Prado museum in Madrid displays Young Saint John the Baptist, one of the few Michelangelo works outside Italy, after nearly 20 years of restoration work

It has been bombed, burned and smashed into pieces. Now, after nearly two decades of restoration work, Spain’s only sculpture by Michelangelo is triumphantly on display at the Prado museum, its turbulent history merely hinted at by cracks and burn marks.



Young Saint John the Baptist, one of the few Michelangelo pieces outside of Italy, is thought to have been created around 1495. Some 40 years later, the second Duke of Florence gifted the sculpture to Francisco de los Cobos, the secretary of state for the holy Roman emperor Charles V.

Cobos sent the sculpture, which is more than a metre tall, to Spain in the 16th century, where it ended up in a chapel in his southern hometown of Úbeda, 90 miles east of Córdoba.

In 1936, as Spain descended into civil war, the chapel came under attack. The sculpture was smashed and burned. “It was a complete destruction,” said Nuria de Miguel of the Friends of the Prado Museum Foundation.

From fragments of a forearm to a handful of curls, just 14 pieces remained of the sculpture, amounting to around 40% of the original work. Some attributed the attack to anarchists, but it is not known for sure who was responsible. The fragments remained in Úbeda, preciously guarded in a museum.

In the early 1990s, buoyed by new developments in art restoration, its owners began talks with Italy’s Opificio delle Pietre Dure, one of the world’s leading art restorers, based in Florence.

Rapidly advancing technology meant that a previously unimaginable reconstruction of the sculpture was now possible, said Ignacio de Medina of the Ducal House of the Medinaceli Foundation, which owns the sculpture. Even so, he said, “accepting this challenge was a brave thing, given the technical challenges”. In 1994, the sculpture fragments were sent to the restoration group in Italy.

The process lasted 19 years. Using various photographs and written accounts of the sculpture before it was destroyed, the team in Florence created a digital 3D image. This became their guide as they reassembled the piece using the original fragments of marble, and created missing pieces from fibreglass coated with stucco. A laser was used to clean off the original parts that had been blackened by fire. The restoration was completed in 2013.

As more than half of the piece had to be rebuilt, the restoration walks a fine line between capturing the original work and reflecting its tumultuous history, said Medina, pointing to several long scars and burn marks that can still be seen on the sculpture. “It restores the dignity of a sculpture that has been absurdly mistreated,” he said.

Calling it an “historic restoration”, the Prado museum director, Miguel Zugaza, pointed to its political undertones. Along with being a tale of pioneering artistic accomplishment, he said, the restoration was also a scathing rebuff of those who sought to destroy priceless artefacts for political gains, such as the recent apparent actions of Islamic State militants in Mosul’s central museum.

“We want this to be a social criticism against all the barbaric actions by iconoclasts that sadly continue to occur around the world,” he said.



Young Saint John the Baptist is on display at the Prado museum in Madrid until 28 June, after which it will be returned to its previous home of the Chapel of the Saviour in Úbeda.