'Lost' Michelangelo goes under hammer

The sketch may have been bought in 1747

A drawing by Michelangelo discovered in a scrapbook in a British stately home last year could fetch up to £8m when it goes on sale on Wednesday.

Study of a Mourning Woman lay forgotten for 250 years before being found in the library of Castle Howard in North Yorkshire.

The three-quarter length drawing in pen and brown ink, said to date from between 1494 and 1504, will be auctioned by Sotheby's in London.

The most significant Michelangelo find in living memory - like finding part of the Holy Grail

James Miller
Sotheby's

The sketch is regarded as a major work by one of the greatest artistic geniuses in history.

"It adds greatly to our knowledge of the earliest works of this great artist, and is also an extremely beautiful and powerful image," a spokesman for the auction house said.

It was a Sotheby's expert, Julien Stock, who chanced upon the work while flicking through a scrapbook of Old Master drawings for an insurance valuation.

At the time, Sotheby's described the find as "the most significant Michelangelo find in living memory - like finding part of the Holy Grail".

The sketch was found in Castle Howard's library

The cost of insuring such a valuable work made it impossible to keep the drawing at Castle Howard, which was the setting for the TV series Brideshead Revisited.

"Mr Stock recognised it as belonging to a small group of large-scale figure studies by Michelangelo," the spokesman said.

"Although there is no record of exactly when the drawing entered the collection at Castle Howard, it was most probably purchased at the 1747 London auction of Richardson's celebrated drawings collection."

Castle Howard has already sold three other paintings from its collection to the National Gallery of Scotland.

The drawing is similar to four other early figure drawings by the artist which are in museum collections in Paris, Munich, Vienna and London.

Appeal

It is dated later than the others and is seen as an important link between them and Michelangelo's later work.

The National Galleries of Scotland had hoped to raise enough money to prevent the work from being sold to a private collector or abroad.

The Castle Howard sketch is only the second major Michelangelo drawing to be discovered in the past 25 years.

The other was a large study of Christ and the Woman of Samaria which sold at Sotheby's in New York in 1998 for just under $7.5m (£6.3m).

Michelangelo was a leading figure in the High Renaissance and painted the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel in Rome as well as sculpting such works as David.