Portrait of Michelangelo
by DANIELE da Volterra, Leadpoint and black chalk, 295 x 219 mm
This portrait shows Michelangelo when he was more than seventy years old. The sheet served as a one-to-one model for the head of one of the apostles in Daniele’s Ascension of the Virgin fresco on the altar wall of the Cappella della Rovere in Santissima Trinità dei Monti in Rome. There the apostle is clad in a purple cloak and appears at the right end of the fresco, emphatically pointing upward with his outstretched right arm to the miraculous ascension.