On Wednesday, a Michelangelo sketch sold for a world record price at an auction in Paris.
At Christie’s Paris auction house, an A4 drawing of a naked man by the Italian artist sold for €23 million ($24 million).
It is a pen and brown ink drawing from the end of the 15th century that depicts a naked guy standing with two other characters in the background.
The €23 million bought for this piece by Michelangelo di Lodovico Buonarroti Simoni, a Renaissance sculpture and painter, breaks all previous records.
His marble sculpture ‘Risen Christ‘ sold for £8.1 million (€9.5 million) at an auction in London in July 2000.
The last time the naked guy sketch was for sale was in 1907 at Paris’s Hôtel Drouot.
It stayed in a French private collection under the ‘School of Michelangelo’ before being assigned to Michelangelo in 2019.
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The A4 sheet’s framing and size are based on Masaccio’s fresco ‘The Baptism of the Neophytes,’ and demonstrate Michelangelo’s fascination in the male form.
France proclaimed it a national treasure in September 2019.
This means that the drawing can’t be taken out of France for 30 months and that the French government and museums can buy it back at any moment.
