the model might have been nervous – was not considered sufficiently compelling by the field. His brilliant career was shattered. The sculpture went into a London bank vault, unattributable and  unsaleable.

Professor Brandt found her Michelangelo closer to home. It is a marble Cupid that has stood since 1906 in a fountain around the corner from her office in uptown New York, in a building on Fifth Avenue bought in the 1950s by the French government for its cultural service. Passing by one day last October, she said, she recognized the statue from a photograph published in 1899, as a Michelangelo, in the catalogue of the Bardini collection in Florence. She announced her discovery along with the corroboratory statement that the Metropolitan Museum was going to exhibit the statue as a Michelangelo in an exhibition this autumn.

Brandt’s mistake? Her “discovery” was no secret to insiders, and she is an insider. In 1984 the Cupid had been offered for sale as a Michelangelo to the Getty Museum by a New Orleans art gallery (which of course did not own it, but that was a technicality). In 1992 it was published with its correct location in a book Brandt should have known, where it is attributed to Michelangelo’s teacher Bertoldo di Giovanni. Her only real contribution was to put the weight of her reputation behind the nineteenth-century attribution to Michelangelo.

That would have been enough if her judgment carried the day. But in the July-August issue of The Art Newspaper the leading Michelangelo specialist Michael Hirst writes that “Michelangelo had no part in [the] conception or execution” of the Cupid. He prefers the attribution to Bertoldo, but only as a “suggestion.” The close of his article is withering: “We should be grateful to Dr Weil-Garris Brandt for having brought the work so inescapably to our attention, while not forgetting that the attribution … to Michelangelo was advanced by Dr Alessandro Parronchi in 1968 from the evidence of a photograph.”

Frankly, I fail to see how anyone could have been taken in. Even from a photograph it is plain that Cupid’s testicles are as crudely level as those of the plaster David.

© Gary Schwartz 1996 and 2024. Published in Dutch in NRC Handelsblad, Cultureel Supplement, 9 August 1996, p. 5. Published on the Schwartzlist, with illustrations, on 31 October 2024.


In 2013 an unsigned author compiled a fascinating dossier on the attribution.

The sculpture has been on loan to the Metropolitan Museum of Art since 2009, first as “attributed to Michelangelo,” and since 2012 as by Michelangelo.

The term of the loan of 2009 was for ten years. In 2019 it was extended for another ten years. In that regard, considering that the sculpture is still the property of the French government, a remark by John Russell in the New York Times of 23 January 1996 is apposite: “If the attribution to Michelangelo wins general agreement, however, the sculpture would certainly be as welcome in the Louvre as it would be in the Met.”

My sarcastic last paragraph was misplaced, and I would like to apologize for it. It pleases me for Kathleen Weil-Garris Brandt that the Metropolitan Museum shares her conviction that the sculpture is by Michelangelo and that it is the one documented in 1556 as an “entirely nude Apollo with quiver and arrows” by him in the garden of Jacopo Galli. Whatever I think about the authorship of the sculpture does not matter.


Responses in the Reply box below (these will be viewed by all visitors to the site) or personally to Gary.Schwartz@xs4all.nl are always appreciated and will be answered.

So will donations. Your donations help defray the costs of the Schwartzlist and encourage Gary Schwartz to write more columns. .Donate Button

8 thoughts on “3 Cupid’s testes”

  1. On checking, it seems that the turn of the head was characteristic of the style of Bertoldo di Giovanni, so I find that attribution convincing.

    Along the same lines, I am puzzled by the recent attribution of the “Torment of St Anthony” at the Kimbell Art Museum to the young Michelangelo. The style seems so discrepant from his established style as to require a personality transplant. And I have difficulty imagining Michelangelo slavishly copying the corresponding print from the Northern engraver Schongauer as his source. Any thoughts?

    1. Your argument is with the sources, Christopher. The Kimbell writes: “Michelangelo’s earliest biographers, Giorgio Vasari and Ascanio Condivi, tell us that, aside from some drawings, his first work was a painted copy of the engraving Saint Anthony Tormented by Demons by the fifteenth-century German master Martin Schongauer.” And the kid was 12 or 13. So I do not share doubts of the kind you express.

      1. Thanks, Gary. On checking, I was interested to find that Vasari does not just mention it in passing, but is very specific about the details of this particular attribution, especially that fact that it was not in his own typical style, but deliberating disguised his authorship by mimicking the Northern style: “Since a scene by this same Martin, which was engraved in copper and showed Saint Anthony being beaten by devils, had reached Florence, Michelangelo drew it with his pen in such a way that it was not recognized as his, and he painted it with colours; in order to copy the strange forms of some of the devils, he went to buy fish that had scales of unusual colours and showed so much talent in this work that he acquired from it both credit and renown. He also copied drawings done by various old masters so closely that they were not recognized as copies, for by staining and ageing them with smoke and various materials, he soiled them so that they seemed old and could not be distinguished from the originals; …”.
        So on this basis I agree that the attribution to Michelangelo is completely convincing. Now, the question is, who was he imitating?

        1. Well, Christopher, your first instinct was perfectly in line with Michelangelo’s intention – that the painting be unrecognizable as his. Good for you!

  2. I have seen, and admired, the Met’s Cupid many times, and have spent quite a bit of time studying it. Personally, I believe it is indeed by Michelangelo. Certainly, it is far, far superior to anything Bertoldo ever did, or could have done; when I read, some time ago, that some scholars thought it could be his work, I was frankly shocked, especially when I saw some of the works by Bertoldo they offered as evidence. This Cupid has a heroic quality that is surely one of the defining characteristics of nearly all of Michelangelo’s work, and which virtually no one else achieved. And I think the feeling for anatomy in this Cupid is extraordinary.
    Incidentally, the one sculpture that is NOT by Michelangelo (in my opinion) is the young Saint John the Baptist — which does not have this heroic quality, and which is, I believe, almost certainly by Rustici. Not Michelangelo.

    1. Thanks, Edward. As I understand from the review of the attributions, it was James Draper in his book on Bertoldo, who first, in 1992, proposed the attribution to him. In 1995 he retracted it. Whether Michael Hirst, for whom I have great respect, maintained his belief in that attribution all his life I do not know. As I wrote, my own opinion does not matter.

      If there were really “defining characteristics in nearly all of Michelangelo’s work, which virtually no one else achieved,” we wouldn’t be getting into situations like this.

      1. I can’t agree with you there, Gary. How many times, in the history of art, have new works been dismissed by some critics, when, over time, they come to be accepted as supreme masterpieces, fully representative of a given artist’s work? Speaking of another work by Michelangelo, the Manchester Madonna: it was dismissed by many scholars, despite having, in Kenneth Clark’s words, “unmistakable force and nobility, perceptible in every touch.” Clark was surely describing something that is real. “Nobility” : perhaps a better word than my use of “heroic.”

        1. The other way around is much more common – works hailed as masterpieces that are dismissed or ignored. Both phenomena go against the assumption of “unmistakeability.”

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *