A new Michelangiolo?

Apr 12, 2022 | Art-Test News

A drawing at auction in Paris in May 2022

Great news are shaking the world of art collecting: next May, in Paris, Christie’s will put on sale, during the auction “Maîtres anciens et du XIXe siècle”, a rare early drawing by Michelangelo, which could reach the incredible figure of 30 million euros. Previously, the drawing was attributed to an artist close to Buonarroti, but it is now considered one of the few original drawings still left in private hands, in total less than 10!

This unique and beautiful drawing depicts a naked man standing between two figures, and is supposedly one of the very first nudes, still existing, of the Florentine master. It is evidently taken from the scene of the “Baptism of the neophytes” frescoed by Masaccio on the walls of the Brancacci Chapel in Florence. Like all of Michelangelo’s very few drawings, copying masterpieces of the past, it dates back to the beginning of his career.

Masaccio, The Baptism of the neophytes, Brancacci Chapel, Florence

The matter of Michelangelo’s drawings in general, but of his early ones in particular, is an ancient and long-debated one.

Vasari already tells that the artist himself, before dying in Rome in 1564, had burned “a large number of drawings, sketches and cartoons made by his own hand, so that no one would see the hard work he had endured and the ways of trying his ingenuity, in order not to appear if not perfect “.

It is therefore also for this artist’s desire for perfection that his graphic work was immediately rare and sought after, so much so that Leonardo Buonarroti, his nephew and heir, was only able to buy a group of drawings on the Roman market after his uncle’s death at a high price.

It is known that Michelangelo always refused to raise pupils. He only resorted to help when he could not do without it, as in the New Sacristy, in Florence, but he always relegated these aids to mere executors.

His refusal to accept a dimension of discipleship lies in his absolute reluctance to acknowledge that he himself had masters other than some great artists of the fourteenth and fifteenth century tradition, such as Giotto, Ghiberti, Donatello, Masaccio, Jacopo della Quercia, on whose works he had hard practiced and that he had no difficulty in admitting how much they had counted for his training.

In fact, his few early drawings that he himself saved from destruction are precisely taken from the works of those masters, such as this drawing presented now by Christie’s.

The copies of Michelangelo’s ancient masters are very personal: look in particular at the chiaroscuro, obtained by means of a dense grid hatching, which follows the trend of the protrusions and recesses and which vitalizes the surfaces, exactly as he does on his marbles with a chisel and the gradine, where he leaves the marks of the instruments visible.

For Michelangelo it was only with the study of nature that beauty could be achieved, and the artist had to imitate nature; by choosing the best details, the artist is able to create a beauty superior to that created by nature itself, and that is why the artist in his mind conceives an ideal of beauty.

This ideal, however, is not human creation, but, according to the Neoplatonic thought, developed at the court of Lorenzo the Magnificent that the young Michelangelo knew and made his own, it is a reflection of the same divine idea of ​​Beauty. And for Michelangelo the most beautiful thing in creation is the human body, precisely because it is a direct mirror of divine beauty.

The Christie’s work, coming from a French collection, is actually offered for sale for the second time, as the first was blocked by the French government, which had classified the design as a national treasure of France, thus blocking its export for about thirty months. “The French government has recently removed this designation – says Christie’s – by granting the expatriation license and allowing the design to be offered without any restrictions to collectors from all over the world”.

The drawing was sold in 1907 to the Hôtel Drouot auction house in Paris as a work of Michelangelo’s school. The first attribution to Michelangelo himself is very recent, and dates back to 2019, when Christie’s Old Masters specialist Furio Rinaldi, now curator of the Achenbach Foundation for graphic arts at the Fine Arts Museums in San Francisco, analised the drawing and considered it to be from Buonarroti, an attribution later also supported by the art historian Paul Joannides, author of the complete catalog of drawings by Michelangelo and his school at the Ashmolean Museum and the Louvre. In the auction catalog, no mention is made of a campaign of accurate scientific analysis and studies that provide interesting and compelling elements to corroborate this attribution. We are sure, however, that the current owner and the auction house have ascertained the authenticity of the design: who would spend 30 million without having done the necessary checks? Well, actually .. but that’s another story.