Translated by Lucinda Byatt This book tells the remarkable story of a rare discovery: the uncovering of two lost paintings by the great Renaissance artist Michelangelo. Like many stories of artistic loss, this one begins in a library in Italy, where Antonio Forcellino - a distinguished Michelangelo scholar and restorer - stumbled across some unpublished letters among the papers of Cardinal Ercole Gonzaga, son of Isabella d’Este and an extremely important figure in the Italian Renaissance. These letters comment on the paintings of Michelangelo in a way that is completely at odds with what was to become the dominant critical tradition of Michelangelo scholarship, an inconsistency that set Forcellino off on a journey that took him to Dubrovnik, Oxford, New York and Niagara Falls and culminated in the discovery of two magnificent paintings: Pieta with Mary and Two Angels, now in a private collection in America, and Cavalieri Crucifixion, now held by an educational institution in England. Through a combination of careful historical research, extensive restoration and meticulous radiographic analysis, Forcellino shows convincingly that these paintings can be traced back to the studio of Michelangelo. This extraordinary story, brilliantly retold, calls into question the received view of Michelangelo’s work and fills in a missing piece in our understanding of one of the greatest artists of all time.

"For many years scholars have been aware that Michelangelo included his own image in his art. In this study, Edith Balas discusses two previously unrecognized double self-portraits. The earliest of these, a statue known as the Victory, was a private project in which an aging Michelangelo of depicted himself surmounted by an idealized alter ego, a figure associated with his younger self, his beloved friend Tommaso Cavalieri, and the David and Goliath theme that preoccupied him through much of his career. In the second of these double self-portraits, The Conversion of Paul in the Pauline Chapel of the Vatican, the artist, again portraying himself in youth and old age, used a central event in sacred history to make a statement about his own spiritual transformation from Neoplatonist "paganism" to a more orthodox form of Christian piety. Dr. Balas explores the meaning of both works with reference to Michelangelo's life, art, and poetry, and reveals them to be among the profoundest autobiographical statements in the history of Western art."--BOOK JACKET.