A newly attributed drawing by Michelangelo—identified as a study for the Sistine Chapel ceiling at the Vatican—will go under the hammer at Christie’s New York next February. The five-inch tall, red chalk drawing of a bare foot, which has never appeared on the market, has an estimate of $1.5m to $2m. “This newly identified drawing is the first unrecorded study for the Sistine ceiling ever to come to auction,’ according to a statement from Christie’s.
Giada Damen, a specialist in Old Master drawings at Christie’s, says that the drawing is a preparatory sketch for the right foot of the monumental figure of the Libyan Sibyl, located at the east end of the Sistine ceiling.
Damen was sent a photograph of the drawing in March by a member of the public requesting a valuation. “I immediately thought, this drawing looks very good,” she told The New York Times. “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.
The seller, who is from Northern California, asked to remain anonymous because of security concerns. He inherited the drawing from his grandmother in 2002 though it had been in his family since the late 1700s.
The Libyan Sibyl in the Sistine Chapel Photo: Fabio Poggi
After spotting the photograph submitted online, Damen brought the drawing to New York where further research was conducted to determine its authenticity. Infrared reflectography revealed invisible drawings on the back of the sheet which resembled the work of “a 16th-century artist close to Michelangelo”, according to Christie’s.
Damen then linked the drawing from California to a sheet of studies for the Libyan Sibyl on the Sistine ceiling housed at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, realising it was similar in medium, style and subject. The Met sheet includes studies of the Sibyl’s back, head, left foot, toes and left hand.
Further detective work unearthed a copy of the Met sheet in the Uffizi Galleries in Florence, which showed the same drawings as the New York study but with an extra addition—the right foot in the attributed Christie’s drawing, a discovery which proved to be the missing link in Damen’s research. The drawing of the foot also has an inscription in brown ink, “Michelangelo Bona Roti”, which appears on a number of drawings by Michelangelo, according to Christie’s.
In May 2022, a drawing by Michelangelo fetched €23.2 million with fees ($24.3 million) at Christie’s Paris, a record price for a drawing by the artist.
