• Scientific analysis links a Pietà painting to Michelangelo, based on pigments, monograms, and stylistic parallels.
• A researcher also attributes a bust in a Roman basilica to Michelangelo, arguing it was hidden to protect the artist’s works.
• The claims follow the $27.2 million sale of an alleged preparatory sketch by Michelangelo for his Sistine Chapel mural.

Even 550 years after his birth, Michelangelo Buonarroti’s body of work appears to keep growing. Scientific analysis has linked a Pietà scene to the Renaissance master, just as an Italian researcher is claiming a bust in a Roman basilica is similarly by his hand.

First up: the painting, which depicts Mary holding the dead Christ in her arms. It was acquired by a private collector, who spotted it at Wannenes Art Auctions in Genoa. In a catalog, the lot was described as a 16th–17th century work by an anonymous artist, “inspired by the models of Andrea del Sarto, Pontormo, Francesco Salviati, and, of course, Michelangelo.” When the collector received the canvas in 2024, he realized it bore two signatures and sent it away for technical analysis.

A monogram on The Spirituali Pietà, attributed to Michelangelo. Photo: Fedrik Johansson.

The study was conducted by the Royal Institute for Cultural Heritage of Belgium (KIK-IRPA), which dated the painting to 1520 and 1580, within Michelangelo’s lifetime. The work’s pigments also fell within that same period: a crimson hue, Cochineal red lake, dates to 1540, while a blue smalt was also used by Michelangelo on his Sistine Chapel frescos. 

X-ray fluorescence analysis further tied one of the monograms on the canvas to the Italian master. The signatures were also applied to the original dry paint layer, with crackles running through them, “so they were definitely not applied after the craquelure in the paint had formed,” Steven Saverwyns of the KIK-IRPA noted. A mysterious series of lines that accompanies the signatures has also been linked to the cryptic numbers 1-5-4 that appear in the master’s correspondence.

Detail of The Spirituali Pietà, attributed to Michelangelo. Photo: Fedrik Johansson.

Stylistic analysis offered more clues. The team found the multi-directional brushstrokes, such as the cross-hatching used to depict fabric and flesh, mirrored the same technique in The Torment of Saint Anthony. The presence of “reddish reserves” used around shapes to heighten their effect, too, represents what Michel Draguet of the Free University of Brussels called “a hallmark of the master’s hand.”

The iconography of Virgin and Christ is also one that Michelangelo returned to repeatedly—most notably his Pietà (1498–99), housed at St. Peter’s Basilica, and the Rondanini Pietà (1552–64), his last, unfinished sculpture at Sforza Castle in Milan. 

Michelangelo, Pietà (1498–99) in St. Peter’s Basilica in Vatican City. Photo: Laszlo Szirtesi / Getty Images.

In the current work, which has been titled Spirituali Pietà, the team has noted several of the master’s motifs, including the torso of Christ, which they note is borrowed from The Dream (ca. 1533), and his arms, which mirror that of Silenus in the bottom right of A Children’s Bacchanal (1533). Draguet deems the canvas “an essential milestone leading to the Bandini Pietà and the artist’s final work.”

Another Claim Emerges

Meanwhile, a bust hidden in plain sight in a Roman church has been attributed to Michelangelo by independent researcher Valentina Salerno, who suggests that it was one work among many that was secreted away to safeguard the artist’s creations.

The marble sculpture depicting Christ the Savior, held in the Basilica of St. Agnes Outside the Walls, was long believed to be the work of an anonymous artist. Salerno’s new, non-peer reviewed study, however, relies on a decade’s worth of archival research into notarial records, inventories, wills, and correspondence to link the bust to Michelangelo. 

“I am not an art historian—in fact, I don’t even have a university degree,” she told Reuters, “but the strength of ​my research lies in its reliance on public archival documents.”

Italian researcher Valentina Salerno in front of a marble bust in the Basilica of Santa Agnese Outside the Walls in Rome. Photo: Filippo Monteforte / AFP via Getty Images.

Though Salerno’s study shies away from stylistic analysis, she does note the bust’s resemblance to artist Tommaso dei Cavalieri. The old master was so besotted by the Italian youth that he dedicated several drawings to him in the 1530s.

The research further tests the long-held notion that Michelangelo was prone to destroy his work later in his life (he famously hacked away at the Bandini Pietà, from ca. 1547–55). Rather, Salerno suggests that his students had carefully stashed the artist’s works away in a locked chamber. It was part of Michelangelo’s “maniacal plan,” she told the AFP, to protect his artworks from being inherited by “a nephew he detested.”

“The goal was to pass on to his poor, vulnerable, non-noble descendants the material to be able to continue studying, to transmit his art to future generations,” she added.

A marble bust in the Basilica of Santa Agnese Outside the Walls linked to Michelangelo by Italian researcher Valentina Salerno. Photo: Filippo Monteforte / AFP via Getty Images.

While historians and experts have so far not weighed in on Salerno’s research, the Italian Cabinieri’s art squad is protecting the work with an alarm system.

These discoveries follow the recent resurfacing of a preparatory sketch identified as one of Michelangelo’s studies for his Sistine Chapel mural. The work sold at Christie’s last month for $27.2 million, making it the artist’s most valuable drawing to sell at auction.