An ancient fragment of a statue of a Roman emperor sold last night at Sotheby’s for $34.3 million, a sum that the house has deemed an auction record for a Roman antiquity.
The three-and-a-half-foot-tall marble fragment depicts only the emperor’s torso, adorned in an elegant bronze cuirass. According to Sotheby’s, it once belonged to a larger statue of an emperor from the Julio-Claudinian dynasty and dates to the 1st century CE. Like many Roman statues, it is a copy of a Greek one.
The statue is thought to have come from Dalmatia, per a provenance supplied by Sotheby’s, which last sold the work in 2010 to an Austrian collector. That year, the statue sold for $7.36 million, which means that it has more than quadrupled in value in the last decade and a half.
This time around, Sotheby’s gave the work an $8 million–$12 million estimate. When it appeared at a New York auction called “Magnum Opus” on Wednesday night, the piece ended up generating a 14-minute bidding war. (That battle was, in some ways, for show: The statue was guaranteed and had more than one irrevocable bid, meaning that it was assured to sell, even before it hit the block.) With premium fees accounted for, the statue sold for nearly triple its high estimate.
“The sculpture embodies the cross-category vision at the heart of this collection: a work whose historical importance, rarity and aesthetic power transcend traditional collecting boundaries,” Alexandra Olsman, Sotheby’s vice president and antiquities specialist, said in a statement. “Few ancient marbles combine such remarkable preservation, scholarly significance and visual impact, and tonight’s result reflects the enduring appeal of truly exceptional objects.”
The work has an unusual history. For years, it resided in the holdings of the heirs to Wilhelm Aloys Maximilian Neumann, a 19th-century collector based in Graz, Austria. At the end of World War II, with the Soviet troops having advanced into Austria, the family hid away the sculpture in an area between two doors, then plastered over the portals. It took a redesign of the Neumann family’s home for the sculpture to emerge anew, per a 2010 New York Times report.
Back then, one Sotheby’s official thought it was worth no more than $900,000 before investigating further, the Times reported.
Sotheby’s did not release the past record for an ancient Roman antiquity, but at least one result from the past two decades approaches the sum brought in by the marble torso. In 2007, a 2,000-year-old bronze statue of Artemis came to auction, also at Sotheby’s, where it sold for $28.6 million, more than four times what the house said it expected. The British dealer Giuseppe Eskenazi bought it at the time.
Wednesday’s “Magnum Opus” sale was composed entirely of works from one mysterious individual’s collection. They are part of a grouping of 600 objects from those holdings that are due to come to auction this week at Sotheby’s, with more to follow at sales staged in New York and Paris through 2027.
The Roman torso statue accounted for more than half of last night’s $63 million haul. That sum, which includes buyer’s premium, outpaces Sotheby’s presale estimate for all three of this week’s auctions, which it said were expected to bring in $60 million when they were announced over the summer.
Also sold last night were significant paintings by Canaletto, Luis Meléndez, and Jacob van Ruisdael, though none set records. There were also an ancient Roman head of a girl and a fragment of a Safavid carpet that sold for $2.5 million and $448,000, respectively.