Michelangelo drawing sells for €23 million at Christie’s
Christie’s has auctioned in Paris a drawing created by Michelangelo in his youth for 23 million euros, a respectable price although below its expectations.
By G. Fernandez – theartwolf.com ·· Image: Michelangelo Buonarroti, A nude man (after Masaccio) and two figures behind him. Pen and two-tone brown ink, 33 x 19.8 cm. (13 x 7 7/8 in.)
In Michelangelo’s early drawings -figures copied from Masaccio’s frescoes in the Brancacci Chapel- the technique (…) -especially as regards the way of defining the volumes- derives from that used by Ghirlandaio in those same years and taught in his workshop. It is a sort of mesh of intersecting lines that gradually define, according to their density, the intensity of the shadows, while their direction suggests the dominant dimension of the form.
Tomás Llorens, “Michelangelo” (1993)
Defined by Christie’s as “Michelangelo’s first nude“, the work, coming from a private French collection, is a copy made by the then young Michelangelo of a fresco by the quattrocento master Masaccio. Christie’s had estimated that the drawing could fetch around 30 million euros, but the final result, including sales commissions, was 23,162,000 euros. Although it is difficult to describe this result as a failure, it is somewhat disappointing in view of the recent multimillion sales of modern and contemporary artworks. Although this drawing is far from being a masterpiece by the “Divine” Michelangelo, it is an important graphic document of the training of one of the most important artists in the history of universal art, whose works very rarely appear on the market.
“A nude man (after Masaccio) and two figures behind him figures” was the first drawing by Michelangelo to go on auction since 2011, when a double male nude (obverse and reverse) was auctioned at Christie’s for £3.2 million, a price then surprisingly low that some specialists blamed on the state of conservation of the drawing. Previously, two drawings by the Italian master were sold for spectacular prices that seemed to support the estimate given by Christie’s. “The Risen Christ” fetched £8.1 million in 2000, and “Study of a Mourning Woman” fetched £6 million the following year. The latter work was then sold to the Getty Museum for an unpublished price in 2017.
In the general auction of Old Masters Drawings, also organized by Christie’s Paris, two drawings by Bartolomé Esteban Murillo far exceeded their pre-sale estimates, including a “Study of a Seated Man” which was auctioned for €73,080, three times its most optimistic pre-sale estimate.
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