The Boy Who Painted Demons
A 12-year-old copied a German engraving of a saint besieged by monsters — and may have created the earliest surviving painting by the greatest sculptor of the Renaissance.
In the desert of legend, Saint Anthony hovers in mid-air, borne aloft by angels, when demons ambush him. Claws rake at his robes, wings and horns crowd the sky, and the holy man's face is caught between agony and resolve. This is the scene rendered in oil and tempera on a small panel just 47 by 35 centimeters, painted, historians now believe, by a boy no older than thirteen: Michelangelo Buonarroti.
The painting, known as The Torment of Saint Anthony, is not an original invention. It is a close copy of an engraving made a few years earlier by the German printmaker Martin Schongauer, whose prints circulated widely across Europe, including Italy, in the final years of his short life. The subject itself was a familiar one in medieval art — the temptation, or trial, of Saint Anthony, drawn from the Golden Legend and other sources, depicting the fourth-century saint resisting demonic assault in the wilderness.
What makes the panel remarkable is not its subject but its possible maker. If the attribution to Michelangelo holds, it was painted around 1487 or 1488, when he was twelve or thirteen years old — making it the earliest surviving work of his career, predating even his famous apprenticeship achievements. According to the biographer Giorgio Vasari, Michelangelo did indeed paint a copy of a Schongauer print, though scholars still debate whether this exact panel is the one Vasari described.
Michelangelo did not simply trace his source. Another biographer, Ascanio Condivi, recorded that the young artist went to a fish market to study the iridescent texture of scales, a detail entirely absent from Schongauer's original print. He also added a landscape beneath the tormented saint and subtly altered the expression on Anthony's face — small acts of independence that hint at the artist he would become.
For centuries, the painting's origins were obscured. It was long attributed to the workshop of Domenico Ghirlandaio, the very master under whom Michelangelo trained as an apprentice. Under that more modest attribution, an American art dealer bought it at a Sotheby's auction in London in July 2008 for two million dollars — a respectable sum, but nothing like the price a genuine Michelangelo would command.
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