Art News

Sotheby’s London Sells a Lost Royal Masterpiece Setting a Record at Auction

LONDON.- Tonight Sotheby’s London Evening Sale of Treasures: Princely Taste was led by the sale of a magnificent pair of Italian carved giltwood settees created for one of the most sumptuous Rococo interiors in Italy – the Gilded Gallery of Palazzo Carrega Cataldi. Setting a record at auction for Italian seating furniture when they sold, to a round of applause, for £1,721,250/$2,763,639/¤1,923,495, the settees sold for over three times the pre-sale high estimate of £300,000 -£500,000*. A further highlight of the sale was a recently rediscovered masterpiece – an exquisitely carved chalcedony cover which is the lost partner of a magnificent cup in the collection of the Louvre. Expertly crafted by Giovanni Ambrogio Miseroni – the greatest of all Renaissance hardstone engravers – the exquisite cover sold for £1,497,150/$2,403,985/¤1,673,175