A five-inch red chalk drawing of a foot, attributed to Michelangelo, will go to auction at Christie's in New York this February. The auction house estimates it will sell for $1.5 million to $2 million—if the attribution holds.
The drawing surfaced through an ordinary channel: a member of the public submitted it through Christie's online inquiry form, casually noting the artist's name. Giada Damen, a specialist in Old Master drawings, spotted it among dozens of similar submissions. Most turn out to be misattributions. But something about this one warranted a closer look.
Renaissance drawings are notoriously difficult to verify. They're rarely signed. They're frequently faked. Yet after Damen examined the work's provenance, analyzed its paper support, and compared it against known Michelangelo sketches in museum collections, Christie's concluded this was genuine: a preparatory study for the Sistine Chapel ceiling.
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If authenticated, the drawing becomes extraordinarily rare. Michelangelo spent four years—1508 to 1512—painting the chapel's frescoed ceiling, creating thousands of preparatory sketches from live models in the process. Only a handful survive today. Fewer still remain in private hands. Most ended up in institutions like the Metropolitan Museum of Art, where a similar sheet of Michelangelo's foot studies for the figure of the Libyan Sibyl sits in their permanent collection.
This particular sketch shows a striking resemblance to that Met drawing—the same confident line work, the same anatomical precision, the same red chalk medium. It's the kind of detail that matters when you're trying to prove a 500-year-old piece of paper came from the hand of one of history's greatest artists.
The discovery speaks to something larger: masterworks are still being found. Not in dramatic archaeological digs, but in attics, estate sales, and online forms. A casual submission from someone who didn't quite know what they had. A specialist with the knowledge to recognize it. The slow, unglamorous work of authentication that separates genuine discovery from wishful thinking.
The drawing goes to auction in February. Whether it sells for the estimated price depends partly on final confirmation of its attribution—a process that continues even now.
