ROME (AP) — An independent researcher claimed Wednesday that a marble bust of Christ in a Rome church is the work of Michelangelo, the latest claim from the Renaissance genius who is one of the world’s most imitated artists.
Valentina Salerno’s unsubstantiated claims have unsettled Renaissance scholars, particularly a recent sketch thought to be of Michelangelo’s foot, but which some question is a copy and which recently sold for $27.2 million at a Christie’s auction.
Given the stakes – and Salerno’s suggestion that several other works can now be attributed to Michelangelo based on his documentary research – many leading experts declined to comment.
Salerno published her theory on the commercial website academia.edu, a non-peer-reviewed social network for academics, and announced the first “rediscovery” at a press conference on Wednesday.
The claims may have received more attention than usual, given that the Vatican seemed at least initially interested in them. Friday marks the 550th anniversary of Michelangelo’s birth, and a host of exhibitions, conferences and commemorations are drawing renewed attention to his genius and legacy.
The Rev. Franco Bergamin, the abbot of the monastery that runs the church, said the culture ministry had been invited to Salerno’s press conference but did not attend. The Gendarmerie Art Group declined to assess the statue’s authenticity but said it was being protected. The sculpture now bears a laminated sign: “Alert Armed.”
Lieutenant Colonel Paolo Salvatori said: “Whether it belongs to Michelangelo Buonarroti or not, we want this asset that is part of our cultural heritage to become part of the national heritage that we have a duty to defend.”
“Documentary evidence on the matter”
Michelangelo Buonarroti, who lived from 1475 to 1564, created some of the most spectacular works of the Renaissance: the majestic David in Florence, the exquisite Pietà in St. Peter’s Basilica, the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel and the Last Judgment fresco behind the church’s altar. Salerno now says she has found another bust of Christ in the Basilica of Sant’Agnès Forrele-Mura, which the Italian Culture Ministry classifies as an anonymous figure of the 16th-century Roman School.
She’s not the first to claim this. In 1996, Michelangelo expert William Wallace published an article in ArtNews about the historical record of erroneously attributing works to Michelangelo. It quoted the 19th-century French writer Stendhal as saying that in the Church of Saint-Agnès, “we noticed the head of the Redeemer, which I swear was Michelangelo’s.”
“Despite Stendhal’s oaths, the head was never taken seriously and today would not even appear in the catalog raisonné of ‘Refuse to Belong,'” Wallace wrote.
Salerno said several documents from the first few hundred years after Michelangelo’s death correctly attributed the work to the artist, but in 1984 a scholar debunked it as wrong, in her opinion, and it has been misattributed ever since.
“I have and will continue to provide – I hope, because research continues – a body of documented evidence on this,” she said. “There will be experts in the field who will conduct their own investigations. So far we can say that, according to the documents, the object is attributed to Michelangelo.”
She said the bust, modeled after Michelangelo’s close friend Tommaso de Cavalieris, was part of the great artistic legacy that Michelangelo left to his friends and students after his death. Salerno said she reached her conclusion by tracing wills, inventories and notarial documents in church and state archives as well as in the archives of the Roman brotherhood to which Michelangelo and his students belonged.
Salerno is an actress and fiction writer with no college degree or expertise in art history. She said she fell into the research “accidentally” a decade ago when she began writing a novel about Michelangelo.
According to her research published on academia.edu, Salerno found evidence of a secret “indissolvable agreement” between some of Michelangelo’s students and his heirs to preserve Michelangelo’s works after his death. She said the agreement included the existence of a previously unknown chamber whose lock could only be opened with three keys held by three different students.
Vatican takes notice
Salerno’s research attracted the attention of Cardinal Mauro Gambetti, director of St. Peter’s Basilica. He appointed Salerno and her mentor to a scientific committee set up in 2025 to discuss a possible exhibition at the Vatican to mark the anniversary of Michelangelo’s birth.
The committee’s work has not yet made any progress. Its members downplayed the importance of Salerno’s work or refused to discuss it.
Some expressed surprise that she would join a committee made up of some of the world’s leading Renaissance and Michelangelo scholars, including Barbara Jatta, director of the Vatican Museums, Hugo Chapman, curator of Italian and French painting from 1400 to 1800 at the British Museum, and Wallace, a professor of art history at Washington University in St. Louis.
When contacted by The Associated Press, Jatta distanced herself from the Vatican commission and said she was appointed to it but that it was Gambetti’s project.
The British Museum declined to make Chapman available for comment. Gambetti’s office did not respond to a request. Other committee members declined to comment.
Wallace told The Associated Press that Salerno’s methodology was sound, noting that Europe has a long tradition of solid work by non-certified researchers. He said he agreed with her argument that Michelangelo did not destroy his work in the fire, a widely held view at the time but debunked by scholars over the years. Instead, he agreed with Salerno that Michelangelo entrusted the remaining works of his final years to his students to complete his projects.
But he questions Salerno’s conclusion that Michelangelo’s vast treasure was secretly hidden and therefore ripe for new discoveries, saying Michelangelo simply didn’t produce that many works in the last years of his life. Michelangelo was in Rome overseeing six architectural projects. He said the drawings he made were sketches to solve technical problems on the site and most likely could not survive because they were only “working drawings”.
Wallace agreed that the existence of a secret chamber that could only be opened with three keys was new. But he said proper academic scholarship would require Salerno to transcribe the documents and allow for a peer-review process, which Salerno said she would do.
Italy is no stranger to new discoveries by older artists, and fakes, frauds, and new “discoveries” by Modigliani and other artists have appeared regularly in the art historical community.
“I think there are 45 contributions I’ve made to Michelangelo since 2000, and none of them are ones you can remember or mention, but every one of them comes with a title like: ‘The greatest discovery of its time’ (or) ‘It will change everything we think about Michelangelo,'” Wallace said. “Five years later, we don’t even remember what it was.”
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