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.