Le Tourment de saint Antoine

This is the earliest known painting by Michelangelo, made around 1487 when he was only twelve or thirteen and apprenticed in a busy Florentine workshop. It began as a copy. A German engraving of Saint Anthony being hauled through the air and beaten by a swarm of demons was circulating, and the boy set out to paint it. But he did not simply reproduce it. He tightened the tangle of clawed and feathered creatures, gave their bodies real weight and turn, and added something the print never had, a stretch of quiet river valley in the background, the kind of Tuscan landscape around Florence that was the only country he actually knew. It is one of only a handful of easel paintings accepted as his, and the sole Michelangelo panel in an American collection.