On the occasion of Christmas in Rome, the Capitoline Museums are exhibiting to the public for the first time a drawing by Michelangelo Buonarroti never seen until now.
This precious exhibition is the result of a recent discovery at Casa Buonarroti in Florence, where a conspicuous corpus of Michelangelo's drawings is kept, during the restoration of The Sacrifice of Isaac, the Master's graphic masterpiece, created around 1530.
The drawing, a black pencil sketch featuring the same biblical character, emerged on the back of the same sheet used by Michelangelo to make the famous Sacrifice of Isaac, on the occasion of the removal of a backing which, in the past, had been positioned to protect the drawing itself. The artist had therefore initially made a sketch on one of the two sides of the sheet and then, turning the same, he had traced it with a red pencil still visible on the outline of the composition of the Sacrifice of Isaac which, for many years, has been part of the Casa Buonarroti collection.
Even the Cleopatra, in fact, in August 1988, unveiled a second Cleopatra, hidden by a false background. And also Cleopatra, a very refined and extraordinarily beautiful drawing, will be exhibited so that the two versions, on the front and on the back of the same sheet, can be measured at the same time.
The exhibition "Michelangelo: rediscovered masterpieces", promoted by Roma Capitale, Department of Cultural Growth - Capitoline Superintendency for Cultural Heritage, Ministry of Cultural Heritage and Activities and Tourism and Casa Buonarroti Foundation, curated by Pina Ragionieri, president of the Casa Foundation Buonarroti, with the organization of the MetaMorfosi Cultural Association and Zètema Progetto Cultura, therefore recounts this double, extraordinary, discovery. «The two sheets by Michelangelo - explains Pina Ragionieri - are presented here as a demonstration of perhaps the two most significant events that occurred in the long years in which I worked as director of the Casa Buonarroti Foundation: that is, the detachment of the backing from two masterpieces from our Collection of drawings by Michelangelo which led to the discovery of two other drawings that were certainly autographs of the Master».
The display of the two graphics in a naturally double-faced frame thus becomes, beyond the contemplation of real masterpieces, also a way to draw attention to the precious conservation interventions. Like that of the Olivetti organization which, between 1988 and 1989, took charge of the restoration of Cleopatra, and that of the MetaMorfosi Association which, in 2016, allowed a conservative intervention of The Sacrifice of Isaac, which later proved to be particularly valuable because led to the discovery of a now very rare unpublished work by Michelangelo.
Pina Ragionieri, precious "soul" of Casa Buonarroti for three decades as director, and today President of this institution, accompanied these two extraordinary works to Rome, in the prestigious Capitoline Museums, for an exhibition that aims to be a tribute to the genius of Buonarroti and his inexhaustible inspiration, so admirably testified by these works.
