Expert discovers $10m drawing by Michelangelo in a box of unknowns

A RARE Michelangelo drawing worth more than $10m has been discovered in a back room of a New York City design museum.

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

The drawing has been unanimously authenticated by Italian Renaissance art scholars in the US and abroad and is one of fewer than ten Michelangelos known to be in the US, museum director Paul Thompson said.

It was purchased by the museum in 1942 for $60 US, and its current value is estimated at between $10m and $12m dollars, art dealers said.

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 Sir Timothy 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'," said Mr Thompson. "He brought out a drawing and said, 'My Goodness, this is a Michelangelo!'."

Sir Timothy said he believes that 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.

Pope Clement VII commissioned the funerary chapel in 1524 and various designs were discussed, but the project was abandoned after the sacking of Rome in 1527.

Because Michelangelo executed few drawings of decorative objects, museum scholars long thought the drawing was by Perino del Vaga, a contemporary of Michelangelo's known for his prolific drawings of design objects.

The museum plans to put the work on public view within a year.