NEW YORK—It could have been a slow week for Sotheby’s, given recent fears of a recession coupled with the fact that Old Masters sales generally lack the media buzz of contemporary auctions. But despite almost 40 percent of the lots going unsold at the auction house’s Old Masters Week, which ran January 23 to 26 in New York, the total earnings were comparable to last year's and a few records were set, showing that the market’s not dead yet.

The week’s biggest sale, Important Old Master Paintings Including European Works of Art, a two-day affair from January 24 to January 25 that offered 398 lots, brought in a total of $82.5 million, well within its estimate of $68.3-99.7 million. That amount came in well shy of last year’s $111 million, but George Wachter, co-chairman of Sotheby’s Old Master Paintings Department Worldwide, chalked up the difference to the fact that an important Rembrandt, Saint James the Greater, was on the block in 2007, and sold for $25.8 million. “They [the two sales] are virtually comparable, with the difference in the total explained by the sale of one painting,” he said in a statement.

This year’s top lot, a rare Franconian limewood figure of Saint Catherine (c. 1505) by the medieval sculptor Tilman Riemenschneider, came in at $6.3 million, just above its high estimate of $6 million. The elegant, delicately carved piece came from the New York–based Scherman Foundation and went to an anonymous buyer. The sale set an auction record for Riemenschneider.

Other high earners included Donatello’s gilt-and-painted-terracotta relief of Madonna and Child, The San Felice Madonna (c. 1450–60), which surpassed its $2-4 million estimate, going for $5.6 million to an anonymous telephone bidder after a five-collector tug-o-war and setting a record for the artist. Lucas Cranach the Elder’s Portrait of a Young Lady Holding Grapes and Apples (1528), an oil on panel transferred to canvas, blew its $1.5-2.5 million estimate out of the water, selling for $5 million to an American private collection. The same artist’s Phyllis and Aristotle (1530) also did well at $4 million, beating its expected $2.5-3.5 million. And Titian’s The Penitent Magdalene (1576) sold for $4.5 million, near the low end of its $4-6 million estimate.

Even with the respectable total, there were some signs of the market flagging, with 152 lots left unsold, including some by such sought-after artists as Jan Brueghel the Elder and Jacopo Tintoretto. The unsold sum represents 38 percent of the 398 lots on offer, up from 27 percent (of 440 total lots) last year, or 21 percent by value, up from 6.7 percent last year.

The week also included three other sales: the Jeffrey E. Horvitz Collection of Italian Drawings on January 23, Old Master Drawings on January 23, and Old Master and 19th Century European Art on January 26, which earned $4.9 million, $4.2 million, and $2.6 million, respectively. Artist records at those sales included Fra Bartolommeo, Agostino Carracci, Giuseppe Cades, Marco Pino, and Ventura Salimbeni.