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拍品專文
This rediscovered drawing by Michelangelo, hitherto unknown, is of major significance. Not only was its author one of the greatest draftsmen of all time, but it is a preparatory study for a significant expressive element in one of the most memorable figures in his highly ambitious, well-known, and celebrated commission: the frescoes on the vault of the Sistine Chapel in the Vatican (fig. 1). Of the handful of drawings by Michelangelo that remain in private hands, this is the only one connected to the Sistine Ceiling to come to auction (some recent fundamental publications on Michelangelo and his drawings are: H. Chapman, Michelangelo Drawings. Closer to the Master, exhib. cat., Haarlem, Teylers Museum, and London, British Museum, 2005-2006; M. Hirst, Michelangelo, New Haven and London, 2011; and C. Bambach, Michelangelo Divine Draftsman and Designer, exhib. cat., New York, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, 2017).
Michelangelo attained unprecedented fame. He was courted by potentates and even kings, and was employed by a succession of popes on grandiose projects. By the 1520s, when he was in his forties, his contemporaries began referring to him as il divine (the divine one). A further testimony to Michelangelo’s renown is the fact that five biographies of him were written during his lifetime or soon after his death (see L. Pon, ‘Michelangelo’s Lives: Sixteenth-Century Books by Vasari, Condivi, and Others’, The Sixteenth Century Journal, XXVII, no. 4, 1996, pp. 1015-1037).
Michelangelo had an exceptionally long and prolific career, and many of his projects in sculpture, architecture, and painting are spectacular in ambition and in scale, embodying the artist’s boundless creativity and daring vision. Michelangelo’s surviving works play a central role in the history of European art, and his voluminous correspondence (remarkably for the period, more than five hundred letters survive), private papers, and ricordi (written accounts) reveal much of his personality, beliefs and ambitions.
Michelangelo Buonarroti was born in 1475 in Caprese, southeast of Florence, to an impoverished Florentine family of minor nobility (fig. 2). In the sixteenth century, when longevity was exceptional, he lived to the age of eighty-eight, dying in Rome in 1564, as an extremely famous and wealthy man. Throughout his life Michelangelo drew constantly. It was through drawing that he planned and prepared his projects, developed his inventions, and refined his ideas. Unfortunately, the surviving sheets by his hand, numbering roughly six hundred, total only a fraction of the thousands of drawings he must have produced (while most scholars agree on this rough estimate of the number of drawings by the master that survive, scholarship on Michelangelo’s graphic corpus remains controversial. For a summary of the divergent opinions see Bambach, op. cit., 2017, pp. 26-29. For the subject, see also D. Ekserdjian, ‘The Tip of the Iceberg. Barocci’s post mortem inventory and the survival of renaissance drawings’, in J.W. Mann (ed.), Federico Barocci. Inspiration and Innovation in Early Modern Italy, Abingdon, 2018, pp.154-173). It is impossible to know how many of his drawings have been lost, but probably thousands of them have disappeared. Several factors have contributed to the loss of so much of Michelangelo’s graphic work: many sheets would have been destroyed in the course of ordinary working practice, others were deliberately burned by the artist himself (in at least four instances he made bonfires of his drawings), others went missing by accident and still more were lost through the destructive practices of early collectors. Very rarely have new drawings been rediscovered and added to Michelangelo’s graphic corpus over the decades (Hugo Chapman listed five drawings by Michelangelo as having re-emerged between 1980 and 2005; see Chapman, op. cit., p. 23. Since then a few more have been rediscovered, among these an early pen-and-ink drawing, Three standing figures, one after Masaccio, sold at Christie’s on May 18, 2022 in Paris, lot 1; see F. Rinaldi, ‘Looking at Masaccio; a rediscovered drawing by the young Michelangelo’, The Burlington Magazine, CLXIV, no. 1431 (June 2022), pp. 536-545). Until now, no other unrecorded study for the Sistine Chapel has come to light (Paul Joannides has recently published a further study (P. Joannides, ‘A drawing by Michelangelo for the Worship of the Brazen Serpent’, The Burlington Magazine, CLXV, no. 1440 (March 2023), pp. 220-225), which previously appeared at auction at Christie’s in 1902; Christie’s, London, Catalogue of a Valuable Collection of Drawings by Old Masters Formed by a Well-Known Amateur J.C. Robinson, 13 May 1902, lot 223). Almost all of Michelangelo’s known studies, excluding architectural drawings and the sketches of marble blocks the artist used to send to his quarry masters, are now in public collections.
The Sistine Ceiling
In the two decades between 1500 and 1520 Michelangelo was in his physical and artistic prime. At that time, he lived and worked between Florence and Rome, undertaking commissions for five of the most prestigious and monumental projects of his career: the colossal marble of David in Florence (1501–1504), the Sistine Ceiling in Rome (1508-1512), the Battle of Cascina, left at the stage of the (now lost) cartoon (1504-1505), the Tomb for Pope Julius II (1505–1545), and the façade of the Church of San Lorenzo in Florence (1516-1520).
In the Spring of 1508 Michelangelo was summoned to Rome by Pope Julius II della Rovere (1443–1513), his most celebrated patron, who commissioned him to paint the enormous vault of the Sistine Chapel in the Vatican. The previous decoration, a starry blue sky painted by Piermatteo d’Amelia (1445–1508), had been irreparably damaged by a crack along its center in 1504. The enterprise was ambitious, as the surface of the vault measures about 530 square meters (5,700 square feet), yet Michelangelo conceived an elaborate decorative program for it (fig. 3). He designed a painted, illusionistic architectural framework, simulating white marble, with nine compartments at the center of the vault depicting episodes from the Book of Genesis. Flanking these biblical scenes are twenty Ignudi (athletic male nudes) seated on illusionistic painted plinths and holding draperies from which are suspended fictive bronze medallions with episodes from the Old Testament. Below these figures seven monumental Prophets alternate with five Sibyls around the ceiling. They are all seated on thrones and accompanied by inscriptions identifying them at their feet, while beneath them a series of figures, ancestors of Christ, proceeds around the whole chapel.
The vault was painted in two sessions starting from the west end, above the papal entrance to the chapel, to the east above the altar. Michelangelo began work in the summer of 1508, and by July-August 1510, he had completed the first portion of the ceiling, corresponding with the area accessible from the wooden scaffolding which allowed access to the vault 68 feet above the ground. Michelangelo wrote about this to his brother Buonarroto: ‘I will have finished my painting by the end of next week, that is the part that I began; and since I have uncovered it, I believe I will have money’ (quoted in English in Bambach, op. cit., 2017, pp. 92-93). When the scaffolding was dismantled Michelangelo had, for the first time, an opportunity to see the result of his work from the chapel floor. The scaffolding was then re-erected closer to the altar, and the second part of the decoration probably began in the spring of 1511. In this second phase Michelangelo adjusted the style and the scale of the figures, making them more monumental, simplified, and easier to read from a distance. The decoration was completed in 1512 and unveiled on October 31, on the eve of All Saints’ Day.
Giorgio Vasari, one of the artist’s early biographers, lavished the highest praise on the decoration: ‘The ceiling has proved a veritable beacon for our art, of inestimable benefit to all painters, restoring light to a world that for centuries had been plunged into darkness’ (G. Vasari, Le Vite de’ più eccellenti pittori, scultori et architettori, Florence, 1568, ed. G. Milanesi, 1906, VII, pp. 178-179, quoted in English in E. Peters, ‘Michelangelo. The Human Figure in Motion’, in Michelangelo Mind of the Master, exhib. cat., Cleveland, The Cleveland Art Museum, The J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles, 2019, p. 12).
The Sibyl’s foot
‘For Michelangelo, more than for most artists, the act of drawing served as a uniquely personal language of communication; it offered great potential for thinking with the hand’ (Bambach, op. cit., 2017, p. 18).
Immediately after receiving the commission for the Sistine Ceiling, Michelangelo began working on studies for the frescoes and after only a few weeks he recorded in one of his notes the expense of transporting ‘a bundle of drawings’ (quoted in ibid., p. 85. According to Professor Joannides this ‘bundle of drawings’ probably consisted mainly of studies for the Battle of Cascina which Michelangelo wished to consult in preparation for his new fresco project. Yet at least three sheets of drawing with studies for the Battle of Cascina on one side have preparatory sketches for the Sistine Ceiling on the other). Over the following months and years he continued to produce studies, proceeding piecemeal as he painted the ceiling, gradually completing one bay of the vault after another. Through preparatory drawings Michelangelo studied each figure, meticulously planning every detail of their poses and anatomy.
Michelangelo worked for four years on the Sistine Ceiling and during this time he must have produced many hundreds of drawings; yet most of these studies are now lost. In 1518 one of the artist’s friends, Leonardo Sellaio, reported that he had obeyed Michelangelo’s instructions to burn the ‘chartoni’ (cartoons) left in his house in Rome. Very likely among these were the cartoons used for the Sistine Ceiling, along with associated drawings (Chapman, op. cit., p. 27). The surviving corpus of studies for the Sistine Chapel is therefore very small and full of gaps; for this reason, the discovery of this new drawing represents a truly rare, unexpected, and significant finding.
In the earliest studies made for the Sistine Ceiling Michelangelo primarily employed pen and ink, and black chalk. Among these first sheets is, for example, a meticulous Drapery study in the British Museum, for the Erythraean Sibyl depicted in the fourth bay of the ceiling (fig. 4; inv. 1887,0502.118; ibid., no. 19, ill.). As time went on, however, Michelangelo began using red chalk more frequently, especially for the more finished studies of the nude human figure which he idealized after live models. Red chalk was a more challenging medium than black chalk being harder and more difficult to erase from the paper support; yet some of its qualities, such as its color, which approached that of flesh, and sharpness, made it particularly well suited for drawing the human body. However, Michelangelo continued to employ soft black chalk for mid-stage figure studies in which mass and tone were established.
An important group of red chalk figure studies inspired by the observation of live models belongs to the second phase of the Sistine Ceiling decoration. These are considered the artist’s finest achievements in the medium. Hugo Chapman has described the sheets as the artist’s greatest creations, noting that ‘they mark the highpoint of Michelangelo’s intensely sensual glorification of the divinely fashioned perfection and beauty of the male form’ (ibid., p. 127). Among these drawings are famous sheets such as the Study for Adam in the British Museum (fig. 5; inv. 1926,1009.1; Chapman, op. cit., no. 25, ill.), a Seated male nude in the Teylers Museum in Haarlem (fig. 6; inv. Ao27recto; see Michelangelo Mind of the Master, op. cit., no. 5, ill.) which is a preparatory study for one of the Ignudi, and two other drawings in the same collection: a sheet with A male head in profile and studies of limbs (fig. 7) and another with studies for the figure of Haman (inv. Ao20 recto and Ao16, ibid., nos. 6 and 8, ill.).
This newly discovered sheet belongs to this very group of red chalk drawings; the study of the foot on the recto of the sheet is preparatory for the Libyan Sibyl, one of the ceiling’s most memorable figures, painted in the last bay at the east end of the chapel (fig. 8). The gigantic figure, frescoed at a scale roughly three times life-size, is portrayed in a complex pose: arrested in motion as she steps down from her throne, holding an enormous open book of prophecy, the tips of her feet supporting her entire weight.
There are two other drawings – both in red chalk - connected to the Libyan Sibyl. One is a sheet in the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford (fig. 9; inv. 1846.43; see P. Joannides, The Drawings of Michelangelo and His Followers in the Ashmolean Museum, Cambridge, 2007, no. 18, ill.). On this is a study for the boy depicted to the left of the Sibyl in the fresco, pointing at her, and next to it is a sketch of the right hand of the Sibyl herself. At a later moment Michelangelo reused the same sheet of paper, adding in pen and ink rapid studies of six prigioni (prisoners) for the Tomb of Julius II, another project he was working on during those years. As Paul Joannides has explained, the Oxford sheet clearly illustrates ‘Michelangelo’s habit of crowding his pages and making new, smaller, drawings, often in a different medium, around a pre-existing larger central one’ (ibid., p. 122).
The second drawing for the fresco of the Libyan Sibyl is a sheet in the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York (fig. 10), which has been described as ‘the most magnificent drawing by Michelangelo in North America’ (C. Bambach, in From Raphael to Carracci. The Art of Papal Rome, exhib. cat., Ottawa, National Gallery of Canada, 2009, no. 10, ill.). It includes several studies: the main image is the figure of a nude seated youth, seen from the back with his head in profile, his arms bent and his upper body twisted in elegant contrapposto, revealing the formidable musculature of his back. The study of the youth, closely observed from a life model – most likely a young male assistant posing in the studio – was transformed into the Sibyl in the fresco. In the painting she is fully clothed except for her powerful shoulders, arms, and bare feet. On the Metropolitan sheet, next to the body of the youth, are studies of other details with which Michelangelo filled the paper: another sketch of the torso, the head in profile, the right foot and various iterations of the toes, and the left hand. The Sibyl was to be painted clothed, but with bare feet, which might explain Michelangelo’s determination to explore the poses of her feet in some detail: the left foot on the Metropolitan sheet and the right foot on the newly discovered drawing.
In the present sheet Michelangelo shows his enduring commitment to the careful representation of the human body. He drew the foot with power and precision, studying the visual effects of the toes pressing on the ground. The vigorous outlines accentuate the contours of the form, anticipating the way the foot will be clearly delineated in the fresco which was to be viewed from a considerable distance. The bold hatching shows how Michelangelo drew spontaneously, quickly capturing the form from the model. By looking carefully at the outlines of the back of the heel, we see how Michelangelo first drew the shape with a delicate chalk line and then strengthened it with a more vigorous stroke. This approach is characteristic of his exploratory working method. Such pentimenti suggest that Michelangelo was adjusting the pose of the foot while he drew, thinking on paper about how best to render the tension of the foot raised on the toes.
In this drawing, as in many of his studies, it is possible to sense the full power of Michelangelo’s creative force. We can almost feel the physical energy with which he rendered the form of the foot, firmly pressing the red chalk onto the paper. The vigor of outlines and modeling are distinctive qualities of Michelangelo’s autograph drawings. When the design was later transferred to the wet plaster on the ceiling, the final position of the foot was slightly altered. Comparison with the fresco shows that the heel of the Sibyl is raised slightly higher off the ground, so that her weight is supported almost entirely by the toes. This demonstrates how relentlessly Michelangelo was driven to perfect his work even in the final stages of painting.
The drawing in the Metropolitan Museum includes, on the verso, studies of the Sibyl’s legs drawn quickly in black chalk (fig. 11). These loose, impressionistic sketches, are stylistically similar to most of the black chalk studies Michelangelo made for the earlier portion of the Sistine Ceiling and they have been dated before the red chalk study on the recto (ibid.).
This newly discovered drawing presents similarities. The sheet is fully laid down on a thin backing paper. We can assume that it was pasted onto this support by a former owner who most likely was responsible also for drawing the red chalk framing lines around the sheet. Transmitted infrared photography reveals on the verso of the sheet a sketch of a thigh and bent right leg executed in black chalk (fig. 12; imaging of the verso was done on a Foster & Freeman VSC 8000 with transmitted infrared light. Below the study of the leg is visible a small doodle, most likely not by the hand of Michelangelo). While only removing the drawing from its backing would allow a full appreciation and assessment of this powerful black chalk study, Michelangelo’s characteristic manner of rendering human muscles is clearly evident. The black chalk is applied with soft hatching, and the leg muscles are modelled through the juxtaposition of dark areas of deep shadow and highlights where the paper has been left blank. To understand the formal and stylistic qualities of this sketch, it is useful to compare it with a sheet in the Teylers Museum with studies of a knee and a leg, also in black chalk (fig. 13; inv. Ao33bis; Michelangelo Mind of the Master, no. 16, ill.). That study is datable to the 1520s, when Michelangelo was working for the Medici in Florence. The verso of the present sheet, which shows the right thigh of a seated figure facing to the right, cannot be connected precisely with any known figure by Michelangelo.
The present drawing has been cut from a larger sheet of paper, a fate shared by many other sheets by Michelangelo, including the drawing in the Metropolitan Museum which has a cut-out section along the right margin (Brooks, op. cit., pp. 21-29). While it cannot be ascertained at this point from which sheet of paper the study of the foot was severed, it is clear that it was created at the same time as the Metropolitan one, around 1511-1512 (Professor Joannides suggests dating the drawing to the Autumn of 1512, very shortly before the figure execution). A close comparison of the detail of the Sibyl’s hand, at lower center on the Metropolitan drawing, with the study of the foot presented here reveals that not only were they drawn with the same immediacy and energy of stroke, but also with a piece of red chalk of almost identical hue. Furthermore, an unidentified draftsman at the end of the sixteenth century made a copy in red chalk after the Metropolitan drawing which is now in the Uffizi in Florence (fig. 14; inv. 2318 F; A. Gnann, Michelangelo. The Drawings of a Genius, exhib. cat., Vienna, Albertina, 2010-2011, under no. 41, pp. 150-152, and C. Cinelli, in 1564⁄2014 Michelangelo. Incontrare un artista universale, exhib. cat., Rome Musei Capitolini, 2014, no. III.15, ill.). Although inferior in quality of execution, the copy is nearly the same size as the sheet in New York – almost a facsimile – but the copyist has re-arranged the individual motifs, omitted certain details, and, most interestingly, replaced the study of the Sibyl’s left foot with that of the right foot found on the new drawing (Joannides, op. cit., 2007, p. 120, under no. 18). It is therefore clear that the anonymous copyist had access to both the studies on the Metropolitan drawing and the present sheet.
History of the drawing
The annotation on the sheet at lower left recording the artist’s name provides an important clue to the early history of the drawing (fig. 15). The distinctive inscription appears, with some close variants, on many drawings assuredly by Michelangelo and on a few copies by his close followers. The study for the Libyan Sibyl in the Metropolitan Museum also bears such an inscription by the same hand. The writing is that of an early unidentified collector, named by Paul Joannides as the ‘Bona Roti Collector’ (ibid., p. 30). Although drawings with similar inscriptions are scattered among several museum collections, the largest group, no fewer than sixteen, is in the Teylers Museum in Haarlem (for a list of drawings with similar inscriptions, see M. Clayton, ‘The Provenance of the Drawings by Michelangelo at Windsor Castle’, in P. Joannides, Michelangelo and His Influence. Drawings from Windsor Castle, exhib. cat., Washington, National Gallery of Art, Fort Worth, Kimbell Art Museum, Chicago, Art Institute, 1996–1998, pp. 205–209). The drawings by Michelangelo in Haarlem were once part of the collection formed in Rome by the German artist and writer Joachim von Sandrart (1606–1688) between 1629 and 1637. By studying the inscriptions on the Haarlem drawings, scholars have been able to establish that they were added before Sandrart acquired the sheets; indeed, they appear to be in sixteenth-century handwriting. Most of the drawings bearing the inscriptions are anatomical studies, and among these are some of the finest drawings for the Sistine Ceiling. The person who added the inscriptions must have had access to the contents of Michelangelo’s studio, having at his disposal a cache of highly important studies. Although Michelangelo jealously guarded his drawings, keeping them from the public eye and destroying many of them, he could be generous with friends and particularly with fellow artists. Daniele da Volterra (1509–1566) had been one of Michelangelo’s devoted collaborators and friends, and was a frequent companion during the final years of the master’s life. It was Daniele who took care of Michelangelo in his final illness and on his deathbed, and it was to him that Michelangelo bequeathed a large group of his drawings. Upon his own death, just two years after Michelangelo’s, Daniele named his pupils Michele degli Alberti (documented 1535–1568) and Feliciano da San Vito as his executors, leaving to them everything pertaining to art, including numerous drawings. Degli Alberti was an artist of some talent who worked in association with his brother-in-law Jacopo Rocchetti (ca. 1535–1596), another artist in Michelangelo’s circle. The recent rediscovery of an inventory of Rocchetti’s possessions has shown that he also owned more than a hundred drawings ‘by the hand of Michelangelo’ (L. Sickel, ‘Jacopo Rocchetti as beneficiary of Michelangelo’s Drawings’, in Dopo il 1564. L'eredità di Michelangelo a Roma nel tardo cinquecento = After 1564. Michelangelo’s Legacy in late Cinquecento Rome, Rome, 2016, pp. 82-99). While it appears that Jacopo Rocchetti’s share of Michelangelo drawings later passed to the painter Giuseppe Cesari, called Cavaliere d’Arpino (1568–1640), what became of the sheets owned by Michele degli Alberti remains unknown. Paul Joannides, followed by others, has suggested that the so-called ‘Bona Roti Collector’ may be plausibly identified as Degli Alberti (Joannides, op. cit., 2007, p. 31, and C. Van Tuyll Serooskerken, ‘Michelangelo Drawings from a Royal Collection’, in Michelangelo Mind of the Master, op. cit., pp. 36-37).
At some point in the eighteenth century the present drawing entered the collection of Armand François Louis de Mestral de Saint-Saphorin (1738–1806), a Swiss diplomat in the service of the King of Denmark. De Mestral travelled extensively across Europe and was variously stationed in Warsaw, Saint Petersburg, Madrid, The Hague, and finally Vienna, where he died in 1806. He had assembled a very significant collection of works of art, including thousands of prints and drawings; among these was a particularly large group of sheets by Giovanni Battista Tiepolo, which he had likely acquired directly from the artist’s workshop in Madrid (G. Knox, ‘Tiepolo Drawings from the Saint-Saphorin Collection’, in Atti del Congresso internazionale di studi sul Tiepolo, Udine, 1970, pp. 58-63).
Upon his death, Armand de Mestral bequeathed the collection to his brother, and through subsequent inheritances a portion of the drawings was later given to the Jenisch Museum in Vevey (Switzerland), while another large group was sold in 1955 by the Reichlen Gallery in Lausanne (Cinq Siècles de dessins. Collections du Musée Jenisch, exhib. cat., Vevey, Musée Jenisch, 1997, pp. XV-XVI). Many sheets from the latter group were subsequently acquired by Janos Scholz and are now at the Morgan Library and Museum in New York (J. Scholz, Italian Master Drawings 1350-1800 from the Janos Scholz Collection, 1976, p. IX; and G. Knox, ‘Drawings from the de mistral de Saint-Saphorin collection’, in Giambattista and Domenico Tiepolo. A Study and Catalogue Raisonné of the Chalk Drawings, I, Oxford, 1980, pp. 191-192). The present drawing, however, was never sold and has remained with a branch of the descendants of Armand de Mestral de Saint-Saphorin until today. At some point in the drawing’s history, most probably in the nineteenth century, it was mounted with another drawing, a quick pen-and-brown ink sketch of a bearded man, perhaps presumed to be a portrait of Michelangelo.
This drawing has never appeared on the market and is unpublished. For centuries, the sheet has remained in private hands, unrecorded and unknown to scholars. Since it came to light earlier this year, and following several months of research at Christie’s, leading experts on Michelangelo, who - with the exception of Prof. Paul Joannides - cannot be named in writing, have unanimously recognized the artist as the author of this sheet. Its appearance at auction today presents an exceptionally rare opportunity to acquire a study for Michelangelo’s most celebrated commission, a testament to his status as il divino and his enduring reputation as one of the great geniuses of the Renaissance.
Standing in front of this drawing, we are reminded of the timelessness and modernity of Michelangelo’s acute observation of the human body. It is this enduring quality of his drawings and their extraordinary creative force that speak to us across centuries. As observed by Carmen Bambach, Michelangelo’s drawings ‘afford the most direct glimpse over the shoulders of the genius, instantly melting away five hundred years to reveal a profoundly intimate creative process’ (Bambach, op. cit., 2017, p. 27).
Michelangelo attained unprecedented fame. He was courted by potentates and even kings, and was employed by a succession of popes on grandiose projects. By the 1520s, when he was in his forties, his contemporaries began referring to him as il divine (the divine one). A further testimony to Michelangelo’s renown is the fact that five biographies of him were written during his lifetime or soon after his death (see L. Pon, ‘Michelangelo’s Lives: Sixteenth-Century Books by Vasari, Condivi, and Others’, The Sixteenth Century Journal, XXVII, no. 4, 1996, pp. 1015-1037).
Michelangelo had an exceptionally long and prolific career, and many of his projects in sculpture, architecture, and painting are spectacular in ambition and in scale, embodying the artist’s boundless creativity and daring vision. Michelangelo’s surviving works play a central role in the history of European art, and his voluminous correspondence (remarkably for the period, more than five hundred letters survive), private papers, and ricordi (written accounts) reveal much of his personality, beliefs and ambitions.
Michelangelo Buonarroti was born in 1475 in Caprese, southeast of Florence, to an impoverished Florentine family of minor nobility (fig. 2). In the sixteenth century, when longevity was exceptional, he lived to the age of eighty-eight, dying in Rome in 1564, as an extremely famous and wealthy man. Throughout his life Michelangelo drew constantly. It was through drawing that he planned and prepared his projects, developed his inventions, and refined his ideas. Unfortunately, the surviving sheets by his hand, numbering roughly six hundred, total only a fraction of the thousands of drawings he must have produced (while most scholars agree on this rough estimate of the number of drawings by the master that survive, scholarship on Michelangelo’s graphic corpus remains controversial. For a summary of the divergent opinions see Bambach, op. cit., 2017, pp. 26-29. For the subject, see also D. Ekserdjian, ‘The Tip of the Iceberg. Barocci’s post mortem inventory and the survival of renaissance drawings’, in J.W. Mann (ed.), Federico Barocci. Inspiration and Innovation in Early Modern Italy, Abingdon, 2018, pp.154-173). It is impossible to know how many of his drawings have been lost, but probably thousands of them have disappeared. Several factors have contributed to the loss of so much of Michelangelo’s graphic work: many sheets would have been destroyed in the course of ordinary working practice, others were deliberately burned by the artist himself (in at least four instances he made bonfires of his drawings), others went missing by accident and still more were lost through the destructive practices of early collectors. Very rarely have new drawings been rediscovered and added to Michelangelo’s graphic corpus over the decades (Hugo Chapman listed five drawings by Michelangelo as having re-emerged between 1980 and 2005; see Chapman, op. cit., p. 23. Since then a few more have been rediscovered, among these an early pen-and-ink drawing, Three standing figures, one after Masaccio, sold at Christie’s on May 18, 2022 in Paris, lot 1; see F. Rinaldi, ‘Looking at Masaccio; a rediscovered drawing by the young Michelangelo’, The Burlington Magazine, CLXIV, no. 1431 (June 2022), pp. 536-545). Until now, no other unrecorded study for the Sistine Chapel has come to light (Paul Joannides has recently published a further study (P. Joannides, ‘A drawing by Michelangelo for the Worship of the Brazen Serpent’, The Burlington Magazine, CLXV, no. 1440 (March 2023), pp. 220-225), which previously appeared at auction at Christie’s in 1902; Christie’s, London, Catalogue of a Valuable Collection of Drawings by Old Masters Formed by a Well-Known Amateur J.C. Robinson, 13 May 1902, lot 223). Almost all of Michelangelo’s known studies, excluding architectural drawings and the sketches of marble blocks the artist used to send to his quarry masters, are now in public collections.
The Sistine Ceiling
In the two decades between 1500 and 1520 Michelangelo was in his physical and artistic prime. At that time, he lived and worked between Florence and Rome, undertaking commissions for five of the most prestigious and monumental projects of his career: the colossal marble of David in Florence (1501–1504), the Sistine Ceiling in Rome (1508-1512), the Battle of Cascina, left at the stage of the (now lost) cartoon (1504-1505), the Tomb for Pope Julius II (1505–1545), and the façade of the Church of San Lorenzo in Florence (1516-1520).
In the Spring of 1508 Michelangelo was summoned to Rome by Pope Julius II della Rovere (1443–1513), his most celebrated patron, who commissioned him to paint the enormous vault of the Sistine Chapel in the Vatican. The previous decoration, a starry blue sky painted by Piermatteo d’Amelia (1445–1508), had been irreparably damaged by a crack along its center in 1504. The enterprise was ambitious, as the surface of the vault measures about 530 square meters (5,700 square feet), yet Michelangelo conceived an elaborate decorative program for it (fig. 3). He designed a painted, illusionistic architectural framework, simulating white marble, with nine compartments at the center of the vault depicting episodes from the Book of Genesis. Flanking these biblical scenes are twenty Ignudi (athletic male nudes) seated on illusionistic painted plinths and holding draperies from which are suspended fictive bronze medallions with episodes from the Old Testament. Below these figures seven monumental Prophets alternate with five Sibyls around the ceiling. They are all seated on thrones and accompanied by inscriptions identifying them at their feet, while beneath them a series of figures, ancestors of Christ, proceeds around the whole chapel.
The vault was painted in two sessions starting from the west end, above the papal entrance to the chapel, to the east above the altar. Michelangelo began work in the summer of 1508, and by July-August 1510, he had completed the first portion of the ceiling, corresponding with the area accessible from the wooden scaffolding which allowed access to the vault 68 feet above the ground. Michelangelo wrote about this to his brother Buonarroto: ‘I will have finished my painting by the end of next week, that is the part that I began; and since I have uncovered it, I believe I will have money’ (quoted in English in Bambach, op. cit., 2017, pp. 92-93). When the scaffolding was dismantled Michelangelo had, for the first time, an opportunity to see the result of his work from the chapel floor. The scaffolding was then re-erected closer to the altar, and the second part of the decoration probably began in the spring of 1511. In this second phase Michelangelo adjusted the style and the scale of the figures, making them more monumental, simplified, and easier to read from a distance. The decoration was completed in 1512 and unveiled on October 31, on the eve of All Saints’ Day.
Giorgio Vasari, one of the artist’s early biographers, lavished the highest praise on the decoration: ‘The ceiling has proved a veritable beacon for our art, of inestimable benefit to all painters, restoring light to a world that for centuries had been plunged into darkness’ (G. Vasari, Le Vite de’ più eccellenti pittori, scultori et architettori, Florence, 1568, ed. G. Milanesi, 1906, VII, pp. 178-179, quoted in English in E. Peters, ‘Michelangelo. The Human Figure in Motion’, in Michelangelo Mind of the Master, exhib. cat., Cleveland, The Cleveland Art Museum, The J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles, 2019, p. 12).
The Sibyl’s foot
‘For Michelangelo, more than for most artists, the act of drawing served as a uniquely personal language of communication; it offered great potential for thinking with the hand’ (Bambach, op. cit., 2017, p. 18).
Immediately after receiving the commission for the Sistine Ceiling, Michelangelo began working on studies for the frescoes and after only a few weeks he recorded in one of his notes the expense of transporting ‘a bundle of drawings’ (quoted in ibid., p. 85. According to Professor Joannides this ‘bundle of drawings’ probably consisted mainly of studies for the Battle of Cascina which Michelangelo wished to consult in preparation for his new fresco project. Yet at least three sheets of drawing with studies for the Battle of Cascina on one side have preparatory sketches for the Sistine Ceiling on the other). Over the following months and years he continued to produce studies, proceeding piecemeal as he painted the ceiling, gradually completing one bay of the vault after another. Through preparatory drawings Michelangelo studied each figure, meticulously planning every detail of their poses and anatomy.
Michelangelo worked for four years on the Sistine Ceiling and during this time he must have produced many hundreds of drawings; yet most of these studies are now lost. In 1518 one of the artist’s friends, Leonardo Sellaio, reported that he had obeyed Michelangelo’s instructions to burn the ‘chartoni’ (cartoons) left in his house in Rome. Very likely among these were the cartoons used for the Sistine Ceiling, along with associated drawings (Chapman, op. cit., p. 27). The surviving corpus of studies for the Sistine Chapel is therefore very small and full of gaps; for this reason, the discovery of this new drawing represents a truly rare, unexpected, and significant finding.
In the earliest studies made for the Sistine Ceiling Michelangelo primarily employed pen and ink, and black chalk. Among these first sheets is, for example, a meticulous Drapery study in the British Museum, for the Erythraean Sibyl depicted in the fourth bay of the ceiling (fig. 4; inv. 1887,0502.118; ibid., no. 19, ill.). As time went on, however, Michelangelo began using red chalk more frequently, especially for the more finished studies of the nude human figure which he idealized after live models. Red chalk was a more challenging medium than black chalk being harder and more difficult to erase from the paper support; yet some of its qualities, such as its color, which approached that of flesh, and sharpness, made it particularly well suited for drawing the human body. However, Michelangelo continued to employ soft black chalk for mid-stage figure studies in which mass and tone were established.
An important group of red chalk figure studies inspired by the observation of live models belongs to the second phase of the Sistine Ceiling decoration. These are considered the artist’s finest achievements in the medium. Hugo Chapman has described the sheets as the artist’s greatest creations, noting that ‘they mark the highpoint of Michelangelo’s intensely sensual glorification of the divinely fashioned perfection and beauty of the male form’ (ibid., p. 127). Among these drawings are famous sheets such as the Study for Adam in the British Museum (fig. 5; inv. 1926,1009.1; Chapman, op. cit., no. 25, ill.), a Seated male nude in the Teylers Museum in Haarlem (fig. 6; inv. Ao27recto; see Michelangelo Mind of the Master, op. cit., no. 5, ill.) which is a preparatory study for one of the Ignudi, and two other drawings in the same collection: a sheet with A male head in profile and studies of limbs (fig. 7) and another with studies for the figure of Haman (inv. Ao20 recto and Ao16, ibid., nos. 6 and 8, ill.).
This newly discovered sheet belongs to this very group of red chalk drawings; the study of the foot on the recto of the sheet is preparatory for the Libyan Sibyl, one of the ceiling’s most memorable figures, painted in the last bay at the east end of the chapel (fig. 8). The gigantic figure, frescoed at a scale roughly three times life-size, is portrayed in a complex pose: arrested in motion as she steps down from her throne, holding an enormous open book of prophecy, the tips of her feet supporting her entire weight.
There are two other drawings – both in red chalk - connected to the Libyan Sibyl. One is a sheet in the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford (fig. 9; inv. 1846.43; see P. Joannides, The Drawings of Michelangelo and His Followers in the Ashmolean Museum, Cambridge, 2007, no. 18, ill.). On this is a study for the boy depicted to the left of the Sibyl in the fresco, pointing at her, and next to it is a sketch of the right hand of the Sibyl herself. At a later moment Michelangelo reused the same sheet of paper, adding in pen and ink rapid studies of six prigioni (prisoners) for the Tomb of Julius II, another project he was working on during those years. As Paul Joannides has explained, the Oxford sheet clearly illustrates ‘Michelangelo’s habit of crowding his pages and making new, smaller, drawings, often in a different medium, around a pre-existing larger central one’ (ibid., p. 122).
The second drawing for the fresco of the Libyan Sibyl is a sheet in the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York (fig. 10), which has been described as ‘the most magnificent drawing by Michelangelo in North America’ (C. Bambach, in From Raphael to Carracci. The Art of Papal Rome, exhib. cat., Ottawa, National Gallery of Canada, 2009, no. 10, ill.). It includes several studies: the main image is the figure of a nude seated youth, seen from the back with his head in profile, his arms bent and his upper body twisted in elegant contrapposto, revealing the formidable musculature of his back. The study of the youth, closely observed from a life model – most likely a young male assistant posing in the studio – was transformed into the Sibyl in the fresco. In the painting she is fully clothed except for her powerful shoulders, arms, and bare feet. On the Metropolitan sheet, next to the body of the youth, are studies of other details with which Michelangelo filled the paper: another sketch of the torso, the head in profile, the right foot and various iterations of the toes, and the left hand. The Sibyl was to be painted clothed, but with bare feet, which might explain Michelangelo’s determination to explore the poses of her feet in some detail: the left foot on the Metropolitan sheet and the right foot on the newly discovered drawing.
In the present sheet Michelangelo shows his enduring commitment to the careful representation of the human body. He drew the foot with power and precision, studying the visual effects of the toes pressing on the ground. The vigorous outlines accentuate the contours of the form, anticipating the way the foot will be clearly delineated in the fresco which was to be viewed from a considerable distance. The bold hatching shows how Michelangelo drew spontaneously, quickly capturing the form from the model. By looking carefully at the outlines of the back of the heel, we see how Michelangelo first drew the shape with a delicate chalk line and then strengthened it with a more vigorous stroke. This approach is characteristic of his exploratory working method. Such pentimenti suggest that Michelangelo was adjusting the pose of the foot while he drew, thinking on paper about how best to render the tension of the foot raised on the toes.
In this drawing, as in many of his studies, it is possible to sense the full power of Michelangelo’s creative force. We can almost feel the physical energy with which he rendered the form of the foot, firmly pressing the red chalk onto the paper. The vigor of outlines and modeling are distinctive qualities of Michelangelo’s autograph drawings. When the design was later transferred to the wet plaster on the ceiling, the final position of the foot was slightly altered. Comparison with the fresco shows that the heel of the Sibyl is raised slightly higher off the ground, so that her weight is supported almost entirely by the toes. This demonstrates how relentlessly Michelangelo was driven to perfect his work even in the final stages of painting.
The drawing in the Metropolitan Museum includes, on the verso, studies of the Sibyl’s legs drawn quickly in black chalk (fig. 11). These loose, impressionistic sketches, are stylistically similar to most of the black chalk studies Michelangelo made for the earlier portion of the Sistine Ceiling and they have been dated before the red chalk study on the recto (ibid.).
This newly discovered drawing presents similarities. The sheet is fully laid down on a thin backing paper. We can assume that it was pasted onto this support by a former owner who most likely was responsible also for drawing the red chalk framing lines around the sheet. Transmitted infrared photography reveals on the verso of the sheet a sketch of a thigh and bent right leg executed in black chalk (fig. 12; imaging of the verso was done on a Foster & Freeman VSC 8000 with transmitted infrared light. Below the study of the leg is visible a small doodle, most likely not by the hand of Michelangelo). While only removing the drawing from its backing would allow a full appreciation and assessment of this powerful black chalk study, Michelangelo’s characteristic manner of rendering human muscles is clearly evident. The black chalk is applied with soft hatching, and the leg muscles are modelled through the juxtaposition of dark areas of deep shadow and highlights where the paper has been left blank. To understand the formal and stylistic qualities of this sketch, it is useful to compare it with a sheet in the Teylers Museum with studies of a knee and a leg, also in black chalk (fig. 13; inv. Ao33bis; Michelangelo Mind of the Master, no. 16, ill.). That study is datable to the 1520s, when Michelangelo was working for the Medici in Florence. The verso of the present sheet, which shows the right thigh of a seated figure facing to the right, cannot be connected precisely with any known figure by Michelangelo.
The present drawing has been cut from a larger sheet of paper, a fate shared by many other sheets by Michelangelo, including the drawing in the Metropolitan Museum which has a cut-out section along the right margin (Brooks, op. cit., pp. 21-29). While it cannot be ascertained at this point from which sheet of paper the study of the foot was severed, it is clear that it was created at the same time as the Metropolitan one, around 1511-1512 (Professor Joannides suggests dating the drawing to the Autumn of 1512, very shortly before the figure execution). A close comparison of the detail of the Sibyl’s hand, at lower center on the Metropolitan drawing, with the study of the foot presented here reveals that not only were they drawn with the same immediacy and energy of stroke, but also with a piece of red chalk of almost identical hue. Furthermore, an unidentified draftsman at the end of the sixteenth century made a copy in red chalk after the Metropolitan drawing which is now in the Uffizi in Florence (fig. 14; inv. 2318 F; A. Gnann, Michelangelo. The Drawings of a Genius, exhib. cat., Vienna, Albertina, 2010-2011, under no. 41, pp. 150-152, and C. Cinelli, in 1564⁄2014 Michelangelo. Incontrare un artista universale, exhib. cat., Rome Musei Capitolini, 2014, no. III.15, ill.). Although inferior in quality of execution, the copy is nearly the same size as the sheet in New York – almost a facsimile – but the copyist has re-arranged the individual motifs, omitted certain details, and, most interestingly, replaced the study of the Sibyl’s left foot with that of the right foot found on the new drawing (Joannides, op. cit., 2007, p. 120, under no. 18). It is therefore clear that the anonymous copyist had access to both the studies on the Metropolitan drawing and the present sheet.
History of the drawing
The annotation on the sheet at lower left recording the artist’s name provides an important clue to the early history of the drawing (fig. 15). The distinctive inscription appears, with some close variants, on many drawings assuredly by Michelangelo and on a few copies by his close followers. The study for the Libyan Sibyl in the Metropolitan Museum also bears such an inscription by the same hand. The writing is that of an early unidentified collector, named by Paul Joannides as the ‘Bona Roti Collector’ (ibid., p. 30). Although drawings with similar inscriptions are scattered among several museum collections, the largest group, no fewer than sixteen, is in the Teylers Museum in Haarlem (for a list of drawings with similar inscriptions, see M. Clayton, ‘The Provenance of the Drawings by Michelangelo at Windsor Castle’, in P. Joannides, Michelangelo and His Influence. Drawings from Windsor Castle, exhib. cat., Washington, National Gallery of Art, Fort Worth, Kimbell Art Museum, Chicago, Art Institute, 1996–1998, pp. 205–209). The drawings by Michelangelo in Haarlem were once part of the collection formed in Rome by the German artist and writer Joachim von Sandrart (1606–1688) between 1629 and 1637. By studying the inscriptions on the Haarlem drawings, scholars have been able to establish that they were added before Sandrart acquired the sheets; indeed, they appear to be in sixteenth-century handwriting. Most of the drawings bearing the inscriptions are anatomical studies, and among these are some of the finest drawings for the Sistine Ceiling. The person who added the inscriptions must have had access to the contents of Michelangelo’s studio, having at his disposal a cache of highly important studies. Although Michelangelo jealously guarded his drawings, keeping them from the public eye and destroying many of them, he could be generous with friends and particularly with fellow artists. Daniele da Volterra (1509–1566) had been one of Michelangelo’s devoted collaborators and friends, and was a frequent companion during the final years of the master’s life. It was Daniele who took care of Michelangelo in his final illness and on his deathbed, and it was to him that Michelangelo bequeathed a large group of his drawings. Upon his own death, just two years after Michelangelo’s, Daniele named his pupils Michele degli Alberti (documented 1535–1568) and Feliciano da San Vito as his executors, leaving to them everything pertaining to art, including numerous drawings. Degli Alberti was an artist of some talent who worked in association with his brother-in-law Jacopo Rocchetti (ca. 1535–1596), another artist in Michelangelo’s circle. The recent rediscovery of an inventory of Rocchetti’s possessions has shown that he also owned more than a hundred drawings ‘by the hand of Michelangelo’ (L. Sickel, ‘Jacopo Rocchetti as beneficiary of Michelangelo’s Drawings’, in Dopo il 1564. L'eredità di Michelangelo a Roma nel tardo cinquecento = After 1564. Michelangelo’s Legacy in late Cinquecento Rome, Rome, 2016, pp. 82-99). While it appears that Jacopo Rocchetti’s share of Michelangelo drawings later passed to the painter Giuseppe Cesari, called Cavaliere d’Arpino (1568–1640), what became of the sheets owned by Michele degli Alberti remains unknown. Paul Joannides, followed by others, has suggested that the so-called ‘Bona Roti Collector’ may be plausibly identified as Degli Alberti (Joannides, op. cit., 2007, p. 31, and C. Van Tuyll Serooskerken, ‘Michelangelo Drawings from a Royal Collection’, in Michelangelo Mind of the Master, op. cit., pp. 36-37).
At some point in the eighteenth century the present drawing entered the collection of Armand François Louis de Mestral de Saint-Saphorin (1738–1806), a Swiss diplomat in the service of the King of Denmark. De Mestral travelled extensively across Europe and was variously stationed in Warsaw, Saint Petersburg, Madrid, The Hague, and finally Vienna, where he died in 1806. He had assembled a very significant collection of works of art, including thousands of prints and drawings; among these was a particularly large group of sheets by Giovanni Battista Tiepolo, which he had likely acquired directly from the artist’s workshop in Madrid (G. Knox, ‘Tiepolo Drawings from the Saint-Saphorin Collection’, in Atti del Congresso internazionale di studi sul Tiepolo, Udine, 1970, pp. 58-63).
Upon his death, Armand de Mestral bequeathed the collection to his brother, and through subsequent inheritances a portion of the drawings was later given to the Jenisch Museum in Vevey (Switzerland), while another large group was sold in 1955 by the Reichlen Gallery in Lausanne (Cinq Siècles de dessins. Collections du Musée Jenisch, exhib. cat., Vevey, Musée Jenisch, 1997, pp. XV-XVI). Many sheets from the latter group were subsequently acquired by Janos Scholz and are now at the Morgan Library and Museum in New York (J. Scholz, Italian Master Drawings 1350-1800 from the Janos Scholz Collection, 1976, p. IX; and G. Knox, ‘Drawings from the de mistral de Saint-Saphorin collection’, in Giambattista and Domenico Tiepolo. A Study and Catalogue Raisonné of the Chalk Drawings, I, Oxford, 1980, pp. 191-192). The present drawing, however, was never sold and has remained with a branch of the descendants of Armand de Mestral de Saint-Saphorin until today. At some point in the drawing’s history, most probably in the nineteenth century, it was mounted with another drawing, a quick pen-and-brown ink sketch of a bearded man, perhaps presumed to be a portrait of Michelangelo.
This drawing has never appeared on the market and is unpublished. For centuries, the sheet has remained in private hands, unrecorded and unknown to scholars. Since it came to light earlier this year, and following several months of research at Christie’s, leading experts on Michelangelo, who - with the exception of Prof. Paul Joannides - cannot be named in writing, have unanimously recognized the artist as the author of this sheet. Its appearance at auction today presents an exceptionally rare opportunity to acquire a study for Michelangelo’s most celebrated commission, a testament to his status as il divino and his enduring reputation as one of the great geniuses of the Renaissance.
Standing in front of this drawing, we are reminded of the timelessness and modernity of Michelangelo’s acute observation of the human body. It is this enduring quality of his drawings and their extraordinary creative force that speak to us across centuries. As observed by Carmen Bambach, Michelangelo’s drawings ‘afford the most direct glimpse over the shoulders of the genius, instantly melting away five hundred years to reveal a profoundly intimate creative process’ (Bambach, op. cit., 2017, p. 27).