An elderly French woman had no idea that a small painting in her kitchen was the work of a famed 13th-century Italian artist — but is now set to cash in on the discovery after the piece sold for a record-shattering $26.6 million.
An auctioneer had come to inspect furniture at the woman’s home in Compiegne, northern France, in June when she spotted the 10-by-8-inch piece on a wall between the kitchen and the dining room.
The auctioneer suggested the unidentified nonagenarian bring the piece into experts for an evaluation — where they were told it was a work by the celebrated artist Cimabue called “Christ Mocked.”
“You rarely see something of such quality,” the auctioneer, Philomène Wolf, told Le Parisie, according to the Washington Post. “I immediately thought it was a work of Italian primitivism. But I didn’t imagine it was a Cimabue.”
On Sunday, the work went on the auction block near Chantilly, north of Paris — and London-based dealer Fabrizio Moretti shelled out the staggering sum for the artwork
“I bought it on behalf of two collectors,” Moretti told The New York Times. “It’s one of the most important old master discoveries in the last 15 years. Cimabue is the beginning of everything. He started modern art. When I held the picture in my hands, I almost cried.”
The sale represented a “world record for a primitive, or a pre-1500 work,” said Dominique Le Coent of Acteon Auction House.
“It’s a painting that was unique, splendid and monumental,” Le Coent added. “Cimabue was the father of the Renaissance. But this sale goes beyond all our dreams.”
The woman will receive “the majority” of the sale money, according to the auction house.
The actual sale price far exceeded estimates of $4.4 million to $6.6 million.
A Cimabue painting had never been auctioned before, so it was difficult to judge how much it could sell for, according to Le Coent.
“Christ Mocked” belongs to a late-13th-century altarpiece that also included Cimabue’s “Flagellation of Christ” — now held at the Upper East Side’s Frick Collection — and the “Madonna and Child Enthroned Between Two Angels,” kept at the National Gallery in London, Paris art expert Eric Turquin told the Times.
Specialists at the Turquin gallery in Paris determined with “certitude” that the painting had the signature characteristics of Cimabue.
With Post Wires