2024-05-15
Michelangelo's drawing "Nude of a Young Man Surrounded by Two Figures" has been sold at a May auction at Christie's. The work was considered to be from the master's workshop until 2019. The composition comes from a private French collection and the French government had to grant special permission to export it.
Michelangelo, alongside Leonardo da Vinci and Raphael Santi, is counted among the three most important artists of the Renaissance period. He was born in 1475 in the small village of Caprese in Tuscany, a few weeks after his birth his family moved to Florence. There, as a young man, he apprenticed with Domenic Ghirlandaio, a renowned Florentine painter. In 1490-92, he was at the court of the Medici Lorenzo the Magnificent, and in 1505 he was commissioned by Pope Julius II, at whose request he painted the plafonds in the Sistine Chapel. He returned to work in the chapel in 1534, when he began work on a fresco entitled "The Last Judgement".
He considered himself primarily a sculptor. His architectural activity did not begin until 1519 when he designed the façade of the church of San Lorenzo in Florence. In the 1520s he also designed the Biblioteca Medicea Laurenziana.
The drawing sold at the May auction is probably the earliest surviving study of a nude by the artist. It was identified as a work by Michelangelo in 2019 by a specialist in the Old Masters Drawings department at Christie's. This attribution was supported by Paul Joannides, Emeritus Professor at Cambridge University. The drawing was bought in 1907 at the Hôtel Drouot in Paris as a work of the Michelangelo school, having escaped the attention of all researchers until its recent rediscovery. The sketch is 30 centimetres high by 21 centimetres wide. The main figure closely resembles the man in Masaccio's fresco "Baptism of the Neophytes" (1426-27). The year 1596 can be considered as the probable date of creation.
Viewers were able to see the work at two pre-sale shows - in New York and Hong Kong. Head of Old Masters at Christie's, Stijn Alsteens said in a statement: "The high price achieved today [for this drawing] is testament to the enduring admiration for one of the greatest artists of all time and to the strength of the art market, particularly for masterpieces of this calibre."