Resumen de Michelangelo scultore: i problemi dell'attività giovanile e il 'Cupido' Galli di Manhattan
Specialised studies on Michelangelo continue to face two areas of difficulty regardings his youthful style as a sculptor. On the one hand they are spoiled by the major turning point typified by works such as the Vatican "Pietà" and the "David", with scholars failing to accept that the artista went through a formative period of growth that had not yet reached those exalted points, and was instead powerfully steeped in fifteenth-century culture. On the other, scholarship has been led astray by enormous fame bestowed on masterpieces such as the two mentioned above or the tomb of Julius II, overlooking the fact that since Vasari himself, and for about three more centuries, the master's 'minor' sculptures stood on the margins of the critical fortune, if not beyond it. Because these works, especially the youthful ones, were unrelated the 'Maniera Moderna', they remained hidden among the under-appreciated sculptures of the Early Renaissance, and the belated reappearance of some of them in the twentieth century has nothing intrinsically strange or suspicious about it. Set against this background, the article jointly considers three fifteenth-century sculptures by Michelangelo rediscovered during the las half century (the "Crucifix" in Santo Spirito, the "Young Saint John the Baptist" in Úbeda and the Galli "Cupid" in New York), focusing on the difficulties in their being definitively admitted to the artist's catalogue, but above all on the powerful reasons for their inclusión. Stylistic resemblances between these pieces and the rest of Michelangelo's oeuvre can be found, not without a few surprises, within both his established early output and his maturity, reaching as far as the Rondanini "Pietà".
