Posted on Wednesday, May 15, 2024
This is the most significant drawing in North America. It lives at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City. It is a page of preparatory sketches for the Libyan Sibyl figure in the Sistine Chapel in the Vatican Palace, by Michelangelo Buonarroti. It is a series of anatomical drawings of his male assistant, for the large fresco painting of the female prophetess, twisting as she closes a massive book.
It is among the greatest drawings produced by humanity. It showcases the artist confidently handling a massive amount of anatomic detail, observed directly from life, in a quick but subtle drawing with a perfect balance of light and dark, hard lines and soft details, in a complex and dynamic pose.
It is also significant as the Sistine Chapel frescoes are apex masterpieces of the High Renaissance from 1450 to 1550. The fresco produced from these drawings is almost 13 ft. high and one of 343 figures Michelangelo painted on the chapel's ceiling. This drawing is a piece and actual fragment of Michelangelo's mental process of corralling and harnessing the anatomic information and knowledge he would need to execute one of the many fresco figures.
American artist John Singer Sargent helped negotiate the the purchase of the work by the Metropolitan Museum in 1924.