The small, spontaneously drawn red chalk sketch shows a bare right foot. But experts at Christie’s say it’s not just any foot — it’s that of the male model who posed for one of Michelangelo’s majestic figures in the Sistine Chapel ceiling frescoes at the Vatican in Rome.
If bidders at an auction in February agree, the tiny image is likely to become one of the most expensive drawings of a foot ever sold.
This previously unknown study, Christie’s experts say, was intended for the figure of a legendary priestess known as the Libyan Sibyl at the east end of the Sistine ceiling cycle. It was discovered in February by Giada Damen, a specialist in old master drawings at Christie’s in New York, when her eye was caught by a digital photo of the sketch in an otherwise routine batch of online requests from members of the public.
The seller, who is from Northern California, asked to remain anonymous because of concerns for his security. He told Damen he inherited the drawing from his grandmother in 2002, though it had been in his family since the late 1700s, and had been passed down for generations.
“I immediately thought, this drawing looks very good,” Damen said in an interview. “I was excited. 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’,” she added.
Studies by the “Big Three” Italian High Renaissance artists — Michelangelo, Leonardo and Raphael — are regarded as the pinnacle of the European drawing tradition and have sold for tens of millions of dollars when they come on the market. In 2009, a black chalk study by Raphael of the head of a muse, also for frescoes in the Vatican, sold at auction for $47.9 million, still the highest price for an old master drawing at a public sale.
But early drawings, which are almost always unsigned, like this one, can be difficult to attribute conclusively to specific artists. Scholars’ opinions can vary, works by studio assistants and later followers abound, and for years the market has attracted skilled fakers.
After viewing the five-inch-high drawing in person in a Christie’s office on the West Coast, Damen persuaded the owner to allow her to take the drawing back to New York to continue her research. “Expensive drawings are very controversial,” Damen said. “I needed to do my work. It could still be a good copy.”
According to Damen, technical analysis at Christie’s New York offices showed that the age of the drawing’s paper was consistent with 15th-century examples. Analysis also revealed a black chalk male figure study by the same hand on the back of the drawing, hidden under a later sheet of backing paper. This same combination of a red chalk sketch on the front, or recto, and black chalk on the back, known as the verso, also characterizes Michelangelo’s celebrated sheet of studies for the Libyan Sibyl on the Sistine ceiling in the Metropolitan Museum of Art.
That sheet includes a red chalk study of the Sibyl’s left foot. Could the Christie’s and Met drawings have originally been part of the same, once-larger sheet?
Damen compared the compositions (the Met’s drawing was out on loan so she used a reproduction for the comparison) side by side in the Metropolitan in the presence of Carmen Bambach, who curated the museum’s celebrated 2017 “Michelangelo: Divine Draftsman and Designer” exhibition. Damen said that in terms of its scale, color and handling of red chalk, the Christie’s study of the right foot “fits perfectly” with the Met’s Michelangelo sheet.
“It was clear they’d been done at the same moment. I felt reassured and excited, and I wanted to jump and hug the people who were there,” Damen said.
When contacted by The New York Times by email to comment on the Christie’s attribution, Bambach did not reply. A spokesman for the Met said by email that the museum is not part of any formal study of the drawing or its attribution.
Paul Joannides, author of the catalog of Michelangelo drawings at the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford, was also contacted, but he said he was unable to offer an on-the-record opinion, pointing out that curators of public museums are obliged to refrain from expressing their views of artworks that are on the market. Damen sought input in person from the key experts on Michelangelo drawings and said Christie’s study had not elicited any negative responses.
Damen’s detective work was given a further clue by the old pen-and-ink inscription “Michelangelo Bona Roti” on the Christie’s drawing. This same inscription, made by an unknown 16th-century owner nicknamed by scholars the “Buonarroti Collector,” appears on dozens of other Michelangelo drawings, including the Met Museum’s Libyan Sibyl sheet.
The ownership history of the drawing also inspired Christie’s confidence, the auction house said. The anonymous West Coast seller is a direct descendant of Armand François Louis de Mestral de Saint-Saphorin (1738-1805), a Swiss diplomat who was a renowned collector of old master drawings and prints, according to Christie’s.
Earlier this month, the research complete, the newly attributed Michelangelo drawing was on display in a private viewing room at Christie’s in London.
Andrew Fletcher, the global head of the old masters department at Christie’s, carefully placed the unframed red chalk front of the drawing facedown on a light box. A black outline emerged beneath the sheet’s blank backing paper. “The creative mind at work,” Fletcher said. “This is the thigh and calf of another figure for the Sistine ceiling.”
Fletcher suggested that the fainter black chalk drawing was a study for an as-yet inconclusively identified figure at the earlier west end of the Vatican’s fresco cycle. The later red chalk foot of the Libyan Sibyl on the front of the sheet could be dated to the fall of 1511, according to Fletcher.
Christie’s said its discovery is just one of two Michelangelo drawings for the Sistine ceiling in private hands. The other, a red chalk study of a male nude, was identified in 2023.
The current auction record for a Michelangelo drawing is $24.3 million, for an early pen and ink drawing of a male nude at Christie’s in Paris in 2022. Another rediscovery, it had been estimated to sell for more than $30 million.
This Sistine ceiling study is much smaller, and Christie’s has been far more cautious with its auction estimate of $1.5 million to $2 million.
“It’s priced to create competition,” said Fletcher, who added that it would be unlikely that the drawing would be backed by any financial guarantees at the sale in February.
Michelangelo is known to have produced many thousands of drawings, but only about 600 have survived. Giorgio Vasari, in his 1550 book, “Lives of the Artists,” wrote that Michelangelo burned a great number of drawings before his death “in order that no one should perceive his labors and tentative efforts, that he might not appear less than perfect.” Michelangelo painted more than 100 figures in the Sistine ceiling, yet studies for only a handful of them remain.
Letters record that in 1518 Michelangelo instructed his assistant Leonardo Sellaio to destroy all the drawings in his house in Rome, where he had worked on the Sistine ceiling and other projects.
Sellaio wrote back: “Regretfully, you know, I have done as you asked.”
If Christie’s is right, it will be one that got away.
Scott Reyburn is a London-based freelance journalist who writes about the art world, artists and their markets.
The post His Right Foot: One Tiny Drawing for Sale, Maybe by Michelangelo appeared first on New York Times.
