Why the Royal Academy is wrong to consider selling their precious Michelangelo

How much does a Michelangelo cost? It is, as they say, a good question, meaning: nobody really knows. The reason for this odd state of affairs is that almost none of them have ever been bought and sold on the open market, which is how the prices of most things are established. It’s hard to think of many examples of his sculptures being traded in that way over the past 500 years.

Strangely, the main exception is the ‘Taddei Tondo’, otherwise known as ‘Virgin and Child with the Infant St John’, which, reportedly, some members of the Royal Academy are suggesting the RA should sell. If that were to happen, which I very much hope it does not, we might learn the answer to the conundrum. Probably it would be a very large sum indeed.

Of course, during his lifetime Michelangelo was paid for his works, and handsomely so, by his patrons, who mainly comprised a series of popes. By the time he died in 1564, at the age of almost 89, he was probably the richest artist who had ever lived (and possibly retained that position until Damien Hirst came along).

After his death, a chest was discovered in his austere bedroom, stuffed with coins and bullion amounting to roughly the sum the Medici family had recently spent on buying the Pitti Palace. But this accounted for less than half the artist’s assets, the remainder having been invested in land and houses around Florence.

However, as the great man once angrily explained to his nephew, he had never ‘kept a shop’. By that he meant he hadn’t produced paintings and carvings on spec for any passing duke or cardinal. Most of his marbles, and nearly all his paintings, have always been immovably fixed to buildings in Rome and Florence.