Rare drawing by Michelangelo at Christie's auction

(ANSA) - NEW YORK, APRIL 05 - After Leonardo da Vinci's "Bear's Head", published a few months ago in London, Christie's back to the fore in the coming days with the offer of an "exceptionally rare" drawing by Michelangelo, one of the few, according to the auction house, still in private hands.

"Young nude (after Masaccio)" would have been performed by the maestro dellaSistina at the beginning of his career.

It will be auctioned on May 18 in Paris during the "Maîtres anciens et du XIXesiècle" sale, with an estimate of around € 30 million after traveling to Hong Kong and New York in the coming weeks.

The drawing comes from a French private collection: it was originally classified as a national treasure of France and its export was blocked for a period of about thirty months.

"The French government recently removed this designation, granting the expatriation license and allowing the design to be offered without restriction to collectors around the world," says Christie's now.

The drawing is probably the artist's earliest surviving nude study.

The central figure recalls the trembling man of the Baptism of the Neophytes, part of the cycle of frescoes by Masaccio in the Chiesa del Carmine in Florence: using two shades of brown ink, Michelangelo enhanced his muscles, foreshadowing his most famous representations of the human body.

The design was authenticated in 2019 by Furio Rinaldi, then a specialist in the Old Master Drawings department at Christie's (now at the FineArts Museums in San Francisco), whose opinion was supported by Paul Joannides,

emeritus of art history at the University of Cambridge and author of the complete catalogs of drawings by Michelangelo and his school at the Ashmolean in Oxford and at Louisvre.

Sold in 1907 to the Hotel Drouot as a work of Michelangelo's school, the drawing had escaped the attention of specialists until its recent rediscovery.

(HANDLE).