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Comment by al_borland | Hacker News Reader

Surely this isn’t the first thing he ever painted, but rather the earliest known work that survived?

Yes probably first known work. The salient point though is that he did this at 12.

How can they possibly know that for sure? It seems massively unlikely. We don't have any really reliable records from that time.

It seems like we do know the year it was painted fairly reliably, but we don't know that it was Michelangelo specifically that painted it (the article exudes more confidence that I would give based on the inherent uncertainty of these identifications).

The article/video only points to this being proven by research done by Giorgio Bonsanti. If you're curious, you'll have to investigate that angle.

It is frustrating that the article is so coy about the evidence around the premise of the article! But, this website and the youtube video this article is based around both lean more towards pop than investigative.

What makes it massively unlikely?

I could believe even quite a bit younger, there are some wildly talented children and it's easy to believe Michaelangelo to have been one.

> It seems massively unlikely.

Why? There were other talented people who produced masterful works at an early age. From the same time as this there's a Dürer self-portrait, also aged 12-13:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Self-Portrait_at_the_Age_of_13

> We don't have any really reliable records from that time.

Uh, no. There's no documented attribution of that painting to Michelangelo; that doesn't mean that other things weren't reliably recorded.

That is slightly unconvincing. Durer is indeed a similar genius, but the complexity of that drawing is an order of magnitude lower than the painting.

Source: know how to draw really well.

I came here to agree with you but then I had the good sense to read the original page which is at the Met (https://www.metmuseum.org/exhibitions/listings/2009/michelan...), and has a lot of background on this painting, including that it WAS actually painted from an existing image (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Temptation_of_St_Anthony_(... - worth a look to compare), so my primary skepticism "how could a kid even come up with that" makes a lot more sense that he had an existing image he was copying.

https://www.metmuseum.org/exhibitions/listings/2009/michelan...

I'm no expert judge but I think there were kids in my middle school who could draw something like that. Certainly in high school.

and also keep in mind, you probably make many sketches before putting brush to canvas...

"As a young boy, Michelangelo was sent to the city of Florence to study grammar under the Humanist Francesco da Urbino.[13][16][d] Michelangelo showed no interest in his schooling, preferring to copy paintings from churches and seek the company of other painters."

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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michelangelo#Early_life_and_ca...

It seems like this painting would be from his time at Urbino's grammar school. His first apprenticeship started when he was 13. You might expect a renaissance artist to do a lot of work on their master's paintings (detail work, etc.) before ever putting their own name to a canvas, but this is, apparently, Michelangelo doing his own thing before ever being apprenticed.

So, while he likely did paint things before this that didn't survive, it's pretty amazing that this is the work of a kid who has yet to be apprenticed and is just pursuing it on his own with nothing more than the advice of people he was hanging out with.

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