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A 5-inch chalk sketch of a man’s right foot could fetch at least $2 million after Christie’s auction house linked it to Michelangelo’s ceiling in the Sistine Chapel.
The tiny drawing of the bare foot is believed to be that of a male model who posed for one of the Renaissance master’s figures on the world-famous ceiling frescoes at the Vatican in Rome, according to a press release from the New York auction house.
Now the red-chalk image, which currently belongs to an anonymous seller from Northern California, is expected to become the most expensive drawing of a foot ever sold when it goes up for auction in February.
“No recorded study for the Sistine Chapel has ever come to auction — until now,” Christie’s said in its release.
Giada Damen, a specialist in its Old Master Drawings Department, gushed, “Standing in front of this drawing, one can grasp the full power of Michelangelo’s creative force; we can almost feel the physical energy with which he rendered the form of the foot, pressing the red chalk vigorously onto the paper.”
The sketch, thought to date from 1511, was intended for the figure of a priestess known as the Libyan Sibyl at the east end of the Sistine Chapel’s ceiling.
In February, the seller, who said he had inherited the drawing from his grandmother in 2002, sent a picture of the sketch to Damen.
The owner said the drawing had been in his family since at least the late 1700s.
The man, who wanted to stay anonymous for security reasons, is a direct descendant of the 18th century Swiss diplomat Armand Francois Louis de Mestral de Saint-Saphorin, a renowned collector of old master drawings and prints.
“I immediately thought, this drawing looks very good. I was excited,” Damen told the New York Times. “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.’ “
The sketch is not signed by Michelangelo, and Damen had to fly out to California to persuade the current owner to let her take the artwork back to New York to prove its authenticity.
“Expensive drawings are very controversial. I needed to do my work. It could still be a good copy,” Damen said.
But after lab tests at Christie’s New York offices showed the drawing paper was consistent with other 16th-century examples, analysts were able to tie it to another sheet of studies by Michelangelo for the same figure, currently kept in the Met.
Earlier in November, the sketch was displayed in a private viewing room at Christie’s London office.
When placed on top of a light, a black chalk outline was visible beneath the backing paper.
That drawing is believed to belong to another earlier drawing for a different figure on the Sistine Chapel ceiling, according to Andrew Fletcher, the global head of the old master’s department at Christie’s.
It is one of just two Michelangelo drawings for the Sistine ceiling still in private hands, after another, a red chalk study of a male nude, was identified in 2023.
Of the many thousands of drawings Michelangelo produced in his lifetime, only around 600 have survived.
In 1518, Michelangelo ordered his assistant in a letter to destroy all of the drawings at his house in Rome, where he had worked on the Sistine ceiling.
That makes the Northern California discovery all the more astonishing.
