The Guardian picks up on the ARTNews article putting forth the claim that New York’s Metropolitan Museum owns a Michaelangelo that it bought 40 years ago as the work of another lesser painter:
Saint John the Baptist Bearing Witness has long been attributed to the workshop of Francesco Granacci, a Florentine Renaissance painter, but hardly a household name today. Now Everett Fahy, former head of European paintings at the Met, has hailed it as the work of the Renaissance genius. Evidence found in the imagery and the underdrawing, the sketch beneath the painting, has led him to conclude that Michelangelo painted it in 1506, two years before he began work on the Sistine ceiling.
The Met bought the painting at Sotheby’s London for about £60,000 as “close circle of Francesco Granacci”. Today, as a Granacci, it would be worth perhaps £400,000. As a Michelangelo, its value would be at least £150m.
Michaelangelo at the Met (The Guardian)
