Da Vinci sketch hits record price

The da Vinci sketch was a study for a larger painting

LONDON, England -- A Leonardo da Vinci sketch has sold to an anonymous bidder for over $11 million -- matching the current record for an Old Master drawing.

The Horse and Rider study was expected to fetch over $5 million, but when the final hammer fell the telephone bidder had agreed to pay £8,143,750 ($11,401,250), including a buyer's premium, Christie's auction house said.

This equalled the price paid for Michelangelo's The Study For The Risen Christ at an auction last year.

Prior to Tuesday's Old Master Drawing sale at Christie's in London, the auction house had been billing Horse and Rider as the most significant piece to come up for sale since the 1930s, being one of the last still in private hands.

The silverpoint drawing was done in Florence on parchment in about 1480, as a preparatory study for the unfinished Adoration of the Magi painting, now in the Uffizi Museum in Florence.

Completed when da Vinci was in his twenties, the sketch is all the more remarkable because the silverpoint technique, which uses a small block of real silver, meant the artist could not actually see what he was doing.

VIDEO Sketch expected to fetch $5 million (June 9) Play video (QuickTime, Real or Windows Media)

"What's very difficult with this technique is that when you make the drawing you don't see what you draw, you only see it when the silver oxidises which takes a few minutes," Nicolas Schwed of Christie's in Paris told CNN.

Schwed said that the Italian master had left many sketches of horses.

"Horses were something particularly difficult to draw for Renaissance artists, because you couldn't really see the movement of horses when they walked. It was too fast," said Schwed.

"The way he did it was to draw different sets of legs, about three or four set of legs at the back to create movement."

Da Vinci, today probably best known for the mysterious Mona Lisa hanging in the Louvre in Paris, was a man head of his time -- a scientist, engineer and theorist as well as a painter and sculptor.