From God reaching out to give Adam the spark of life on the sweeping Sistine chapel ceiling fresco to a grieving Mary holding the limp body of her son Jesus in her lap, the works of Michelangelo are iconic.

Less well-known by the general public are the details of the life of the high Renaissance artist, a man who scrupulously controlled his image as he rose to become the most renowned artist of his time, and arguably one of the most famous of all time.

To this day, his name still makes headlines. On Wednesday, two days before the 551st anniversary of Michelangelo's birth, new claims about his death and his works emerged from an independent researcher. Valentina Salerno presented a theory that the master sculptor and painter had hidden his artworks in a secret room in the days before his death, leaving the keys to friends as part of a complex scheme to keep them in trusted hands.

She also attributed a marble bust of Christ in a minor Roman church to him.

Salerno, who based her theory on archival research, is not an art historian but an actress and fiction author who began studying Michelangelo a decade ago for a book idea. She described her findings in an email to DW as "a great story of friendship that spans the centuries" and presents a new image of the legendary artist. Her claims have yet to be reviewed by scholars, and many experts withheld comment after her announcement.

However, the news invited many to revisit Michelangelo's life and art and reexamine what we do know about a man who continues to fascinate us today. 

Painter, sculptor, architect, poet: A true Renaissance man

Michelangelo di Lodovico Buonarroti Simoni was born on March 6, 1475, some 100 km (62 miles) east of Florence, the city that would launch his career. While he thought of himself primarily as a sculptor, he was also a painter, architect and poet.

He rose to prominence as a young man when he came under the patronage of the Medici family in Florence. He eventually worked primarily between Florence and Rome, where he executed commissions from prominent individuals including popes. 

His artistry is praised for its harmonious and balanced compositions that are rich in anatomical detail, cosmic grandeur and human drama.

"When Michelangelo came along, the works of art that he made, it's really a first generation of responding to a universal message," says Elizabeth Lev, a US art historian and Renaissance expert based in Rome who leads art tours in the city, of his impact. "He deals with the most fundamental aspects in the most fearlessly iconic way."

 

Michelangelo: The brand

"One of the things that really makes him stand out is he's a man who constructed a brand for himself very early on," Lev explains.

Michelangelo, who died in 1564, was the first Western artist to have his biographies published while he was alive. 

He collaborated closely with Giorgio Vasari, whose 1550 book on the lives of artists included a chapter on Michelangelo. Three years later, Michelangelo's assistant, Ascanio Condivi, published a new biography that the artist had essentially ghostwritten.

Despite some differences, both biographies present a similar image of the artist as not just a craftsman, but a highly intellectual artist and lone genius whose art emerged fully formed.

"The blood, sweat and tears of the creative process; the missteps and the errors that we all make when we're trying to perfect our craft — Michelangelo didn't want that to be seen," Lev explains.

He destroyed many of his drawings, sketches and papers in a suspected effort to control public perception of the labor his art required. He even went so far as to take a hammer to his pieta sculpture in Florence, known as the Bandini Pieta, partially destroying the statue.

"The only reasonable answer to why he would do that was because the work was coming out not of the standard that one expected from Michelangelo," Lev says of his possible motivations. 

A different secret room

These same motivations feed the long-standing story that he burned his remaining works in his final days — a story that Salerno now contests with her theory that his artworks were actually hidden in a secret room.

Without claiming any certainty, Lev points out that burning his work would fit the artist's known desire to avoid people seeing his unfinished works. "You see all of this poetry at the end of his life where he knows the end is near," she says. "He's very concerned about legacy."

With respect to Salerno's theory, Lev points out that there is no such account of a secret room among Michelangelo's intimate friends. However, Michelangelo himself did have to hide for a period of time due to a political situation that threatened his life.

Michelangelo supported the Florentine Republic, Lev explains. As it transitioned to a dukedom, people called for his execution, forcing him to go into hiding in a secret chamber below a chapel.

"That secret room makes a whole lot of sense," Lev says. "That Michelangelo has this secret room where he's squirreling away his works? There's no account of this."

A new day, a new Michelangelo

Given the quantity and scale of Michelangelo's artworks, there should be hundreds and hundreds of preparatory works. Yet there aren't that many in known existence — perhaps one reason why sketches and drawings often surface purported to be by him.

For instance, this past February, a sketch of a foot identified as his work by experts at Christie's auction house sold for a record $27.2 million.

In other cases, known artworks have also only recently been attributed to him. In 2015, two art historians proposed that two bronze statues of nude men riding a lion-like animal were, in fact, early Michelangelo works and his only known bronze output.

And in her recent publication, researcher Salerno argued that a marble bust in the Roman church of St. Agnes actually stems from the Renaissance master's hand. The statue had been previously attributed to him up through the 19th century; in the 1980s, contemporary scholarship then attributed it to an anonymous artist.

Salerno hopes that her archival work will spur further scholarship.

And according to Lev, much more extensive proof would be needed to provide any basis for the claims.

At the end of day, Michelangelo's legacy will persist beyond the new stories and works that may swirl around him. As Lev point out, he took "these huge concepts, the big questions, the things that every single one of us, regardless of religion, background, language, all have — we're part of these big questions — and he was able to recount them with such beauty and elegance and to their essential form that everybody can relate to it."

Edited by: Elizabeth Grenier