Il Giovannino Perduto: An Attribution Hypothesis for Michelangelo Buonarroti. Five Converging Lines of Evidence on the Candidate Art History Never Examined

In 1570, a notary in Úbeda described a sculpture of the infant Saint John the Baptist — today one of the serious candidates for Michelangelo's lost Giovannino — as an alabaster image. Four hundred and fifty years later, two independent laboratories, separated by twenty-five years of technological advance, identified that same material in a small figure of a child held in a private Argentine collection: Il Giovannino Perduto. This monograph examines the hypothesis that Il Giovannino Perduto may be identified with the San Giovannino that, according to Ascanio Condivi and Giorgio Vasari, Michelangelo Buonarroti made around 1495-96 for Lorenzo di Pierfrancesco de' Medici, and which art history has considered lost since the sixteenth century. It takes up and critically reviews the file assembled by Ángel Osvaldo Nessi between 1993 and 2000, incorporating evidence unavailable at that time: the 2023 update of the materials analysis (GEO3BCN-CSIC), systematic stylistic comparanda with documented early works, and a historiographical review of the other proposed candidates (Berlin, San Giovanni dei Fiorentini, Úbeda). The article does not argue for a closed attribution. It argues that the convergence of five independent lines of evidence places this piece in a position distinct from that of its competitors in the debate, and warrants its inclusion in specialist scholarship on the lost works of the young Buonarroti. Photographs of works and documents by third parties reproduced here appear by way of citation, for purposes of study and criticism, and are excluded from the licence applied to the text. Rights remain with their respective holders.