20 Renaissance Artist Myths People Still Believe

Michelangelo didn’t lie on his back to paint the Sistine Chapel. Working for Pope Julius II, he built his own wooden scaffold attached to wall brackets. He worked standing up for four years, leaning back and craning his neck over the huge ceiling. A poem he wrote to a friend in 1510, accompanied by a self-portrait drawing, recounts the actual agony it caused, including a swollen neck.

Leonardo da Vinci’s most celebrated portrait has given rise to centuries of speculation over her identity. Some writers even suggested that the Mona Lisa was really Leonardo in disguise. In 2005, Dr. Armin Schlechter, a scholar at Heidelberg University, found the answer scribbled in the margin of a book. An entry in a document written by the Florentine clerk Agostino Vespucci in 1503 records that Leonardo was working on a portrait of Lisa, the wife of the silk merchant Francesco del Giocondo. The discovery settled the centuries-old debate over her identity.

On May 28, 1606, the painter Caravaggio (Michelangelo Merisi) fought an illegal sword duel at a Roman tennis court against the gang boss Ranuccio Tommasoni. The fight was over money and competition regarding Fillide Melandroni, a courtesan whom Tommasoni controlled. Caravaggio killed Tommasoni during the bout. The murder made him a fugitive, wanted under a death warrant by Pope Paul V, and he lived out his life on the run.

An image on one of the pages of the Codex Atlanticus, a Leonardo da Vinci notebook, appeared to be that of a two-wheeled bicycle. It was heralded by Italian scholar Augusto Marinoni as evidence that Leonardo had invented the bicycle long before anyone else thought of it. The paper was indeed original 15th-century stock, but German researcher Dr. Hans-Erhard Lessing showed that the pencil strokes had been made with modern graphite decades ago, when the document was being restored. The actual first bicycle was created in 1817 by German inventor Karl von Drais.

Michelangelo wore shabby clothes and often railed against his poverty, which did little to dispel the notion that artists must always be starving. But his estate was actually valued at some 50,000 gold florins when he died in 1564. That figure included farms and townhouses, according to art historian Rab Hatfield. In a locked chest next to his bed, Michelangelo had stashed 8,400 gold ducats in cold, hard cash.

It’s been well-documented that the Mona Lisa doesn’t appear to have any eyebrows or eyelashes. In 2007, French optical engineer Pascal Cotte was able to scan the masterpiece in the Louvre with 240-megapixel multispectral imaging, including ultraviolet and infrared, and found microscopic traces of a painted eyebrow hair above her left eye. Leonardo da Vinci had put the eyebrows and lashes on in super-thin glazes over the dry paint, and over five centuries, old cleanings and pigment decay just ate away at those fragile top layers.

The Renaissance painter Raphael (Raffaello Sanzio) died on April 6, 1520, at the young age of 37 following a 15-day bout of acute lung disease that was most probably pneumonia. 16th-century biographer Giorgio Vasari later attributed the demise to excessive love-making with his mistress Margherita Luti. But new research published in 2020 by a team headed by Dr. Michele Augusto Riva analyzed papal dispatches and contemporary physicians’ notes and concluded that the doctors repeatedly bled him, an old medical practice known as phlebotomy, which worsened his illness.

The reason for the small horns on the head of Michelangelo Buonarroti’s famous marble Moses, created between 1513 and 1515 for Pope Julius II’s tomb in Rome, is a mystery to most. It is no mistake. Saint Jerome, the ancient scholar who translated the Bible into Latin, mistranslated a Hebrew word in the book of Exodus that described Moses’s face as having “radiated.” He rendered it instead with a word derived from a root meaning “horn.” Michelangelo was merely using iconography that the Church had employed for a millennium.

It is no secret that the Greek-born painter El Greco, who made his career in Toledo, Spain, used exaggerated proportions when portraying human beings. In 1913, a Spanish ophthalmologist named Germán Beritens claimed that the painter’s astigmatism had distorted both his vision and his work. But researchers have shown that an astigmatic painter’s eyes would stretch the canvas in front of him by the same amount, canceling out any effect. One of his paintings, The Burial of the Count of Orgaz, includes normal-sized mortals beneath elongated heavenly figures, suggesting the distortion was intentional.

The Florentines burned objects from this world during their bonfire of the vanities in 1497 under the direction of the radical friar Girolamo Savonarola, who dominated the city with his message about the dangers of vanity. There’s a popular tale of Botticelli himself hurling his canvases into the fire. The art historian Giorgio Vasari didn’t write that; all he says is that Botticelli became an adherent of Savonarola and “deserted his painting.” It was 19th-century English historians who invented the story. Botticelli continued to produce mythological and other secular subjects for many years.

Long before Michelangelo carved a single chip out of it, a gigantic slab of marble, known as Il Gigante, or The Giant, had bested two sculptors. Agostino di Duccio had begun digging into its center, and Antonio Rossellino attempted it years later. Both gave up after discovering flaws in the stone. Florence’s cathedral authority had left the piece abandoned for decades until Michelangelo, in his mid-twenties, was commissioned to carve a statue from it. For several years, he labored on it, making David’s frame deliberately thin to work around its previous wounds.

Michelangelo and other Florentine sculptors of his day, such as Donatello, worked at a time when statues dug out of the earth still bore remnants of gilding, red cinnabar, and blue pigments. Anyone who picked up an artifact would see these colors clearly, and Pliny the Elder, the Roman writer whose work was studied by Renaissance scholars, wrote of painted statues. And yet, these men deliberately left their sculptures unpainted, choosing the interplay of light and shade rather than pigment.

Legend has it that in the year 1300 or thereabouts, a courtier sent by the pope requested a sample of Giotto di Bondone’s artistry. Giotto took a piece of paper and drew a perfect red circle, freehand, and then he handed over the sheet with the words “Here is your drawing.” This anecdote was popularized by Giorgio Vasari, a 16th-century biographer, but there is no contemporary record to support it. In fact, his original edition named the pope as Benedict IX, who died roughly two centuries before Giotto was born. Later editions corrected the name.

Lives of the Most Excellent Painters, Sculptors, and Architects was written by Giorgio Vasari, a Tuscan painter and writer in the 16th century, and published in 1550. It has been called “the first real art history book.” Art historians such as Patricia Rubin have shown that he invented dramatic dialogue between artists. He also minimized the importance of the major painters from Venice and northern Italy, namely Titian and Tintoretto. And he structured the whole history to end with Michelangelo, a fellow Tuscan, as the ultimate artist. A lot of our understanding of Renaissance art comes from him.

It’s true that Leonardo da Vinci would purchase caged birds in Florentine markets and set them free, and that helped fuel the popular modern claim that he was a strict vegetarian. The idea traces partly to a 1516 letter by traveler Andrea Corsali comparing diets in India to “our Leonardo da Vinci.” Yet Leonardo’s household accounting books in the Codex Atlanticus, one of his notebooks, list regular expenditures on veal, mutton, chicken, and fish.

Leonardo da Vinci’s notebooks were filled with mirrored writing, running right to left, which has led to speculation of secret codes over the years. Leonardo scholar Martin Kemp suggests it’s more likely that Leonardo was left-handed, and that drawing a quill across the paper left-to-right with wet iron-gall ink pulled his hand through the ink, smearing the page. So he reversed the direction. But there wasn’t much privacy: anyone holding up a mirror could easily read it. He wrote normal correspondence left-to-right.

There’s a popular factoid on the web that claims it took Leonardo da Vinci 12 years to paint the Mona Lisa’s lips. It was debunked long ago because the timeline of Leonardo’s known work on the Mona Lisa doesn’t support spending 12 years on just the lips. Nor does the science: A study by the C2RMF (France’s center for museum research and restoration) of the Mona Lisa has shown that there were many layers of incredibly thin, translucent glazes, or sfumato, measuring only micrometers. These were applied to all of the subject’s facial features, including her eyes, cheeks, and mouth. Leonardo continued to work on the entire painting until his death in France in 1519, having begun in 1503.

It was widely assumed that the Venetian painter Titian (Tiziano Vecellio) had lived nearly to 100, passing away in what his own letters stated was his 99th year. But scholar Charles Hope and London’s National Gallery uncovered the real motive: Titian inflated his age in begging letters to King Philip II of Spain, his main patron, who routinely delayed paying him for commissions. Based on stylistic analysis, his true date of birth is thought to be around 1490, making his actual age at death late in his 80s.

Michelangelo sculpted the marble Pietà for St. Peter’s Basilica in Rome from 1498 to 1499, at age 24. His biographer, Giorgio Vasari, writes that Michelangelo overheard visitors praising Solari, a Lombard sculptor, for sculpting it. This annoyed him, so he came back to the statue at night and inscribed his name on Mary’s sash. He allegedly felt bad about the vanity and never signed another work of art. He didn’t sign David or Moses either.

Baroque painter Artemisia Gentileschi (1593-1656) is sometimes portrayed as the only woman artist in history. But she wasn’t. Sofonisba Anguissola was already the court painter of King Philip II of Spain and was teaching and mentoring other artists around Europe. Lavinia Fontana was the first woman to paint large-scale public altarpieces and female nudes. Plautilla Nelli, a Florentine nun, headed an all-female workshop that produced massive paintings for churches. They all had recorded careers before Gentileschi’s own.

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