Are ‘Secret Room’ drawings by Michelangelo? Now, visitors can judge for themselves

The narrow, arched room below the Medici Chapels Museum in Florence has some suspiciously virtuosic doodles on the walls.

"The hand is very fast, showing great confidence, it makes you think," Francesca De Luca, the museum's director, said as she contemplated a muscular nude by the entrance. She pointed out the legs in another sketch and their resemblance to the powerful gams of a Michelangelo sculpture on a tomb upstairs.

"These have never been seen by the public," she said.

Until now. Next month, the museum's so-called stanza segreta, or secret room, where Michelangelo possibly hid and drew on the walls nearly 500 years ago, will open to the public.

The sketches were discovered in 1975 by Paolo Dal Poggetto, then the director of the Medici Chapels, who was hoping to create a new exit for tourists. He and his colleagues discovered a trapdoor hidden...