Friday, September 07, 2012

Have $15 Million Kicking Around?


If so, you could own a rare Raphael drawing that's going to auction.

From a piece on Spear's...

Executed in black chalk, Raphael’s Head of an Apostle (estimated at £10–15 million) is a highly important drawing within the artist’s oeuvre: a working, ‘auxiliary cartoon’ for a significant figure in the Transfiguration, Raphael’s greatest late work, commissioned by Cardinal Giulio de’ Medici in around 1516 and recently described by scholars as “one of the most important of all Renaissance paintings”.When Raphael died unexpectedly at the age of just 37, his body was laid out in state in his studio, with the Transfiguration hanging at his head. (The painting can today be seen in the Vatican Museum in Rome.)

Just as the Transfiguration was a major milestone in the history of art, anticipating elements of the much later Baroque style, so too the drawings relating to it were unlike anything previously seen in Raphael’s oeuvre or anywhere else.

No comments: