Last March, a person who now wishes to remain anonymous submitted a photograph of a small, framed drawing of a foot to Christie’s online “Request an Auction Estimate” portal. Just under a year later—and after months of authentication research—the work, newly identified as an authentic drawing by Michelangelo, sold for $27.2 million on a $1.5 million–$2 million estimate.
Christie’s specialists determined that the work was a previously unknown study for the foot of the Libyan Sibyl, a figure featured in the artist’s Sistine Chapel ceiling. The drawing sold on Thursday after 45 minutes of bidding during Christie’s Old Master and British Drawings sale in New York, surpassing the previous auction record for a Michelangelo work—another drawing that sold for $24.3 million at Christie’s Paris in 2022.
According to the auction house, the red-chalk drawing is one of only about 600 Michelangelo drawings known to exist today. Of those, roughly 50 are studies related to the Sistine Chapel.
“In the 23-plus years I have been in the industry, I have been privileged to see many wonderful Old Masters moments, but today topped them all,” Andrew Fletcher, Christie’s global head of Old Masters, who placed the winning bid on behalf of a client, said in a statement.
The story of how the work arrived at Christie’s is nearly as remarkable as the drawing itself. The person who submitted the photograph said the work had hung on a wall for years and belonged to their grandmother. The back of the frame was sealed with duct tape and bore the handwritten attribution “Michelangelo,” in the grandmother’s own writing. The owner has said they always assumed it was a copy.
To authenticate the drawing, Giada Damen, a specialist in Old Master drawings at Christie’s, had the work examined using infrared reflectography to reveal underdrawings and other features not visible to the naked eye. She then cross-referenced it with other authenticated red-chalk studies by Michelangelo, particularly works in the collections of the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Uffizi Gallery. At the Met, she found one drawing in particular that closely matched the newly discovered work.
“This one jumped out for the quality of the drawing,” Damen told the Times of London’s chief art critic, Laura Freeman. “Often what we receive are reproductions or copies, or drawings that are not of the highest quality.”As for who bought the work, Damen speculated that it may have gone to a collector or institution in the Gulf. After all, rumors circulated last fall that Abu Dhabi’s Department of Culture and Tourism acquired Gustav Klimt’s Portrait of Elizabeth Lederer for $236.4 million. And it has long been reported that Saudi Arabia’s Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman purchased Leonardo da Vinci’s Salvator Mundi (ca. 1500) for $450 million. Why not one more trophy for the region?
