Think back, if you will, to the works of art you cre­at­ed at age twelve or thir­teen. For many, per­haps most of us, our out­put at that stage of ado­les­cence amount­ed to direc­tion­less doo­dles, chaot­ic comics, and a few unsteady-at-best school projects. But then, most of us did­n’t grow up to be Michelan­ge­lo. In the late four­teen-eight­ies, when that tow­er­ing Renais­sance artist was still what we would now call a “tween,” he paint­ed The Tor­ment of Saint Antho­ny, a depic­tion of the tit­u­lar reli­gious fig­ure beset by demons in the desert. Though based on a wide­ly known engrav­ing, it nev­er­the­less shows evi­dence of rapid­ly advanc­ing tech­nique, inspi­ra­tion, and even cre­ativ­i­ty — espe­cial­ly when placed under the infrared scan­ner.

For about half a mil­len­ni­um, The Tor­ment of Saint Antho­ny was­n’t thought to have been paint­ed by Michelan­ge­lo. As explained in the video from Inspi­rag­gio just below, when the paint­ing sold at Sothe­by’s in 2008, the buy­er took it to the Met­ro­pol­i­tan Muse­um of Art for exam­i­na­tion and clean­ing.

“Beneath the lay­ers of dirt accu­mu­lat­ed over the cen­turies,” says the nar­ra­tor, “a very par­tic­u­lar col­or palette appeared. “The tones, the blends, the way the human fig­ure was treat­ed: all of it began to resem­ble the style Michelan­ge­lo would use years lat­er in none oth­er than the Sis­tine Chapel.” Infrared reflec­tog­ra­phy sub­se­quent­ly turned up pen­ti­men­ti, or cor­rec­tion marks, a com­mon indi­ca­tion that “a paint­ing is not a copy, but an orig­i­nal work cre­at­ed with artis­tic free­dom.”

It was the Kim­bell Art Muse­um in Fort Worth, Texas that first bet big on the prove­nance of The Tor­ment of Saint Antho­ny. Its new­ly hired direc­tor pur­chased the paint­ing after turn­ing up “not a sin­gle con­vinc­ing argu­ment against the attri­bu­tion.” Thus acquired, it became “the only paint­ing by Michelan­ge­lo locat­ed any­where in the Amer­i­c­as, and also just one of four easel paint­ings attrib­uted to him through­out his entire career,” dur­ing most of which he dis­par­aged oil paint­ing itself. About a decade lat­er, and after fur­ther analy­sis, the art his­to­ri­an Gior­gio Bon­san­ti put his con­sid­er­able author­i­ty behind a defin­i­tive con­fir­ma­tion that it is indeed the work of the young Michelan­ge­lo. There remain doubters, of course, and even the noto­ri­ous­ly uncom­pro­mis­ing artist him­self may have con­sid­ered it an imma­ture work unwor­thy of his name. But who else could have cre­at­ed an imma­ture work like it?

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Orig­i­nal Por­trait of the Mona Lisa Found Beneath the Paint Lay­ers of Leonar­do da Vinci’s Mas­ter­piece

When Michelan­ge­lo Cre­at­ed Artis­tic Designs for Mil­i­tary For­ti­fi­ca­tions to Pro­tect Flo­rence (1529–1530)

How Four Mas­ters — Michelan­ge­lo, Donatel­lo, Ver­roc­chio & Berni­ni — Sculpt­ed David

A Secret Room with Draw­ings Attrib­uted to Michelan­ge­lo Opens to Vis­i­tors in Flo­rence

Michelan­ge­lo Entered a Com­pe­ti­tion to Put a Miss­ing Arm Back on Lao­coön and His Sons — and Lost

Michelangelo’s Illus­trat­ed Gro­cery List

Based in Seoul, Col­in Marshall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. He’s the author of the newslet­ter Books on Cities as well as the books 한국 요약 금지 (No Sum­ma­riz­ing Korea) and Kore­an Newtro. Fol­low him on the social net­work for­mer­ly known as Twit­ter at @colinmarshall.

The term sur­re­al­ism — or rather, sur­réal­isme — orig­i­nates from the French words for “beyond real­i­ty.” That’s a zone, we may assume, reach­able by only dar­ing, and pos­si­bly unhinged, artis­tic minds. But in fact, even the most down-to-earth among us go beyond real­i­ty on a night­ly basis. We do so in our dreams, where the accept­ed mechan­ics of space and time, life and death, and cause and effect do not apply. Or rather, they’re replaced by anoth­er set of rules entire­ly, which feels per­fect­ly con­sis­tent and con­vinc­ing to us in the moment. Such “dream log­ic” may frus­trate the friends and fam­i­ly we attempt to regale with tales of our night visions, but as the sur­re­al­ists found, it could also be put to the ser­vice of endur­ing art.

In the Hochela­ga video above, that chan­nel’s cre­ator Tom­mie Trelawny pro­vides a long his­to­ry of sur­re­al­ism in a short run­ning time. Trac­ing that move­men­t’s roots, he goes all the way back to the ancient cul­ture of the Aus­tralian Abo­rig­i­nals, for whom the con­cept of the “dream­time” still plays an impor­tant role — and has inspired “pos­si­bly the old­est unbro­ken artis­tic tra­di­tion in the world.”

In oth­er places and oth­er eras of antiq­ui­ty, dreams were also con­sid­ered “a bridge for the spir­it world and the phys­i­cal one.” For the Egyp­tians, “these night­time voy­ages were a chance to see real­i­ty more clear­ly,” as evi­denced by resut, their word for “dream,” which also means “awak­en­ing.” Unsur­pris­ing­ly for reg­u­lar Hochela­ga view­ers, Trelawny also finds dreams in the Bible, “a book full of visions of the divine and glimpses into the cos­mic unknown.”

In every peri­od between antiq­ui­ty and now, art — includ­ing the work of Hierony­mus Bosch, Albrecht Dur­er, and Edvard Munch, as well as Japan­ese wood­block prints — has attempt­ed to cap­ture the sort of expe­ri­ences and imagery encoun­tered only in dreams, and indeed night­mares. But it was only in the wake of Sig­mund Freud’s The Inter­pre­ta­tion of Dreams, first pub­lished in 1899, that sur­re­al­ism could take shape, inspired by the ques­tion, “If the mind can reveal itself through dreams, what if it could reveal itself through art?” Après Freud came the uncon­scious­ness-inspired paint­ings of Gior­gio de Chiri­co, René Magritte, and of course Sal­vador Dalí. Yet none of them could have fore­seen the tru­ly sur­re­al­is­tic déluge that arti­fi­cial intel­li­gence has brought us. If AI reveals to us some­thing of how we think, its hal­lu­ci­na­tions reveal to us even more about how we dream.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

An Intro­duc­tion to Sur­re­al­ism: The Big Aes­thet­ic Ideas Pre­sent­ed in Three Videos

What Makes Sal­vador Dalí’s Icon­ic Sur­re­al­ist Paint­ing The Per­sis­tence of Mem­o­ry a Great Work of Art

Watch Dreams That Mon­ey Can Buy, a Sur­re­al­ist Film by Man Ray, Mar­cel Duchamp, Alexan­der Calder, Fer­nand Léger & Hans Richter

Europe After the Rain: Watch the Vin­tage Doc­u­men­tary on the Two Great Art Move­ments, Dada & Sur­re­al­ism (1978)

David Lynch Presents the His­to­ry of Sur­re­al­ist Film (1987)

The Fan­tas­tic Women Of Sur­re­al­ism: An Intro­duc­tion

Based in Seoul, Col­in Marshall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. He’s the author of the newslet­ter Books on Cities as well as the books 한국 요약 금지 (No Sum­ma­riz­ing Korea) and Kore­an Newtro. Fol­low him on the social net­work for­mer­ly known as Twit­ter at @colinmarshall.