NY. A small, simple drawing by the Italian Renaissance painter Michelangelo was sold for $201,600, 33 times its estimated value, Christie’s auction house announced this Wednesday.
It is a small square drawn on a piece of yellowish paper that came from the hand of the author of the frescoes in the Vatican’s Sistine Chapel, according to Christie’s experts, who had valued it between 6,000 and 8,000 dollars.
The buyer, whose name was not disclosed, paid “33.6 times the lowest estimated price,” the house says in a statement.
The small work represents a block of marble, with the word “simile”, or “similar”, which was next to a letter from Cosimo Buonarroti, the last direct descendant of Michelangelo, dated November 3, 1836.
In the letter, with calligraphy of the time, the descendant of the great painter, sculptor and architect specifies that he gave “the attached sketch” of his “illustrious ancestor Michelangelo” to his friend John Browning, future British governor of Hong Kong, whose signature appears at the bottom of the sheet of paper.
The diagram was known in the literature, but was recently identified by Christie’s Old Master Drawings Department, which found the letter and diagram attached to the back of a painting that had been in a private collection for decades.
Later investigations confirmed the authorship of Michelangelo.
Christie’s had already sold that painting in 1986 at an auction in London. In the catalog for its sale it already mentioned the piece of paper glued to the support that it “believed” came from Michelangelo’s hand.
According to the auction house, it is believed that fewer than ten works by Michelangelo remain in private hands.
The auctioned drawing is part of a set of diagrams made by Michelangelo (1475-1564) to indicate the type of marble blocks he needed for his sculptures. Most of them are preserved in the Casa Buonarroti, a museum in Florence founded by Cosimo Buonarroti, who died in 1858.
Michelangelo’s last diagram of this type was also sold by Christie’s in 2008 in London. Then 73,250 pounds (about 91,225 dollars) were paid, compared to an estimate of between 10,000 and 15,000 pounds.
Both the 2008 drawing and the current one were owned by Cosimo Buonarroti and both come with an inscription from him detailing his gift.
It is likely that Cosimo Buonarroti sometimes cut out these diagrams from a larger sheet with such drawings to offer them to honored guests, Christie’s speculates.
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– 2024-04-18 15:57:21
