Michelangelo’s Puzzle
Rebecca Jelbert
Michelangelo’s Puzzle
Bloomsbury 2025 hb £72
DOI:10.5040/9798765158470
ISBN 9798765158449
Pdf available at ResearchGate (free to join)
Michael Daley
Its vaulting, multifarious, ambitions notwithstanding, this book’s genesis might be thought of more import than its content. Two years after Professor James Beck’s death in 1997, Noah Charney (who has written the foreword for the present book) founded The Association for Research into Crimes Art (ARCA). Whereas Beck had created ArtWatch International in 1992 to ‘serve as an international advocate for the conservation and stewardship of historically significant works of art and cultural monuments’, Charney’s ARCA was presented as ‘an international, nongovernmental organization that works to promote scholarly research in the study of art crime and cultural heritage protection.’ Thus, a schism arose between those who see injurious ‘restorations’ as the most common and – being irreversible – the gravest crimes against art, and those who take historic art’s currently modified appearances as identical with their original states.
Among many collaborative projects, ARCA, with the publisher Bloomsbury Academic, produces books on the ‘multidisciplinary field of art crime’. Doubling as the Series Editor, Charney, an art history advisor to the AI firm Art Recognition and an adjunct professor at the American University of Rome, likens Rebecca Jelbert’s book and Michelangelo’s works to ‘world-class onions’ – that is, as being ‘onions of infinite secrets, each veil peeled away offering more’. Jelbert, we are assured, will not disappoint: ‘Here we are with a new book on Michelangelo that contains more revelations.’ Her qualifications – along with Charney’s own – are spelled out: ‘She is an art historian, in that she studies historical art, but she is primarily an artist – a painter, graphic designer, and illustrator.’ Moreover, ‘Her approach is not weighed down by the invisible pressure plates of the insular world of academic art historians (nor is mine – I’m a professor of art history, but have never bothered with many academic publications, preferring to write best-selling books for the widest possible audience). And here, she offers a new perspective on the three major artworks: Laocoön, the Sistine chapel ceiling, and the Last Judgement.’
Charney lets a little cat out of Jelbert’s bag: ‘Michelangelo was an art forger. He was featured in my 2015 book, The Art of Forgery… So it is not implausible that Michelangelo forged other works, even after he had made a name for himself.’ Charney’s book was reviewed by Clare Finn (a conservator and the Secretary of the Visual Arts and Architecture Section of the Critics’ Circle) in The Art Newspaper (18 May 2015): ‘A new book on the art of forgery is deceptively slick… The author draws most of his material from press articles (so it must be true), the internet, some specialist journals, auto biographies of convicted forgers and the author’s own previous publications… The material is peppered with inaccuracy. Looking for underdrawings with a black light instead of Infra-red at the other end of the visible spectrum, will destine you to disappointment.’
Having published in 2015, Charney missed subsequent demolitions of misattributions by ArtWatch contributors (Ann Pizzorusso; Jacques Franck; Euphrosyne Doxiadis; Kasia Pisarek) but his failure to acknowledge and address Beck’s summary last book, From Duccio to Raphael: Connoisseurship in Crisis (2006) is remiss. He ends his foreword: ‘Great art is an onion. Let’s start peeling’.
Jelbert acknowledges the indebtedness of her onion to the long standing academically published and delivered claims of Lynn Catterson, a Columbia University faculty member who completed her PhD (Towards the Academy: Sculptural Practice in Quattrocento Florence) under Professor Beck who, in turn, had trained under Rudolph Wittkower. Jelbert holds that Michelangelo’s well-known early, single foray into the fabrication of an antiquity ‘did not represent a descent; rather it helped to establish his ascendence as a virtuoso artist… The question is, was Michelangelo tempted once again to pit his immense skills against those of the ancients by carving the Laocoön and his Sons…’ Evidently convinced that he had, Jelbert sets out her pending elaborations: ‘I also hope to show that through a fuller understanding of this aspect of Michelangelo’s artistry, new light can be shed on his Sistine Chapel frescos in the Vatican, both the iconic ceiling and his Last Judgement on the altar wall.’ Putting her onion’s cart before the horse, Jelbert admits that she is ‘Building on an article I wrote in 2019 [‘Aping the Masters? Michelangelo and the “Laocoön Group’’’, ARCA’s Journal of Art Crime 22, Fall/Winter 2019 3–16’] and on the academic research findings published by Catterson from 2005 [‘Michelangelo’s Laocoön?’ Artibus et Historiae, 26, no. 52 (2005), pp29–56.] I will present further evidence to suggest that Michelangelo forged this fascinating work of art.’
With suggestions, not proofs, in prospect, Jelbert’s assertiveness is defensive: ‘Even if Michelangelo did not forge the Laocoön, it is understandable that he too would want to include paintings of this newly discovered artwork in his own work.’ (A ‘would want to’ is not a ‘had’.) Given Jelbert’s pending edifice’s indebtedness to Catterson’s groundbreaking work, we must give her voice. On 15 June 2021 Catterson observed:
It has been nearly twenty years since my research and later publication which suggested Michelangelo (1475–1564) carved the marble group of Laocoön and his Sons in the Vatican… it was an exercise in pairing two established patterns. The first was repeated tendencies in the long history of fakes and forgeries; the second was Michelangelo’s activity, or lack thereof, in his early career. I attempted to establish if it was possible, and then probable, that Michelangelo made a spectacular antique forgery. Independently, but along parallel lines of reasoning, I demonstrated that it was possible, and then probable, that the Laocoön was a spectacular counterfeit. The article then concerned itself with connecting the two within a tightly woven chronological framework.
Those comments came in her preface to a book, Enigma Laocoönte, by Francesco Colafemmina. She recalled that when her own research was presented in a public lecture in New York co-sponsored by The Italian Academy for Advanced Studies in America and The Center for the Ancient Mediterranean of Columbia University on 6 April 2004 – along with wide press interest in America, the UK, Italy and elsewhere – the reaction to it ‘was swift and energetic, to say the least. Some academics commented to the press without even having heard the lecture. To be sure, I knew the gravity of the potential issues that would result were I correct, for too much work had long been invested in using the Laocoön as the keystone for framing the so-called Rhodian school of sculpture.’ Since then, she noted: ‘I have waited for someone to counter the argument in print – a peer reviewed book or journal article. This has never happened. Instead, the not unpredictable great wall of silence was constructed, and in the case of the Laocoön, the wall was high, thick and heavily fortified.’
And, for that reason: ‘I am very much heartened by the work of Francesco Colafemmina who has since taken pursuit of Michelangelo and the Laocoön. His work is admirable for the amount and type of sources he has examined – sources that I had not even considered at the time. But these sources contribute to the additional and extremely important contexts of the contemporary political and religious situation, as well as to the utterly fascinating history of doubt that the sculpture was ancient. This in itself is deserving of a monographic treatment.’ Catterson reflected: ‘it is reassuring to learn that I am not the first with doubts about the authenticity of the Laocoön, and now with this publication, I am not the last. I congratulate Francesco on his scholarship, and I am very happy to pass on to him the challenge of further exploring the topic.’ The initial wall of silence endured: in his ‘Selected Bibliography’ Charney makes no mention of Catterson but does cite Dan Brown. With a prospect of The Two-in-two-decades Crusaders about to become The Three, Jelbert makes no reference to the Second and gives scant acknowledgement of the First. She sets out her onion stand thus:
Modern commentators have acknowledged Michelangelo’s references to the Laocoön Group in his Sistine Chapel frescos, but none have recognised his allusion to the stars… I suggest that in the Sistine Chapel ceiling, the celestial canopy provided Michelangelo with an alternative scheme within which to place the famous, one in which the Trojan priest could take on a new meaning… Renaissance puzzle culture reached its peak around the beginning of the sixteenth century, about the same time Michelangelo was preparing to paint his Sistine Ceiling… Michelangelo’s great rival, Leonardo, created revolutionary images of the face which, when viewed from just the right angle, revealed the intended image. Similarly, in Hans Holbein the Younger’s enigmatic double portrait, The Ambassadors (1533…) – painted shortly before Michelangelo started his Last Judgement – an elongated skull suddenly springs into sharp focus when seen from the side… Holbein’s skull was an integral part of his extraordinary intellectual puzzle, and it is only one example of a visual cipher taking center stage.
Here, errors of fact and interpretation link arms with neglect of ArtWatch’s own earlier published demonstrations of the mis-restorations of Michelangelo’s ceiling and Holbein’s Ambassadors. That is, first, that the restored ceiling no longer accords with that recorded on its completion. Then, no one mentioned, thrilled, as Jelbert does, the present brilliant colouring. As we have many times demonstrated, everyone – including Michelangelo’s own biographers Vasari and Condivi – had marvelled that he had (with his last-stage dark additions to the dry frescoes) given ‘such great emphasis to the light in contrast to the shade that even knowledgeable artists were induced… to see what was flat as solid’. Such was the power and corporeality with which God himself had been invested, Condivi noted, that ‘wherever you turn He seems to follow you. Michelangelo had created in the Heavens a simulacrum of the carved monument he had wished to make of Pope Julius II.’ His figures had not been conceived as encoded bearers of allusions to astrological configurations.
Similarly, Jelbert misrepresents a cipher the illusionism deployed by Holbein in his anamorphic skull. Having failed to recognise the magically transformative nature of its nature she takes as a mere cipher. and optical trick the visual magic whereby Holbein transmuted a painted passage into a palpable object. A years-long controversy engulfed Holbein’s Ambassadors in the wake of this (draughtsman/sculptor’s) challenges to its restorers’ misguided alteration of that anamorphic device. Having demonstrated through drawings the National Gallery’s misreading of Holbein’s means and purposes we published them in two articles in the Art Review and presented them in talks at New York’s Art Students League and at the Society of Antiquaries in London. The first was reported the next day on the front and inside pages of The Times and much further coverage followed in the UK and international press. The National Gallery, with the assistance of the BBC, produced a highly tendentious filmed account of its own restoration which it made available to the public through (now withdrawn) CDs. Our first ArtWatch UK online post – ‘The New Relativisms and the Death of “Authenticity’’’ (26 Nov. 2010) – addressed that controversy. We explained the nature of the National Gallery’s misreading and mis-painting of that skull in a Daily Telegraph letter (15 Nov. 1997):
… The most unwarranted feature of this ‘restoration’ has been the alteration of the design of Holbein’s distorted skull. This was carried out on the erroneous assumption that the skull’s perspective was intended to be corrected by a viewing from an extremely acute angle to the right of the picture [as Jelbert now echoes]. It was not. The optician Edgar Samuel demonstrated some 30 years ago [in the Burlington Magazine] that the skull’s distortion corrects when viewed through a glass tube placed in front of the picture. Such a viewing gives rise to an extraordinary pictorial transformation in which the skull aligns with two other spherical objects – a celestial globe and a terrestrial globe on a perfect axis. National Gallery staff have rejected this theory – even though it works – because their own ‘computer manipulations’ of Holbein’s image show that a glass cylinder ‘Cannot have been used to create it’… the National Gallery’s restorers have notched up an ignominious first: they have amended an old master painting to suit a piece of (misguided) ‘virtual reality’.
Needless to say, if Michelangelo had not forged the Laocoön, he could not have been referencing his own dark deed throughout the figures within his Sistine Chapel frescoes – but he could, of course, have drawn rivalrous/inspiration from the archaeological recovery of a long lost, famous ancient masterpiece.
As for art crime, the avowed central concern of ARCA, with Michelangelo’s Sistine Chapel frescoes having been subjected to the harshest, experimental and materially irreversible, pictorial bowdlerisation and falsification imaginable, seeking corroborations of a still unproven contention of cultural fraud in such restoration-wrecked artefacts can only seem methodologically dubious. The unpalatable truth is that the mis-restoration of Michelangelo’s Sistine Chapel frescoes – along with the late-20th-century flood of overly ambitious, technically experimental and intrinsically injurious/falsifying ‘restorations’ – collectively constituted the greatest crime against art in our times.
As for Michelangelo’s Laocoön ‘forgery’, too little consideration has been given to sculptural practicalities. How much does it weigh? How, when and where had Michelangelo carved it in complete secrecy and then moved its seven component parts to be reassembled in a pre-discovered underground space without anyone noticing or later disclosing? How many people had been involved? Had Michelangelo carved it, could he have resisted telling his confidant/biographer/propagandist Condivi? Had Michelangelo also had the wit to manufacture and bury elsewhere a supposedly lost arm that would only be discovered during the 20th century and then be found to fit his sculpture?