A highly finished black chalk drawing of the resurrected Christ, rising from his tomb.

The drawing depicts the figure of Christ emerging from the tomb, his limbs spanning the entire composition, the relatively small head allowing attention to focus on the magnificently modelled torso at the centre. Michelangelo used tiny stippled strokes of chalk to build up the body, which stands out in implied relief from the plane of the paper, emphasised by the flattened, decorative swirl of the shroud.

In the years after 1530, Michelangelo made more than a dozen drawings of the Resurrection or the Risen Christ alone (see RCIN 912767). While the compositional studies of the Resurrection may have been prompted by a specific project, it is quite possible that the single figures of Christ had a different function. The care taken over this drawing, and three others of the same subject (British Museum, Tolnay 263; Casa Buonarroti, T.347v; and another lost but known through copies) may suggest that they were intended not as preparatory sketches but as finished works of art, 'presentation drawings' like several of the other sheets by the artist now at Windsor.

In no other work by Michelangelo is the Resurrection of Christ expressed with such glorious exuberance. The Saviour is young, virile and beardless, Olympian in form and perfectly muscular. His meticulously modelled torso is composed of tiny strokes of chalk with no blending, as highly finished as any of the mythological sheets of the same period, and the drawing was thus probably executed as a gift rather than a personal meditation. In the absence of any pictorial setting beyond the lightly drawn sarcophagus and discarded winding cloth, Christ appears as an effusion of pure light or pure Spirit. It is perhaps paradoxical that a drawing of the triumph of the soul over death should so strongly emphasise Christ’s body, but his almost polished torso reflects the effulgent light with a glory that transcends materiality.

A copy of the drawing, attributed to Alessandro Allori, is in the Louvre (inv. 505).