Rare Michelangelo found in back room of museum

A rare Michelangelo drawing worth more than €10.92m has been discovered in a back room of a New York City design museum.

The drawing has been authenticated by Italian Renaissance art scholars and is one of fewer than 10 Michelangelo's known to be in the US.

It was purchased by the museum in 1942 for $60 (€60.54), and its current value is estimated at between $10m (€10.09m) and $12m (€12.1m).

"To find a new drawing by Michelangelo is very exciting, but to find a drawing by him of a menorah and, moreover, in New York, is almost incredible," said Timothy Clifford, director of the National Galleries of Scotland, who discovered the work while on sabbatical at the Smithsonian's Cooper-Hewitt, National Design Museum, in Manhattan.

About 500 years old and in pristine condition, the 17in by 10in drawing was made using black chalk, brush and brown wash with incised lines on cream-coloured paper.

The work was spotted by Clifford in April as he sifted through a box of light fixture designs by unknown artists in the museum's newly opened Drue Heinz Study Centre for Drawings and Prints, a repository of European and American design. The distinctive style of the drawing immediately led him to suspect that it was by Michelangelo.

"He's an Italian Renaissance scholar, and he said he wanted to look at all our drawings from the Italian Renaissance period. We said, 'All? We've got hundreds of boxes'.

"And he said, 'All'," Mr Thompson said.

"After he'd been here for about two weeks and, God knows how many boxes he'd been through, he opened a box simply labelled, 'Lighting fixtures'. He brought out a drawing and said, 'My goodness, this is a Michelangelo!'."

Clifford says he believes the rendering is of a seven-branched candelabrum in the form of a menorah and that the drawing - which indicates the completed object was to be at least 6ft tall - relates to the Medici tombs project. The museum plans to put the work on public view within a year.