Claims of ‘rediscovered’ Michelangelo baffle Renaissance experts

Rome — A marble statue of Christ in a Roman church is by Michelangelo, an independent researcher claimed Wednesday, the latest motif for the Renaissance genius who has become one of the world’s most imitated artists.

Valentina Salerno’s unconfirmed claim has left Renaissance scholars unsettled, especially since a recent drawing of a foot attributed to Michelangelo — but disputed by some in turn — fetched $27.2 million at a recent Christie’s auction.

While Salerno has suggested that several other works are now attributed to Michelangelo based on his documentary research – leading experts have declined to comment.

Salerno published his theory on the commercial website academia.edu, a non-peer social networking site that has examined academic use, and announced the first “rediscovery” at a press conference on Wednesday.

While the claims have probably attracted more attention than they usually do, the Vatican seems interested, at least initially. Friday marks the 550th anniversary of Michelangelo’s birth, and there are a number of exhibitions, conferences and commemorations to revive attention to his genius and legacy.

The Ministry of Culture was invited to participate in Salerno’s press conference and did not, canceling the order to run the church, Rev. Franco Bergamin, but the Carabinieri’s art team declined to weigh in on the statue’s authenticity, saying it had been salvaged and that a laminated symbol now adorns the sculpted arm.

“Whether or not we think this property belongs to our cultural heritage, whether it can be attributed to Michelangelo Buonarroti or not, it is part of the national heritage that we are responsible to protect,” said Lt. Col. Paolo Salvatori.

Michelangelo Buonarroti, who lived 1475-1564, created some of the masterpieces of the Renaissance: David in Florence and the Pieta in St. Peter’s Basilica, the Sistine Chapel ceiling and “The Last Judgment” fresco behind the chapel’s altar. Salerno now says she has found another – a statue of Christ in the Basilica of Sant’Agnes Furi le Mura, listed by Italy’s Ministry of Culture as anonymous, from a 16th-century Roman school.

She is not the first to claim that. In 1996, Michelangelo expert William Wallace wrote an article in ArtNews about the well-documented history of wrongly attributing works to Michelangelo. It quotes the 19th-century French writer Stendhal as writing in the Church of Sant’Agnes, “We have observed the head of the Saviour, which we must swear by Michelangelo.”

“Despite Stendhal’s pledge, the head was never taken seriously, and nowadays does not even appear in the Catalog Raison under ‘Rejected Attributes,'” Wallace wrote.

Several documents from the first few hundred years after Michelangelo’s death suggest that Salerno correctly attributed the work to the artist, but in 1984 a scholar erroneously dismissed it, and it has been wrongly attributed ever since.

“I have provided and will continue to provide — I hope, as the research continues — full documentary evidence of this,” he said. “There will be experts in the field conducting their own investigations. So far, according to the documents, we can say that the object is attributed to Michelangelo.”

He pointed out that the statue was modeled after Michelangelo’s best friend Tommaso de Cavalrius and was part of the great artistic legacy Michelangelo left to his friends and students when he died. Salerno said he came to the conclusion of tracing wills, inventories, and notarized documents in church and state archives and the archives of Roman confraternities to which Michelangelo and his students belonged.

Salerno, an actress and novelist, has no college degree or expertise in art history. He says he fell into the research “accidentally” 10 years ago when he set out to write a novel about Michelangelo.

According to his research published on academia.edu, Salerno uncovered evidence of a secret “contract of obscurity” among some of Michelangelo’s students and his heirs to keep Michelangelo’s works after his death. The deal included the previously unknown existence of a chamber whose locks could only be opened with three keys, held by three different students, he said.

Salerno’s research caught the eye of Cardinal Mauro Gambetti, who ran St. Peter’s Basilica. He named Salerno and his mentor to a scientific committee formed in 2025 to discuss a possible Vatican exhibition commemorating the anniversary of Michelangelo’s birth.

Nothing has happened yet in the work of the committee. But its members downplayed the importance of Salerno’s work or refused to discuss it.

Some expressed surprise at her inclusion on a panel that included Barbara Jatta, director of the Vatican Museums, Hugo Chapman, curator of Italian and French drawings, 1400-1800 at the British Museum, and Wallace, professor of history at St. Washington University, some of the Vatican Museums’ leading Renaissance and Michelangelo scholars.

Jatta distanced himself from the Vatican committee when contacted by The Associated Press.

The British Museum declined to make Chapman available for comment. Gambetti’s office did not respond to requests for comment. Other members of the committee declined to comment.

Wallace told the AP that Salerno’s approach was sound and noted that Europe has a strong tradition of undocumented researchers doing robust work. He said he accepted her thesis that Michelangelo did not destroy his works in a fire, a commonly held belief at the time that has been debunked by scholars over the years. Rather, he admitted to Salerno that Michelangelo entrusted what remained of his works in his final years to his students to complete his projects.

But he disputes Salerno’s conclusion that Michelangelo’s great treasure was secreted—and therefore ripe for new discovery—saying that Michelangelo did not produce as much in the last years of his life. Michelangelo oversaw six architectural projects in Rome at the time. He said that the drawings he made were drawings to solve technical problems in the workplace and did not survive because they were merely “working drawings”.

Wallace admitted that the existence of a secret room that could only be opened with three keys was novel. But proper academic scholarship calls for Salerno to transcribe the documents and allow for a peer-review process, he said.

Italy is no stranger to claims of new inventions about old artists, with forgeries, hoaxes and new “inventions” by Modiglianis and other artists being a regular occurrence in art history circles.

“I think I’ve counted 45 attributions to Michelangelo since 2000, and you can’t remember or quote one of them, but each one came with the title, ‘Greatest Invention of the Time,’ (or) ‘This Changed Everything We Think About Michelangelo,'” Wallace said. “And five years later, we don’t even remember what it was.”

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