Il 'San Giovannino' mediceo di Michelangelo, da Firenze a Úbeda

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 espec