Bidder pays €9.5m for Renaissance drawing

A rediscovered drawing by the last great Florentine artist of the High Renaissance, Andrea del Sarto, fetched £6.5m (€9.5m) at auction today.

Head of St Joseph has become the third most expensive old master drawing yet sold at auction, after Michelangelo’s The Risen Christ and Leonardo da Vinci’s Horse and Rider.

Scholars knew about the existence of the work from a 1920s photograph, but the whereabouts of the drawing remained a mystery.

Head of St Joseph, which has fetched a world record price for the artist, was discovered in a private Swiss collection earlier this year after disappearing for more than 50 years.

Andrea del Sarto (1486-1530), the son of a Florentine tailor, began at the workshop of Piero di Cosimo before becoming an independent artist.

Absorbing the artistic influences of the careers of Leonardo da Vinci, Mchelangelo and Raphael, he soon became the leading painter in the city, receiving commissions from religious orders, collectors and the Medici family.

In 1518, Sarto was summoned to the court of Francois I, King of France, but returned to Florence a year later. He died at the age of 44 following an outbreak of the plague.

The drawing, auctioned at Christie’s in London, is a study for the head of Saint Joseph in the altarpiece of the Holy Family, which is now in Florence’s Pitti Palace.

The black and red chalk study also contains a secondary drawing below it, of Saint Joseph with his eyes open.

Michelangelo’s The Risen Christ and Leonardo da Vinci’s Horse and Rider both hold the highest price for an Old Maser drawing – both fetching £8,143,750 (€12,002,830) within a year of each other in 2000 and 2001.

The £6,504,000 (€9,586,255) paid for Head of St Joseph includes the buyer’s premium.