Picture this: The first work by the man who’s arguably the most famous sculptor of all time, Michelangelo. It survives through the centuries, all the way to the modern era…when it’s stolen by Nazis and disappears.

Like most stories I tell, this sounds like totally made up clickbait. Is it? You’ll just have to keep reading and find out for yourself.

Michelangelo the Jerk

Every great artist starts somewhere. Sometimes, they want to keep their origin stories secret.

Michelangelo was apprenticed to a painter named Domenico Ghirlandaio, a popular painter in Florence. The way things worked back then is a master would have a school with a group of apprentices of various levels — some pretty advanced, with the young ones doing the grunt work and picking up dirty little scraps of discarded knowledge off the floor.

Some wealthy patron would hire the artist’s studio to create a piece of art, and they’d all get to work.

Young Michelangelo would’ve mixed paints, studied sketches, and learned how to paint frescos. Eventually, he’d test his hand at some background figures. Giorgio Vasari, who wrote an extremely flattering biography of Michelangelo, recounts this story:

“Now while Domenico was working on the main chapel of Santa Maria Novella, it happened one day while he was away that Michelangelo began to sketch the scaffolding with some stools and the implements of the craft, along with some men who were working there. When Domenico returned and saw Michelangelo’s sketch, he declared: ‘This boy knows more about it than I do.'”

Although Vasari praises Michelangelo to an almost unbelievable degree, he does go out of his way to note that this is where Michelangelo learned the craft of painting frescos: art on wet plaster. Ghirlandaio was responsible for a lot of impressive work on the Tornabuoni Chapel in Santa Maria Novella, and his students would have helped.

It’s important to note here that some could call Michelangelo a bit of a jerk. Now, I’m not calling him a jerk, but some could. He was talented, and knew it. He had a bit of a chip on his shoulder, as well as a biting wit. There’s a number of different stories, but Michelangelo once mouthed off to a fellow student, who punched him in the face — resulting in a severely broken nose that was bent for the rest of his life.

No Spielbergs Allowed

I always seem to come back to Michelangelo’s formative years when talking about him, because they weigh so heavily in how I see him as a person. Michelangelo would later talk a bit of trash about his old master Ghirlandaio, saying he “received absolutely no assistance from him,” and claim that Ghirlandaio was jealous of his talent. This was apparently such a controversial and contentious topic that even Vasari tried to set the record straight.

It really seems like I’m trying to say Michelangelo was a jerk, doesn’t it? Well, we have to look at him in the context of the times.

It was the Renaissance. Artists were starting to see themselves as individuals inspired by a passion for art, rather than contractors hired to carry out a task. People like Ghirlandaio ran large studios, sometimes cranking out pieces like a cell phone sweatshop.

The Tornabuoni Chapel we were talking about? It was a commission by a wealthy guy, Giovanni Tornabuoni. Yeah…the chapel is named after him. It’s not the Ghirlandaio Chapel. It’s the central piece in Santa Maria Novella, one of the main churches in Florence. Certain rich guys had the “rights” to decorate pieces of churches.

Doing so could bring you quite a bit of prestige. Maybe Tornabuoni would have pictures of his awesome chapel on his 16th Century tinder account.

So Ghirlandaio would be given certain topics — in this case, scenes from the lives of Mary and John the Baptist. He’d do the primary design work, and his students would help carry out his plan. He’s not really going to deviate from that. It was rather regimented, even down to the composition of the scenes themselves. It’s not as though he’s going to be like “Yeah, I want Mary to be riding a horse here and wearing some cool pink boots, and the Archangel Gabriel should have an awesome flaming sword.”

It’s a little backwards from the way we look at things today. Think of it like this: If you hired Steven Spielberg to make you a movie, are you going to come in and tell him where to put the camera and how you think the Tyrannosaurus really shouldn’t eat the lawyer on the toilet, and that Jeff Goldblum is all wrong for the role and you want to replace him with your nephew? Spielberg is going to Spiel-bolt.

I’m sorry for that joke. I couldn’t help it.

This struggle for promoting art as “art” instead of a hired task was something Michelangelo fought for throughout his life. He feuded with those like Raphael, who ran giant studios. It’s likely that Michelangelo wanted to rewrite his own past, hiding the fact that he came up through this system, mixing paints and performing what many might see as manual labor.

At any rate, Michelangelo was eager to escape the system and get away from painting. So when Lorenzo de Medici came calling, Michelangelo leapt to follow.

Renaissance Bezos

Lorenzo was an incredibly wealthy banker. Like, really wealthy. Maybe the richest dude in Europe at the time — he and his family were basically the leaders of Florence. Lorenzo was dedicated to the arts, with a deep desire to reconnect with the ancient world and basically recreate Athens. It’s like if Jeff Bezos actually tried to do something good with his cash.

Now, I should mention that bankers were seen by some as sinners. Technically speaking, the Bible says usury — earning money by charging interest — is a sin. So, there’s historians who see the actions of the members of the Medici family as being self-serving, suggesting they’d fund renovations and a bunch of new art for a church as a way of spending their cash on something holy, giving themselves something to brag about at the pearly gates.

Maybe Jeff Bezos thinks shooting himself into space will be looked at as doing something good for humanity? Maybe his purpose in making billions is just to help all of us? Yeah, I don’t think so either.

Despite what some may believe, there’s no doubting that Lorenzo had a great appreciation for art, and was trying to reboot the culture of the ancient world. Here I’ve spent all this time ripping on these wealthy art patrons, but it seems like Lorenzo was quite different. He was actively encouraging artists to learn their craft and show off their creativity.

Keep in mind, Lorenzo’s grandfather was a patron of Donatello, who’d sculpted the first freestanding nude sculpture since ancient times. If you wanted to work for a family that would give you free reign, this was the place to find them.

Here you go, Spielberg. Here’s a camera. Here’s an old director to chat with, here’s a stack of old movies. Figure out what you want to work on. The dinosaurs can eat whoever they want, and Goldblum can play all the roles himself if that’s what you think is best.

To that end, Lorenzo wanted to train a new generation of sculptors, as there weren’t many left. He recruited an elderly student of Donatello as a teacher, and set up a sculpture school in his garden.

He goes to Ghirlandaio and asks for some of his best students. One of them was Michelangelo.

Michelangelo Buonarroti, Boy Genius

So Michelangelo’s 15, studying ancient sculptures. Remember, this is the Renaissance — they’re digging up old statues, and people like Lorenzo are buying them to display in their homes. If you had enough money to get yourself one of those ancient statues, you were the popular kid on the block. You’d stick that thing right next to your front door and casually pose next to it every chance you got.

“Oh, this old thing? No big deal, it’s just an Athena. How’s your sister doing? Haven’t seen her in a while, you should bring her by, I can show her my Poseidon out back. She won’t believe the size of his trident.”

Part of Michelangelo’s learning process wasn’t just examining ancient sculptures, but trying to copy them. So he’s working in Lorenzo’s garden with the other students, copying the head of a faun — a man with a goat head from Roman mythology. A creepy goat head. Don’t tell me it’s not creepy. It is.

As the story goes, the ancient sculpture he was copying had its mouth closed, but Michelangelo made his with the mouth open.

Lorenzo walks by, takes a look, and compliments the head. He tells Michelangelo it’s great, but the teeth wouldn’t be in such good condition. After all, this isn’t just a creepy goat man’s head; it’s an old creepy goat man’s head. This, from Vasari:

“…this lord, laughing with pleasure as was his custom, said to him: ‘But you should have known that old men never have all their teeth and that some of them are always missing.'”

Michelangelo immediately breaks out a tooth and drills a hole in the gums to make it look like it had been extracted. Lorenzo is so impressed by this boy, he invites Michelangelo to live with him in his home. 

Now, it’s important to note that this story is true — well, it’s the story Michelangelo told, anyway. And as I said, some could call him a jerk. That could also mean that he embellished his tales to make himself look better. 

There are verifiable parts of the story, mind you. Michelangelo did apprentice under Ghirlandaio. He did get his nose broken, he did work in Lorenzo’s garden, he did live in Lorenzo’s house. It’s certainly not out of the realm of possibility that the story of the faun’s head is completely accurate. 

Knowing Michelangelo, I could definitely see him getting criticized and thinking “What? You son of a…how dare you! Watch what I can do!”

Nazis (I Hate These Guys)

Fast forward to 1943. Italy is teamed up with Nazi Germany.

The Allies invade Sicily, then move to the mainland. Italy signs an armistice, agreeing to stop fighting. Mussolini is out, Hitler goes crazy — well, crazier. Florence is occupied by Nazi troops.

The supposed original Head of a Faun was hanging in the Bargello, a sculpture gallery you can still visit today. It was during the occupation that it just…went missing. The Nazis got ran out of Florence, and it was never seen again.

You could argue that it just got misplaced, but that’d be an awfully big coincidence, don’t you think? Or you could also say it’s possible someone else snatched it. But that would be ignoring the fact that stealing famous art was part of what the Nazis did.

After the war, the Allies found salt mines full of what we call “Nazi plunder.” I think we all know of how the Jewish people had their valuable items stolen, but the Nazis also went nuts with ripping off art all over Europe. I’m sure people far more knowledgeable than I on this topic could write about it for days, but I imagine it had something to do with Hitler being a failed artist. There were entire Nazi organizations with the expressed purpose of finding valuable art to steal. They literally wound up with hundreds of thousands of items.

Part of the ultimate goal was to build this thing called the Führermuseum, where Hitler was going to put all these famous works and embarrass cities like Vienna, where he’d made his mediocre paintings. A psychiatrist could probably write a book about how Hitler’s inadequate trident spurred him to wave it around at everyone.

There’s a whole movie about stolen Nazi art, the thoroughly disappointing “Monuments Men.” How they managed to screw that up, we’ll never know.

Much of the art was later returned, but Michelangelo’s faun was never found. Some say Soviet troops ended up taking it when they invaded Berlin — there are scholars who believe it’s almost certainly in Moscow. Please email Putin and ask him.

I guess this is where you can leave a mean comment and say “You clickbaited me, you don’t know that Nazis actually took it!”

Well…yeah, I don’t have video of them taking it. And I don’t have a picture of Hitler doing meth and running around the Eagle’s Nest while wearing it as a mask. But they totally took it.

But Was It Really?

There’s some dispute as to whether the plaster casts still around are of the original. A few scholars have said what was hanging in the Bargello was an 18th Century piece. There is a reference to a head of a faun entering the collection in 1689, which may undermine the claim.

Most historians believe these casts were indeed taken from the original, and that the original was carved by Michelangelo. But there is at least one guy who claims there never was a Head of a Faun at all — that Michelangelo was a huge liar and made up the whole thing.

Like I said…some think he was a jerk. And as is the case with most every topic in the art world, there’s discussion, debate, and rabid arguments.

Supposedly there would be some sort of label on the original that would prove what it was, but since it may be locked up in the Kremlin or something, there’s no way to tell. Again, if you have Putin’s email, please ask him and let me know what he says.