‘The Young Archer’ sculpture is from Michelangelo?
The object in question is “Young Archer,” a life-size marble carving of a naked boy that might or might not be the earliest known work by Michelangelo. It is now on display at the Metropolitan Museum in the bright and airy Vélez Blanco Patio, where viewers are invited to decide for themselves what to believe.
As is widely known by now, the boy with the missing arms and feet was displayed for many years in the rotunda of the Fifth Avenue town house where the Cultural Services office of the French Embassy now resides. The building was designed by Stanford White, who purchased the sculpture in Europe and placed it in the grand foyer. There it attracted little notice until 1990, when it caught the eye of James David Draper, then a graduate student and now a curator for the Met’s European sculpture and decorative arts department.
Mr. Draper thought it was by a contemporary of Michelangelo. Kathleen Weil-Garris Brandt, a New York University professor, argued that it was by Michelangelo himself. Mr. Draper agreed; other scholars disagreed. Now it is back in the news because the French Foreign and European Affairs Ministry has turned it over to the Met in a 10-year loan.
The immediate experience is anticlimactic. The boy has none of the powerful, erotically charged muscularity of Michelangelo’s famous works. There are many more striking sculptures by other artists in the Met’s collection, and if you didn’t know the background of this one, you would probably pass it by without a second thought. Knowing its recent history and uncertain identity, however, you look more closely.
If it was created by Michelangelo when he was 15 or 16, as Mr. Draper theorizes, then it does seem impressively accomplished. The boy’s contraposto stance, the subtle articulation of muscle and bone under smooth skin and the way he appears to be reaching across his body to draw an arrow from a quiver made in the shape of a lion’s paw: all this attests to a precocious talent. The yearning expression of his upturned face adds a touching emotional dimension.
If we believe that it is by Michelangelo, then, as Mr. Draper observes in a museum news release, “implications for the development of his art from intensely lyric beginnings, before he was sure of his craft and totally innocent of his future terribilità, are considerable.”
But then, what if documentary evidence came to light proving that it is not by Michelangelo? How would that transform your experience of it? Should it alter how you view it and feel about it? After all, a change in attribution does not change the physical object. But, of course, such a change alters a lot. Certainly it affects the object’s monetary value, and the sculpture becomes far less of a draw for museumgoers. But why?
To shed more light on this question, consider a nearly exact replica of “Young Archer” that Met technicians created to fill the spot vacated by the real sculpture. In the dimly lighted French Embassy entrance hall it is practically impossible to discern any difference between this computer-assisted fabrication and the hand-carved marble at the Met. And yet it feels as if something is missing — as if, like a robot or a zombie, the replica had no soul. Imagine the difference between a piece of the true cross and a fake.
The real “Young Archer” does not feel soulless, but the more we believe it came from the hands of that great genius Michelangelo, the bigger its soul — or, what the cultural critic Walter Benjamin called “aura” — will feel. We may be modern, skeptical secularists, but there is still a kind of primitive, magical dimension in our psychological relationship to art, and, as in the case of “Young Archer,” it is disappointing, albeit philosophically intriguing, to be left in doubt.
Some day incontrovertible proof one way or the other might surface. Until then, “Young Archer” will remain in art-historical purgatory awaiting his final judgment and testing the faith of art lovers.
“Young Archer” remains on view at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, (212) 535-7710, metmuseum.org.
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