Sanderson of the Times reports that the Rothschild bronzes’ first recorded appearance in the art history canon dates to 1878, when Julie von Rothschild, wife of Baron Adolphe Carl von Rothschild, purchased them in Venice. The majority of Renaissance sculptures place male pubic hair in a triangle pointing down toward the genitalia, but Michelangelo’s reverse the direction with patches of curls. Both are present in the newly attributed sculptures.Ī final anatomical clue to the bronzes’ provenance is the figures’ pubic hair. A thigh muscle known as the sartorius, for example, isn’t visible to the untrained eye but would be easily recognized by an anatomist, while triangles of auscultation (spots in the small of the back which lack muscle and bone) weren’t even recorded by researchers until a generation after the Rothschilds were cast. Michelangelo is one of the few Renaissance artists known to have dissected human bodies, affording him an advanced insight of the body’s inner workings. The painstaking attention to detail apparent in the sculptures speaks to their creator’s extensive knowledge of anatomy, Abrahams tells the Guardian. This same trend is evident in the Rothschild bronzes, and the effect, according to Abrahams, is a bit like the men are wearing flip-flops. The figures’ toes offer another vital link to Michelangelo of the 40 total toes scattered throughout his oeuvre, all but two feature a short, outward-leaning big toe and a long second toe. “But if you were a guy lifting masonry stone you would have very developed muscles.” “They look slightly on steroids, slightly pumped up, like bodybuilders,” Abrahams says. That suggests the same (muscular) model sat for all eight works. Peter Abrahams, a clinical anatomist at Warwick Medical School, tells the Telegraph’s Anita Singh that the sculpted pair’s eight-pack torsos mirror similarly impressive washboards seen in two of the artist’s statues and five of his drawings. As the Times’ David Sanderson notes, three known bronzes made by the artist have been lost over the centuries: A colossal statue of Pope Julius II was melted down by anti-papal rebels soon after its creation, a second was turned into a cannon during the French Revolution and a third disappeared from France around the same time.Įxperts first floated the potential Michelangelo attribution back in 2015, according to CNN's Matthew Robinson. If proven true, the team’s findings would make the Rothschild sculptures Michelangelo’s only surviving bronzes. Only Michelangelo, the research team argues, could be behind such muscular eight-pack abdomens, unruly pubic hair-and disproportionate toes. But whose hand was behind such virile masterpieces? As Mark Brown reports for the Guardian, researchers from Cambridge’s Fitzwilliam Museum and the University of Cambridge have compiled a book of evidence positing that the Renaissance giant Michelangelo was the creator of such impressive specimens of the human form. The pair of early 16th-century Florentine sculptures, which depict two nude men riding astride panthers, certainly makes an impression.

If you’d ever seen the Rothschild bronzes, you’d remember.

Michelangelo bronze julius ii