Michelangelo's hidden self-caricature discovered in Vittoria Colonna portrait

A new study published in the journal Clinical Anatomy by Professor Deivis de Campos of the Federal University of Health Sciences of Porto Alegre, Brazil, claims that Michelangelo Buonarroti concealed a self-caricature within his 1525 portrait of poetess Vittoria Colonna, held at the British Museum in London. The tiny figure of a man painting emerges from the folds of Colonna's dress, resembling Michelangelo's earlier self-caricature from 1509 in a sonnet to Giovanni da Pistoia, where he depicted himself standing while painting the Sistine Chapel. In the Colonna portrait, the hidden figure is bent forward at an acute angle, as if the miniature Michelangelo is painting the entire portrait. De Campos interprets this as both a hidden signature and a valuable document for studying Michelangelo's physique and health at the time. This is not the researcher's first investigation into Michelangelo; a year earlier, his team published findings in Clinical Anatomy suggesting that Michelangelo's works, including the Medici Chapels in Florence and the Sistine Chapel in Vatican City, contain pagan symbols alluding to female reproductive anatomy, such as uteri and fallopian tubes. The friendship between Michelangelo and Vittoria Colonna, a poet and arts patron who hosted artists and writers like Ludovico Ariosto, Jacopo Sannazaro, and Pietro Aretino on Ischia between 1501 and 1536, was based on shared love of art and deep religious faith, maintained through extensive correspondence.