Michelangelo sketches found

Spain’s Prado art museum has discovered two sketches by Renaissance master Michelangelo languishing in a storage room, a senior official said Monday.

The modest drawings of a shoulder and a man’s arm are studies for the “Last Judgment,” which is painted on the altar wall of the Sistine chapel in the Vatican, said Gabriele Finaldi, associate director for the Prado collection.

The works were part of a set of eight drawings donated to the museum in 1930. They were thought to be associated with Michelangelo and his school, but they had never been studied or published, he said. The two pieces were properly identified as Michelangelo’s own work by art experts as the Prado prepared for an exhibition of 16th century Italian drawings.