Michelangelo only signed one piece of art.
Michelangelo is one of the few people in history whose work has spanned the centuries with no need for a last name. Hundreds of his surviving works of art — including sculptures, paintings, and drawings — don’t even bear an artist’s mark. That’s because the artist only ever signed one piece, the Madonna della Pietà, and his doing so likely stemmed from misplaced credit.
Michelangelo was commissioned to sculpt the Pietà in the late 1490s. As he was just 24 years old at the time, it was one of his earliest projects, and a piece that helped launch him into the spotlight. The sculpture, which was created as a funeral monument for French Cardinal Jean de Bilhères, depicts the Virgin Mary holding the body of Jesus following the Crucifixion. The young artist sculpted the piece from one cut of marble and finished the job in under two years. According to fellow Renaissance artist and friend Giorgio Vasari, Michelangelo’s statue initially bore no indication of its creator, but the artist supposedly changed his mind after overhearing his work credited to a rival; he snuck back to chisel his name prominently onto the sash across Mary’s chest.
Shame at the rash decision likely kept Michelangelo from signing his future works of art, though the artist did find other ways of inserting his likeness into his work. In the Sistine Chapel, Michelangelo imposed his own features onto St. Bartholomew — who was skinned alive — possibly as a joke meant to share his disdain for the physically grueling project.
A replica of Michelangelo’s David has been housed at the Victoria & Albert Museum in London since 1857, but there was a time when it underwent some adjustments thanks to the queen of England. Several plaster replicas of David have been made, and in the mid-1800s, one was shipped to Great Britain as a gift from Leopold II, the Grand Duke of Tuscany, to Queen Victoria. Victoria had two main issues with the sculpture — its staggering 20-foot height and its nudity — and sent the statue to the museum, where, based on the queen’s initial horrified response, curators created a 2-foot plaster fig leaf to cover the offending organ. According to the Victoria & Albert Museum, the leaf was attached with the help of “strategically placed hooks” any time museum staff believed royal ladies might visit. However, today the David replica stands frondless, as the artist originally intended.
