Crouching Boy
Michelangelo (1475-1564) · 1530 to 1534
A naked boy crouches on a block of marble, folded so tightly over himself that his chest rests on his thighs and his hands reach down to his foot, as if he is picking a thorn from it or simply gathering himself. The head is bowed, the face barely defined. The figure is only about half a metre high, but the compression of the body gives it a weight far beyond its size. He seems to be trying to fit himself back inside the stone.
Michelangelo made the sculpture in the early 1530s, at the time he was working on the tombs of the Medici family in the New Sacristy of San Lorenzo in Florence, and it was probably intended for a niche in one of those tombs. Look closely and you can see the toothed chisel marks over the whole surface: the back is roughly hewn, the face is only blocked out, while the knees and shoulders are more finished. Whether the sculpture was abandoned or deliberately left in this state is still debated, but the rawness fits the mood of Michelangelo's late work, in which figures struggle against the marble that holds them. Walk around it, because the pose only makes sense from several angles.
The statue was recorded in the Medici collection and was bought in the eighteenth century by the English collector Lyde Browne, from whom Catherine the Great acquired it in 1785 with the rest of his antiquities. For a long time it stood in the park at Tsarskoye Selo before being recognised and brought to the Hermitage. It is the only sculpture by Michelangelo in Russia and one of very few outside Italy. Notice the small hole drilled at the top of the block: it may have been for a mounting pin, a hint that the figure was meant to be placed high up and seen from below.
Did You Know? Catherine the Great bought the sculpture in 1785 as part of an English collection of antiquities, apparently without special notice of its author.
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