The Minister's ruling follows a recommendation by the Reviewing Committee on the Export of Works of Art that the export decision be deferred. This reflects the drawing's outstanding aesthetic quality and importance for study; it is believed to be one of one of Michelangelo's rare earlier works and its unusually excellent state of preservation clearly shows the variety of his penmanship.
The deferral will enable purchase offers to be made at the following agreed fair market price:
A drawing, Study of a Mourning Woman, by Michelangelo, deferred at the recommended price of £7,500,000 (including VAT) until after 28 January 2003. The deferral period could be extended until after 28 June 2003 if there is a serious intention to raise funds with a view to making an offer to purchase.
Anyone interested in making an offer to purchase the drawing should contact the owner's agent through:
The Secretary, The Reviewing Committee on the Export of Works of Art, Department for Culture, Media and Sport, 2-4 Cockspur Street, London SW1Y 5DH
NOTES TO EDITORS
The drawing, Study of a Mourning Woman, by Michelangelo, is in pen and two shades of brown ink heightened with white. It measures 26cm x 16.4 cm.
The drawing was discovered in the Library at Castle Howard pasted into an album of otherwise undistinguished drawings. It is of imposing size, and for a work of this period is in amazingly fresh condition - still preserving the contrast between the brilliant white heightening and the dark tonality of the ink. The subtlety and variety of Michelangelo's penmanship comes across far better than in many of his surviving pen studies, where the tonal contrasts have been dulled by exposure to the light.
The drawing is justly described as 'an important and highly significant addition to the artist's corpus'. It is of outstanding significance to the study of Michelangelo on two counts. Firstly, it is thought to be one of a handful of drawings by the artist from the beginning of his career. The drawing fits in neatly with a group of five pen-and-ink drawings generally dated to the period 1490-1500,(only one of which, the 'Greek Philosopher' in the British Museum, is in this country). Michelangelo was at this time evolving his own unique style of drawing based on that learnt from the Florentine painter Domenico Ghirlandaio, during his short tenure in his studio in the late 1480s. Secondly, it is a pivotal work because it contains elements of the rigid, extremely sculptural cross hatching of the 'Philosopher' while anticipating the much more fluid draughtsmanship and dual use of white heightening both as a highlight and to cover up areas of penwork as employed in studies, like the nude for the 'Battle of Cascina' cartoon of 1504-5, in the British Museum. The discovery of the 'Mourning Woman' vitally expands our understanding of Michelangelo's formation, a period inadequately documented by surviving drawings.
Michelangelo was notoriously reluctant to allow anybody to look at his drawings (a paranoia increased by the theft of over fifty studies from his studio in Florence in 1529), limiting access to them to a restricted circle of friends. The 'Mourning Woman' is a fascinating and relatively well documented example of a Michelangelo drawing that enjoyed a measure of fame among Michelangelo's contemporaries. The Croatian-born miniaturist Giulio Clovio evidently had access to the drawing as he included the figure in his 'Crucifixion' illumination in the Farnese Hours (1537-46) now in the Pierpont Morgan Library. Other variants and copies after the figure, including one by the Florentine Francesco Salviati, demonstrate how Michelangelo's innovative figural ideas filtered out into the wider artistic community.
