A Drawing Said to Be by Michelangelo Will Go to Auction

A five-inch-tall red chalk drawing of a foot, said to be by Michelangelo (1475–1564), will be offered for sale at Christie’s auction house in New York in February. Christie’s estimates the work to sell between $1.5 million and $2 million. The piece came to light when Giada Damen, a specialist in Old Master drawings at Christie’s, noticed it among a batch of online inquiries from members of the public.

The client had noted that the artist was Michelangelo on the form; however, as Damon told the New York Times, she gets a lot of inquiries about works purported to be by Renaissance masters. Added to this, Renaissance drawings can be difficult to authenticate, as they are rarely signed and often faked. Nevertheless, Damon thought it possible the work was genuine. Now, after research into the drawing’s provenance, a technical analysis of its support, and comparison with known sketches in museums, Christie’s has declared it a study for Michelangelo’s masterwork, the frescoed ceiling of the Vatican’s Sistine Chapel in Rome.

If true, the drawing is incredibly rare. Michelangelo worked on the Sistine Chapel for four years from 1508 to 1512, and in the process is thought to have made thousands of preparatory sketches using live models.

Of these, only a few survive, and only one—two, if this is counted as one of them—remain in private hands. On Christie’s website, the auction house notes the drawing’s similarity to a sheet of Michelangelo’s sketches for the figure of the Libyan Sibyl on the Sistine Chapel ceiling; that work is in the collection of the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York.