Michelangelo's First Painting: The Torment of Saint Anthony  

November 3, 2009

Tuesday 8:00pm - 7:00pm

Detail: Beginning September 26, 2009, Michelangelo's first known painting, The Torment of Saint Anthony, will be on view among the permanent collection of the Kimbell Art Museum. The Kimbell Art Museum acquired the painting in May 2009. It will be featured in a focus exhibition including a facsimile of the Schongauer engraving on which it is based and the recent technical examinations and scholarly analyses that identify it as the painting described by Michelangelo's biographers. This work was executed in oil and tempera on a wooden panel in 1487–88, when the artist was only 12 to 13 years old. It is the first painting by Michelangelo Buonarroti (1475–1564) to enter an American collection, and one of only four known easel paintings generally believed to come from his hand. The others are the Doni Tondo in Florence's Uffizi Gallery and two unfinished paintings in London's National Gallery, The Manchester Madonna and The Entombment.