A rediscovered Antonio Canova marble sculpture of Mary Magdalene could fetch up to $13.4 million when it heads to auction in July.
A rediscovered Antonio Canova marble sculpture of Mary Magdalene could fetch up to $13.4 million (US$10 million) when it heads to auction in July.
Described by auction house Christie’s as the Italian neoclassical sculptor’s “lost masterpiece, Maddalena Giacente (Recumbent Magdalene) was commissioned by the Earl of Liverpool, then British prime minister, and took three years to carve.
Depicting Mary Magdalene in a state of religious ecstasy, the sculpture was completed just before Canova’s death in 1822.
“This is one of the last works that Canova actually executed,” Christie’s International Head of Sculpture Donald Johnston said.
“It’s just recently come to light after having been in collections in the 20th century, unrecognised as a significant marble by Canova.”
The sculpture is now on show at Christie’s London and will go on tour to New York and Hong Kong.
It will be offered for sale at a July 7 auction, with a price estimate of $8.9 million to $13.4 million (£5 million to £8 million).
A series of original NASA photographs from the Apollo missions sold for a total of 1.16 million Danish crowns (A$232,000) in an auction in Copenhagen on Wednesday.
The 74 privately-owned photographs from the Apollo 8-17 missions included the famous one of Buzz Aldrin’s moon walk during the first manned lunar landing in July 1969, which sold for 52,000 crowns (A$10,000).
The photograph of Buzz Aldrin in full astronaut suit and Neil Armstrong, who took the photograph and can be glimpsed in the reflection on Aldrin’s visor, featured on the cover of National Geographic and Life magazines in 1969.
The first colour photograph of the first earthrise ever witnessed by human beings taken during the Apollo 8 mission in 1968 sold at the highest price of 88,400 crowns (A$17,700).
A leather helmet that Amelia Earhart wore on a flight across the Atlantic in 1928 and later lost in a crowd of fans in Cleveland has sold at auction for $1.1 million.
The helmet went to an anonymous bidder in an online-only sale that closed Sunday, a spokesperson for Heritage Auctions said.
The seller was Anthony Twiggs, a 67-year-old Minnesotan who had tried for years to prove that the leather aviator’s helmet he inherited from his mother was really Earhart’s.
Earhart was just a passenger in June 1928 when she became the first woman on board a plane crossing the Atlantic.Photos shot before and after the flight show her wearing a leather helmet or flight cap.
Earhart wore the same helmet the following year in the Women’s National Air Derby, an all-female race from Santa Monica, California, to Cleveland.Thousands of spectators greeted the famous aviator when she landed her single-engine Lockheed Vega at the Cleveland airfield, and she lost the helmet in the crush.
Mr Twiggs’ mother, Ellie, was in the crowd along with a group of school friends, according to a story that Mr Twiggs recounted to The New York Times.Ellie told her family that a boy who liked her said he had found Earhart’s leather helmet on the ground and wanted to give it to her.
Mr Twiggs inherited the helmet after his mother’s death more than 20 years ago but had a difficult time convincing experts that it really had belonged to Earhart, who disappeared over the Pacific Ocean in 1937.
That changed last fall when Mr Twiggs succeeded in using photo matching technology to authenticate the helmet, which exactly matched the one seen in the 1928 photos, the Times said.
Mr Twiggs told the Times before last weekend’s sale that he was relieved that his mother’s story turned out to be true.
“My mother kept it for Amelia.
She thought it was the neatest thing.
It was never about that boy she wouldn’t even name,” Mr Twiggs said.
“He didn’t impress her that much, but the helmet did.”
A gemstone, billed as one of the largest gem-quality opals ever found, was sold for $200,321 at auction in Alaska on Sunday.
The opal, dubbed the “Americus Australis,” weighs more than 11,800 carats, according to the auction house Alaska Premier Auctions & Appraisals.It also has a long history.
Most recently, it was kept in a linen closet in a home in Big Lake, north of Anchorage, by Fred von Brandt, who mines for gold in Alaska and whose family has deep roots in the gem and rock business.
The opal is larger than a brick and is broken into two pieces, which Mr von Brandt said was a practice used decades ago to prove gem quality.
Mr Von Brandt said the stone has been in his family since the late 1950s, when his grandfather bought it from an Australian opal dealer named John Altmann.
Man Ray’s famed “Le Violon d’Ingres” is poised to make history as the most expensive photograph ever sold at auction.
The black and white image, taken in 1924 by the American surrealist artist, transforms a woman’s naked body into a violin by overlaying the picture of her back with f-holes.
The original print of the masterpiece, widely considered to be Man Ray’s most famous work, is expected to fetch between $7 million and $9.8 million when it goes under the hammer at Christie’s in May — the highest estimate for a single photograph in auction history, according to the auction house.
A British metal detectorist has thanked his kids after he found one of England’s first gold coins, which sold at auction for $1.2 million.
Michael Leigh-Mallory, 52, discovered the Henry III gold penny buried 10 centimetres under the ground on farmland in the Devon village of Hemyock.
Once a keen metal detectorist, he had long quit his hobby until his children had encouraged him to get back into it and take them out with him.
Mr Leigh-Mallory bought a new metal detector and the day after it arrived he and the kids set off into nearby farmland.
“Within 15 minutes I found the coin,” he told The Guardian.
“I knew it was gold but I had no idea how important it was.”
The coin is estimated to have been minted around the year 1257.
Mr Leigh-Mallory will split the profits from the auction sale 50-50 with the land owner.
One page of artwork from a 1984 Spider-Man comic book has sold for a record $US3.36 million ($4.7m) at a Heritage Auctions’ four-day comic event in Dallas on January 13.
The artwork for page 25 from Marvel Comics’ Secret Wars No.8 was done by American comic artist Mike Zeck.
It depicts the origin of Spider-man’s black suit.
The previous auction record for an interior US comic book page was $US657,250 ($910,192) for art from a 1974 comic of the The Incredible Hulk.
A 1938 comic book featuring the first appearance of Superman has sold for US$3.18 million ($4.37 million) at auction.
The comic, sold by Heritage Auctions , is known as the “Rocket Copy” after the original owner embossed the cover with a rocket stamp.
Action Comics #1 holds three of the top four spots for highest-priced comics ever sold at auction, with the Rocket Copy coming in at number four – and it is just the fourth comic ever to sell for more than US$3 million ($4.12 million).
The top spot is held by a copy of Amazing Fantasy #15, featuring the first appearance of Spider-Man, which sold last September for US$3.6 million ($4.94 million).
When Action Comics #1 first hit newsstands in 1938, it would have cost just ten cents to buy – about US$1.90 ($2.60) today.
A near-mint condition issue of the first ever comic featuring Marvel superhero The Hulk has sold for more than $677,000, setting a new record.
Auctions and private sales site Comic Connect said it was the most expensive Incredible Hulk comic ever sold, fetching $677,153 (US$490,000), paid by a private collector.
The comic, first published in 1962, was in near-mint condition.
“Highly-graded copies of Hulk #1 are notoriously hard to find, due to the cheap paper used and the smudging of the grey colour on the front cover,” Comic Connect COO Vincent Zurzolo said in a press release.
The Hulk was created by Stan Lee and Jack Kirby as one of the earliest Marvel superheroes.He has been portrayed on the big screen by Eric Bana, Edward Norton, and most recently by Mark Ruffalo in the Avengers films.
The most expensive comic ever sold remains a copy of Amazing Fantasy #15, also from 1962, which featured the debut of fellow Marvel superhero, Spider-Man.It fetched $4.97 million (US$3.6 million) in September last year.
This bottle of Penfolds Grange Hermitage Bin 1 Shiraz 1951 is the most expensive bottle of Australian wine ever sold.
It went under the hammer on Sunday at a Langton’s auction and fetched $157,624, breaking the previous record of $142,131, which was set for another bottle of Penfolds Grange 1951.
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The popular non-fungible token (NFT) Bored Ape has accidentally been sold for US$3000 ($4216), one-hundredth of its market price of $300,000 ($421,600).
The seller was supposed to put the NFT up for 75 ethereum (ETH), the crypto-currency used for many NFT trades.
But a “fat-finger error” meant it was mistakenly listed for 0.75 ETH on Saturday, CNet reports .
An automated account quickly jumped on the error and bought the NFT.
They then put it back up on sale for close to US$250,000 ($351,000).
“How’d it happen? A lapse of concentration I guess,” the owner Max, with the username maxnaut, told CNet.”I list a lot of items every day and just wasn’t paying attention properly.I instantly saw the error as my finger clicked the mouse but a bot … instantly sniped (it) before I could click cancel, and just like that, $250k was gone.”
Two of Empress Josephine Bonaparte’s tiaras have sold at auction for over $1.06 million (US$763,000).
The two pieces which are understood to have belonged to French Emperor Napoleon Bonaparte’s first wife went under the hammer yesterday at Sotheby’s London.
The pieces, which have spent more than 150 years in private hands prior to their sale, exceeded the anticipated high estimate of $924,000 (US$662,000).
This piece is a gold and enamel tiara and features small portraits of ancient Greek deities Zeus, Dionysus, Medusa, Pan and Gaia in agate and jasper.
London’s Victoria & Albert Museum previously held the item on loan and noted it was “probably a gift from Napoleon’s sister Caroline Murat.”
One of the tiaras is gold with blue enamel accents and vivid red carnelian engravings featuring classical portraits.
The empress, also known as Joséphine de Beauharnais after her first marriage to nobleman and army general Alexandre de Beauharnais, has been the subject of ongoing fascination over Napoleon’s documented passion and devotion to her and how she ultimately relinquished her marriage when she and the emperor were unable to produce an heir together..
