In July 2008 this panel sold at Sotheby’s for about $2 million as a product of Ghirlandaio’s workshop. Then the Metropolitan Museum took the varnish off, and the Kimbell paid a reported $6 million-plus for the earliest surviving painting by Michelangelo.

The subject is borrowed, and openly. Michelangelo — twelve or thirteen, apprenticed in Domenico Ghirlandaio’s Florence workshop, working around 1487–88 — copied an engraving by Martin Schongauer of Saint Anthony ambushed in mid-air by demons. Copying prints was standard training. What is not standard is what the boy did with it: he tightened Schongauer’s composition, put a landscape under a scene that had none, and gave the demons a skin nobody had drawn before.

That last part is the story everyone tells, and it is better attested than most studio anecdotes. Both Giorgio Vasari and Ascanio Condivi record that Michelangelo went to the fish market to study the shape and colour of fins, eyes and scales before painting the creatures — and Condivi’s account was written under the artist’s own supervision, which puts it about as close to first-person as the sixteenth century gets. The demons are imaginary. Their surfaces were observed.

The attribution rests on the cleaning. At the Metropolitan Museum in 2008–09, layers of yellowed varnish and clumsy discoloured overpaint came off, revealing the palette underneath; technical examination then found the painter’s own changes worked into the panel, which is evidence of an original composition rather than a copyist following a print. The stylistic case — the emphatic cross-hatching in particular — followed from there. The Kimbell acquired it in May 2009.

It is worth saying plainly that the authorship is still disputed by some scholars, which is the honest state of the record rather than a footnote. What is not in dispute is the rarity: four panel paintings in total are attributed to Michelangelo, and this is the only one in the Americas. Oil and tempera, on a panel measuring just 47 by 35 centimetres — smaller than a sheet of A2, hanging in Fort Worth.