It’s the toe-st of the town.
A tiny chalk drawing of a man’s naked foot sketched by Michelangelo fetched a toe-curling $27.2 million at a New York City auction Thursday — setting a record for the artist’s most expensive piece ever sold, according to the auction house.
“You could say Christie’s put its best foot forward,” quipped Angela Montefinise, a spokeswoman for the auction house.
The 5-inch sketch of the bare right foot is believed to depict that of a male model who posed for the legendary Renaissance master as he painted figures on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel in 16th-century Rome.
The drawing — which raked in a mind-bending $5.4 million per toe, if you’re counting — sold to an unidentified buyer for nearly 20 times what art snobs had expected.
The sketch of the sockless foot, made with red chalk, was discovered by a seller from Northern California, who inherited it from his grandmother in 2002.
The unnamed owner, who said the drawing had been in his family since at least the late 1700s, handed it over to Giada Damen, a specialist in Christie’s Old Master Drawings Department, to evaluate for authenticity last February.
Giada did research and determined it’s an authentic Michelangelo, according to the auction house.
“I immediately thought, this drawing looks very good. I was excited,” Damen told the New York Times in November. “This looked like a 16th-century drawing. The client filled in a box saying the name of the artist was ‘Michelangelo’, but I get a lot of ‘Michelangelos’ and ‘Leonardos.’”
The sketch is not signed by Michelangelo, so Damen flew out to California to persuade the then-owner to let him take the artwork back to New York to prove its authenticity.
The drawing was sold Thursday in the auction house’s sale room at Rockefeller Center in Manhattan.
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