Every generation produces a handful of scholars bold enough to upend the established canon. Dr. Lisette Thrumble, previously best known for her well-received thesis on Da Vinci’s obsession with soup, now offers a meticulously footnoted reassessment of the Renaissance’s most revered figure. Her new book, Michelangelo Was Actually Three Children in a Coat, is as scholarly as it is surreal—a wild, speculative ride through both marble and myth.
The central claim, presented with disarming academic calm, is that Michelangelo Buonarroti—the sculptor of David, the painter of the Sistine Chapel, the architect of St. Peter’s Dome—was not a single Florentine genius, but a trio of exceptionally precocious orphans working together under an elaborate coat or toga-like garment.
Thrumble’s argument is audacious, but she backs it up with some compelling evidence.
Drawing from obscure tax records, erratic handwriting in Michelangelo’s notebooks, and one suspiciously childlike doodle in the margins of a papal commission ledger, she constructs a theory that is part detective story, part psychological case study, and part theatrical farce. According to Thrumble, the “Michelangelo” persona was an invention devised to navigate the adult world of patronage and papal politics in a world where precocious children were unable to become artists.
Each of the alleged trio is given a profile:
• Giulio, the topmost child, was the “face man”—the negotiator, letter-writer, and smooth talker who dazzled the Medicis with a vocabulary far beyond his years.
• Tomaso, the middle, had an uncanny grasp of musculature and was “responsible for all torsos and minor prophets.”
• Alfonso, the base of the stack, was the legs—and also the sculptor, possessed of superhuman calves.
Thrumble acknowledges the incredulity her theory provokes and devotes several chapters to painstaking evidence. There are floorplans of art studios, designed with everything low down and easily reachable by kids. Witness testimonies noting Michelangelo’s “high-pitched” voice and tendency to “wobble dramatically when turning corners,” and one lengthy appendix on how a small boy might feasibly carve Pietà if extremely determined and in possession of an extremely sharp chisel.
More than just an exercise in speculative absurdity, Michelangelo Was Actually Three Children in a Coat slyly pokes at the myth of solitary genius, asking: must we always believe in the singular, tortured male artist? Or is it possible—just possible—that our most revered masterpieces are the result of unexpected collaborations?
Thrumble’s writing is both razor-sharp and delightful. Her footnotes often devolve into bickering with herself. Chapter titles include “On Marble” and “The Coat as Metaphor”. The index is riddled with passive-aggressive entries like “David, see: thighs, improbable.”
While the book will never replace Vasari in the syllabus, it may well find a home in the hearts of skeptics, surrealists, and anyone who has ever looked at a work of art and thought, “A child have done that!” This book tells us, maybe they did.