Recession? What Recession?

Michelangelo Buonarroti Ferdinand Barbedienne William Burgess Filippo Parodi Jacopo Pontormo Constant Sevin Jan Steen From Raging Bulls to Miserable Drips

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Old Master Paintings
A powerful painting that might also be an important discovery was at the booth of Galerie Arnoldi-Livie of Munich. Bruce Livie paid $250,000 at Sotheby’s New York in 2006 for a painting the catalog listed as by an “Italian 16th-century follower of Michelangelo Buonarroti.” Livie and other art historians now believe that the work, priced here at €2.5 million ($3.8 million), is a replica of Michelangelo’s lost cartoon for The Drunkenness of Noah, a scene in his Sistine Chapel ceiling, and was painted by Jacopo da Pontormo for the papal banker Bindo Altoviti.

Another painting that attracted favorable attention was Jan Steen’s The Sacrifice of Iphigenia (1671), on the stand of London/New York gallery Simon Dickinson. A dramatic description of Agamemnon’s agony over sacrificing his daughter to appease the wrathful god Artemis and successfully sail to Troy, the painting went for an undisclosed price to an undisclosed buyer. The work, which once belonged to Dutch dealer Jacques Goudstikker, was looted by the Nazis in 1940, recovered by the Allies in 1945, and held in the custody of the Dutch government until February 2006, when it was handed over to Goudstikker heir Marei von Saher. The asking price was €8 million ($12.3 million). “You just can’t find a picture like that today,” said Ian Kennedy, a curator of European painting and sculpture at the Nelson-Atkins Museum in Kansas City, Missouri.

Antiquities
Rupert Wace of London had a great TEFAF opening, selling, among other pieces, an Egyptian bronze head of a cat to an Asian buyer for more than €100,000 ($153,000), and a marble bust either of Faustina the Younger, the wife of the Emperor Marcus Aurelius, or Bruttia Crispina, wife of Emperor Commodus, which had an asking price of €225,000 ($345,000). This sculpture, which had been in Uruguay for the last 165 years, is returning to Italy after selling to an Italian collector.

Charles Ede of London sold, for a six-figure price, a rare, late Egyptian wood model of a boat and eight crew members that measured about 16 by 34 inches, to a European collector, who, according to the dealer, “does quite a lot of ship buying.”

Ede was pleased with his results after the opening weekend, calling this year’s TEFAR “the best fair we have done for years.”