Il ‘San Giovannino’ mediceo di Michelangelo, da Firenze a Úbeda

For almost half a century art historical literature has concurred that the marble ‘San Giovannino’ (“Young Saint John the Baptist”) carved by Michelangelo for Lorenzo di Pierfrancesco de’ Medici is an entirely lost and unknown work. This article, already announced by the author in 2000, seeks instead to demonstrate that it is one of the six or seven candidates unsuccessfully proposed by scholars up to 1964, and indeed the least successful of all: the ‘San Giovannino’ that belonged to Francisco de los Cobos (c. 1477-1547), secretary of the Emperor Charles V, and was given by him to his chapel-mausoleum of El Salvador in Úbeda (Andalusia) – a sculpture with a doubly unfortunate fate, as it was half destroyed in 1936, during the Spanish Civil War. The statue’s attribution to Michelangelo, proposed by Manuel Gómez-Moreno in 1930, has been systematically rejected or overlooked by scholars to the present day, and the author must therefore reiterate it, as if for the first time. The article opens with a comprehensive review of the bibliography on the Medici ‘San Giovannino’ that aims to show how the statue in Úbeda has never been able to assert itself among other candidates, above all because of the crushing critical weight of some among those who most strongly favoured these other works (including Wilhelm Bode, Heinrich Wölfflin and Roberto Longhi). There follows a census of all the images of the Úbeda statue prior to 1936 that can be identified in historic European photographic archives (published here as figs. 1-17). Before a stylistic and qualitative reading of the work – the starting-point of the author’s research, and at the very heart of this article – there is a sort of digression on the terminology and iconography of “San Giovannino” during the Renaissance. The diminutive term “Giovannino”, now used indiscriminately in Italian to denote all images of the Precursor as infant, child, adolescent or young man, was limited during the Renaissance to his infancy and childhood: thus none of the old candidates proposed as Michelangelo’s Medicean commission is a ‘San Giovannino’, except the one in Úbeda. This section of the essay also casts light on the extraordinary novelty of the sculpture that belonged to Cobos with respect to the statuary images of the Baptist as a child or adolescent produced before the sixteenth century. The revelation of the work’s style and quality benefits from comparison with many other sculptures and paintings by Michelangelo, but especially the ‘Bacchus’ and the so-called “Manchester Madonna”, which allows the dating of the Úbeda statue to be narrowed down to 1495-96, that is, to the years in which the ‘San Giovannino’ cited by Ascanio Condivi and Giorgio Vasari has always been dated (thanks to their mentions of it). The reattribution to Michelangelo of the statue in Úbeda quite naturally leads to the certainty that it once belonged to Pierfrancesco di Lorenzo di Giovanni’s branch of the Medici family. Curiously no one who studied the ‘San Giovannino’, except for John Shearman (1975), has ever come to the conclusion – an elementary one – that the work must have remained in the Medici’s Casa Vecchia in Florence until the assassination of Duke Alessandro by Lorenzino in 1537: but at this point Shearman, who did not believe in the statue in Úbeda, nor in the other statues of Saint John proposed as works by Michelangelo, gave up his research. Another certainty, easy to infer from early sources, is that immediately after Lorenzino fled from Florence, all the goods of the younger branch of the Medici passed to Cosimo I, the sole legitimate descendant of Pierfrancesco still in Florence, and new Lord of the city and its state. From Cosimo to Cobos the passage is entirely smooth, since it is well known that during the months of his rise to power, Cosimo put his whole trust in an alliance with Charles V through his omnipotent secretary (who was accustomed to diplomatic gifts from Italian rulers in the form of works of art, such as the paintings by Titian he received from Federico II Gonzaga and Alfonso I d’Este). Letters in the "Mediceo del Principato" correspondence in the Florence State Archives confirm that in the summer of 1537 Cosimo made a gift to Cobos, sent directly to him in Andalusia, of a “statua”: this can only be the ‘San Giovannino’ documented shortly thereafter at Sabiote (a feudal property that passed to Cobos precisely in that year), and finally in the chapel of El Salvador in Úbeda, founded in 1536. A first appendix of archival and historical sources on how Medici property passed from Lorenzino to Cosimo I in 1537 is followed by a second appendix that shows how when he shipped Michelangelo’s ‘San Giovannino’ to Cobos, Cosimo must have already owned a second statue by the same master, which had entered his possession after the political unrest of those months: the ‘Apollo’ made for Baccio Valori, which always remained in the Medici collection, unlike the ‘San Giovannino’ that ended up in Spain.