Life becomes poetry when someone else is reading it with you.

Michelangelo’s Risen Christ (Giustiniani Christ) is a genuine work by him that almost no one talks about. In June 1514, the Roman nobleman Metello Vari commissioned a life-size nude statue of the resurrected Christ holding a cross for Santa Maria sopra Minerva in Rome. Michelangelo began the first version around 1515, working from the feet upward as he usually did and by the time he reached the face, a dark vein running through the Carrara marble had appeared across Christ’s left cheek and down the neck. Considering it a failure of the stone's purity, Michelangelo abandoned it. He later gave the unfinished sculpture to Vari, who received it in January 1521 (some say 1522) and placed it in the courtyard garden of his house near the Minerva. Vari treated it as a treasure. After his death it passed through the market and entered the Giustiniani collection in the early 17th century. Another sculptor finished it (possibly Pompeo Ferrucci or the young Gian Lorenzo Bernini) and in 1644 the statue was moved to the church of San Vincenzo Martire in Bassano Romano, where it still stands. For centuries it was thought to be a later imitation. Only in the late 1990s and early 2000s did scholars, working from Giustiniani inventories and a 1521 letter from Vari that mentions the black vein, identify it as Michelangelo’s first attempt. To honor the original contract, Michelangelo started a second version in Florence in 1519. He sent the nearly finished marble to Rome, where assistants completed it (first Pietro Urbano, who damaged the work, then Federico Frizzi). That second, unflawed statue was installed in Santa Maria sopra Minerva in 1521 and remains there today. The fascinating part is how close it came to disappearing for good. One black line in the marble, a garden courtyard, a country church an hour from Rome and a Michelangelo most people still walk past without knowing it exists.