A fair price
Four soldi a pound
In the spring of 1487, mullet at the Mercato Vecchio in Florence sold for four soldi a pound, and the Buonarroti household owed a fishmonger named Bastiano Grassi a little over three lire. The debt sits in Lodovico Buonarroti’s account book for April, between lamp oil and the hire of a mule. One line further down, in the same cramped hand, Lodovico wrote another word: quadretto, a small picture.
The apprentice
His son Michelangelo was twelve and had been at Domenico Ghirlandaio’s workshop since the winter, grinding colours and drawing whatever the older boys left lying about. His father had agreed to the arrangement the way people agree to have a tooth pulled. An older apprentice, Francesco Granacci, lent the boy a German print of Saint Anthony being carried into the air by demons, on condition that it came back clean. It came back with a green thumbprint on the margin.
Michelangelo painted his copy on a poplar board sawn from an old cupboard door, at the end of the kitchen table after the workshop closed. It took him seven weeks. He wanted real scales for the demons, so most mornings for a fortnight he stood at Grassi’s stall and drew the fish. “The fish were better than the print,” he told Granacci. “The man who made the print never went to the market.” Grassi let him look for nothing. He started charging when the boy began taking fish home to draw by lamplight, which is how the bill reached three lire.
The picture
The saint hangs in the middle of the panel, upright, with a white beard down to his belt, while a crowd of creatures pulls at him. One has the head of a bird and a body of silver-green scales. Another swings a club at his head, and a red one hauls at his cloak from below. The sky behind them is the pale grey-green of a fishmonger’s tiles. Underneath, a river runs out towards a small town, and a single boat with a white sail sits on the water, which the print does not have. Infrared photographs show that the saint’s face was first painted looking up at the demon with the club. At some point it was turned to look straight ahead.
The second day
At that age, Granacci said later, the boy finished things and then got rid of them. Drawings went into the kitchen fire, and panels were scraped back to the wood and used again. “He could not stand them on the second day,” Granacci told a cousin, who wrote it down. Of everything Michelangelo made between twelve and fifteen, this is the only piece known to survive, and it survived because it was out of the house before the second day.
Lodovico settled the fish bill in May. In the account book the debt is crossed out, and so is the word quadretto. Grassi hung the panel on a nail behind his stall, above the weighing scales. Asked about it as an old man, Michelangelo said only: “It was a fair price. They were good mullet.” For the rest of that summer he walked to the workshop by a longer street.
Fort Worth
The panel passed through the Grassi family, a convent outside Prato and three dealers, and it now hangs in a museum in Fort Worth, Texas. It is 47 centimetres high. The museum hangs it with its centre 1.42 metres from the floor, a little lower than the pictures on either side, which puts the fish-scaled demon at about the eye level of a twelve-year-old.
