For almost half a century art historical literature has concurred that the
marble 'San Giovannino' (“Young Saint John the Baptist”) carved by
Michelangelo for Lorenzo di Pierfrancesco de' Medici is an entirely lost
and unknown work. This article, already announced by the author in 2000,
seeks instead to demonstrate that it is one of the six or seven candidates
unsuccessfully proposed by scholars up to 1964, and indeed the least
successful of all: the 'San Giovannino' that belonged to Francisco de los
Cobos (c. 1477-1547), secretary of the Emperor Charles V, and was given by
him to his chapel-mausoleum of El Salvador in úbeda (Andalusia) – a
sculpture with a doubly unfortunate fate, as it was half destroyed in 1936,
during the Spanish Civil War.
The statue's attribution to Michelangelo, proposed by Manuel Gómez-Moreno
in 1930, has been systematically rejected or overlooked by scholars to the
present day, and the author must therefore reiterate it, as if for the
first time.
The article opens with a comprehensive review of the bibliography on the
Medici 'San Giovannino' that aims to show how the statue in úbeda has never
been able to assert itself among other candidates, above all because of the
crushing critical weight of some among those who most strongly favoured
these other works (including Wilhelm Bode, Heinrich Wölfflin and Roberto
Longhi).
There follows a census of all the images of the úbeda statue prior to 1936
that can be identified in historic European photographic archives
(published here as figs. 1-17).
Before a stylistic and qualitative reading of the work – the starting-point
of the author's research, and at the very heart of this article – there is
a sort of digression on the terminology and iconography of “San Giovannino”
during the Renaissance. The diminutive term “Giovannino”, now used
indiscriminately in Italian to denote all images of the Precursor as
infant, child, adolescent or young man, was limited during the Renaissance
to his infancy and childhood: thus none of the old candidates proposed as
Michelangelo's Medicean commission is a 'San Giovannino', except the one in
úbeda. This section of the essay also casts light on the extraordinary
novelty of the sculpture that belonged to Cobos with respect to the
statuary images of the Baptist as a child or adolescent produced before the
sixteenth century.
The revelation of the work's style and quality benefits from comparison
with many other sculptures and paintings by Michelangelo, but especially
the 'Bacchus' and the so-called “Manchester Madonna”, which allows the
dating of the úbeda statue to be narrowed down to 1495-96, that is, to the
years in which the 'San Giovannino' cited by Ascanio Condivi and Giorgio
Vasari has always been dated (thanks to their mentions of it).
The reattribution to Michelangelo of the statue in úbeda quite naturally
leads to the certainty that it once belonged to Pierfrancesco di Lorenzo di
Giovanni's branch of the Medici family. Curiously no one who studied the
'San Giovannino', except for John Shearman (1975), has ever come to the
conclusion – an elementary one – that the work must have remained in the
Medici's Casa Vecchia in Florence until the assassination of Duke
Alessandro by Lorenzino in 1537: but at this point Shearman, who did not
believe in the statue in úbeda, nor in the other statues of Saint John
proposed as works by Michelangelo, gave up his research.
Another certainty, easy to infer from early sources, is that immediately
after Lorenzino fled from Florence, all the goods of the younger branch of
the Medici passed to Cosimo I, the sole legitimate descendant of
Pierfrancesco still in Florence, and new Lord of the city and its state.
From Cosimo to Cobos the passage is entirely smooth, since it is well known
that during the months of his rise to power, Cosimo put his whole trust in
an alliance with Charles V through his omnipotent secretary (who was
accustomed to diplomatic gifts from Italian rulers in the form of works of
art, such as the paintings by Titian he received from Federico II Gonzaga
and Alfonso I d'Este). Letters in the Mediceo del Principato
correspondence in the Florence State Archives confirm that in the summer of
1537 Cosimo made a gift to Cobos, sent directly to him in Andalusia, of a
“statua”: this can only be the 'San Giovannino' documented shortly
thereafter at Sabiote (a feudal property that passed to Cobos precisely in
that year), and finally in the chapel of El Salvador in úbeda, founded in
1536.
A first appendix of archival and historical sources on how Medici property
passed from Lorenzino to Cosimo I in 1537 is followed by a second appendix
that shows how when he shipped Michelangelo's 'San Giovannino' to Cobos,
Cosimo must have already owned a second statue by the same master, which
had entered his possession after the political unrest of those months: the
'Apollo' made for Baccio Valori, which always remained in the Medici
collection, unlike the 'San Giovannino' that ended up in Spain.

translated by Frank E. Dabell