A modest square, hastily sketched on a weathered piece of paper believed to have been crafted by Michelangelo, will be up for auction in April in New York, as announced by auction house Christie’s.
The experts at the company were inspecting a drawing by another artist from the same era for an upcoming sale when they stumbled upon “this little piece of paper with a drawing and a letter” stuck to the back of the frame, revealed Stijn Alsteens, international head of the Old Master Drawings department at Christie’s, speaking to AFP.
The simple pen-and-ink drawing depicts a diagram of a block of marble. It comes mounted to a letter written by Cosimo Buonarroti, the last direct heir of Michelangelo.
The block sketch, which is overwritten with the word “simile” (English: similar), was originally taken from a larger sheet of Michelangelo’s diagrams of marble blocks, according to Giada Damen, a specialist in Old Master drawings for Christie’s New York. “These were either intended for the quarries that provided him with the blocks to make his sculptures, or for the shippers of these blocks,” she told Observer, adding that his diagrams often contained measurements.
The drawing was owned by Cosimo and gifted in 1836 to Sir John Bowring, an English tourist who would later become the governor of Hong Kong. The accompanying letter includes an inscription from Cosimo detailing the gift.
