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James Draper: Hello, I’m James Draper, the Henry R. Kravis Curator of European Sculpture and Decorative Arts at The Metropolitan Museum of Art. The Museum is now displaying the marble sculpture of a young archer attributed to the young Michelangelo. This fragmentary figure of a nude youth, missing arms and lower legs, was previously in the Fifth Avenue mansion that has housed the Cultural Services office of the French Embassy for several decades. The sculpture's on view at the Metropolitan Museum for ten years as a special loan from the French Republic’s Ministry of Foreign and European Affairs. It shows every sign of having been the piece that belonged to a Florentine banker living in Rome in the sixteenth century who owned something that is variously described as a Cupid or an Apollo, but with a vase at his feet that’s just got to be this figure. The explanation for that sort of flange of marble that comes off his left leg is, in fact, the edge of that vase that also helped support the figure. So then it lay neglected—although a couple of artists did draw it, so we can do a lot to reconstruct the limbs—until it passed into the hands of a Florentine dealer named Bardini, whose collection was sold at Christie’s in London in 1905. He preserved the thought that it was by Michelangelo, said that it came from the gardens of Villa Borghese, which is where the later draftsmen certainly saw it. But it didn’t find a buyer at that London |
