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 A nude young man (after Masaccio) surrounded by two figures by Michelangelo made €23,162,000 at Christie’s in Paris today. This is the most expensive work by the artist to have ever sold, the highest price ever achieved for a work on paper offered on the European continent, and the third highest price for an Old Master drawing ever sold.

This unpublished drawing, one of the most exciting discoveries made in the field of Old Master drawings in recent decades, is an important addition to a small group of drawings by Michelangelo from the 1490s, copied from works by earlier Florentine masters. ‘He drew for many months from the pictures of Masaccio in the Carmine,’ Giorgio Vasari wrote in his 1568 life of Michelangelo, referring to the paintings by the early fifteenth-century painter Masaccio (1401-1428) in Santa Maria del Carmine in Florence’s Oltrarno quarter, ‘where he copied those works with so much judgment, that the craftsmen and all other men were astonished, in such sort that envy grew against him together with his fame.’These drawings can be dated to the time when Michelangelo enjoyed the protection of Lorenzo de’ Medici, and later of his son Piero de’ Medici, who encouraged the young artist’s study of antique sculpture and early Renaissance art in the years immediately preceding the creation of some of his most famous works, such as the Pietà in Saint Peter’s, Rome (1498-1499), and the marble David in the Galleria dell’Accademia, Florence (1501-1504).

The drawing was first recognised as the work of Michelangelo in 2019 by Furio Rinaldi, then a specialist in Christie’s department of Old Master Drawings. Paul Joannides, Emeritus Professor of Art History at Cambridge University and author of the complete catalogues of drawings by Michelangelo and his school in the Ashmolean Museum, Oxford, and the Musée du Louvre, was able to study the original, and supports the attribution. Sold in 1907 at the Hôtel Drouot in Paris as a work of the school of Michelangelo, the drawing escaped the attention of all scholars until its recent rediscovery. It is probably the earliest surviving nude study by the artist.