Miguel Ángel Buonarroti had a guiding principle to carry out his sculptural work. In the bowels of each stone there is a sculpture, and it is the sculptor's job to discover it. Thus he earned the recognition of his colleagues during the Italian Renaissance. Therefore, finding Michelangelo's fingerprint on one of his sculptures caused great joy.
The Victoria and Albert Museum, in London, revealed it. A fingerprint of the artist could be perfectly preserved on the skin of one of his least known sculptures. A recent analysis of a wax sculpture made the discovery possible. The fingerprint appears blurred, as if it had been the result of a quick and accidental movement.
never seen
This sculpture was designed as a study for another larger scale piece. It was planned to be placed in St. Peter's Basilica, in the Vatican and it is known as The slave. Something new was discovered: on the skin, there is a mark.
They had never seen her. Experts attribute this lack of visibility to the environmental conditions under which the piece had been stored. A slight change in the warmth or humidity of the rooms must have melted a minimal amount of skin over the buttocks. where the fragment of a fingerprint can clearly be seen. The design is originally by Michelangelo, so the mark must be his.
Before he died, Michelangelo had most of his unfinished works burned. Along with notes, drawing notebooks and other papers of his authorship, everything ended up on a burning pyre in Rome. But the study of The slave survived. Peta Motture is Senior Curator at the Victoria and Albert Museum. She claims that Michelangelo's fingerprint was a 'fascinating' serendipity.
Connection with Michelangelo
“It is an exciting prospect that one of Michelangelo's prints has survived in wax,” he said in the institution's statement. “Such marks would suggest the physical presence of an artist's creative process. It is where the mind and the hand somehow come together.
Thus, today you can have access to a more personal level of the artist. In his words, to a “more direct connection” to his work, his work and his unfinished legacy. This remains a mystery to art historians. The fingerprint is a piece of light on a dark past, still inaccessible to contemporary review.
