These are the drawings Michelangelo made while planning one of the prophets on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel. The sheet is red chalk, with a few touches of white chalk on the shoulder. A muscular, bare back fills most of the page, with the arms raised and the head turned in profile. Around it are studies of a foot, a hand and a face.
The model was a young man from his workshop. Using a male model for a female figure was ordinary practice in Renaissance studios, and Michelangelo then transformed the pose. In the painting the Libyan Sibyl is a monumental seated prophet, about three times life size, shown at the moment she closes an enormous book and starts to step down from her throne. That twisting motion needed many studies, and this is one of the best.
The Metropolitan Museum of Art bought the double-sided sheet on August 8, 1924. The painter John Singer Sargent helped negotiate the purchase with the widow of its previous owner, Aureliano de Beruete. We have a post on another of the Sistine Chapel's prophets, the Delphic Sibyl, in this same ceiling tradition.
Studies for the Libyan Sibyl appears on our:
Related: The Delphic Sibyl: A Pagan Prophet on the Pope's Ceiling