As published in the New Yorker

The Crayola scrawl that your mom taped to the refrigerator wasn't as good as the centerpiece of "Michelangelo's First Painting," a show, busy with curatorial paraphernalia, that has been drawing crowds at the Met all summer. But the fulsome presentation of "The Torment of Saint Anthony" (1487-88), painted when the artist was twelve or thirteen, could take you back to parental raptures of "Oh, look! Isn't he wonderful?" The exhaustively authenticated picture copies a German engraving of the time: the glum monk being savaged by gaudy demons in midair, in a mountain landscape. Michelangelo worked hard on it, infrared analysis shows. He gave the monsters piquantly naturalistic nuances, such as accurate fish scales. A flavorful palette, while somewhat out of control, distantly predicts purplish and greenish notes in the Sistine Chapel. But the work, a Gothic goof, is less art than artifact and, in the show, a cult object. The grownup Michelangelo would blench. Soon the painting will be off to its recent purchaser, the Kimbell Art Museum, in Fort Worth. ♦