italian art

Christie's and Sotheby's on the Upswing (Sorta)

Don't call it a comeback ... well, because the bar's been lowered. At the post-war and contemporary art sales last Friday, both Christie's and Sotheby's nearly hit the high end of presale estimates. This marks a distinct turn from earlier this year, when the auction houses couldn't even reach the lowest ends of reduced expectations. Any comparison to last year is made difficult by the fact that both houses combined their auctions with Italian art sales. So, they open with "close to the top end of the range" and can't really be evaluated on anything else.

Values for the pieces are off -- that's pretty well known (especially to anyone trying to sell right now). Sotheby's brought in $32.8 million at the sale -- which also had Arab and Iranian art on top of the contemporary and Italian lots. Christie's picked up $27.7 million, with more U.S. buyers than expected.

We're again seeing an engineered reality that's driven by performance relative to presale estimates -- this is all the hint we nee to know that the art market is still pretty far from recovery. But, as we know, it could have been much worse. Hell, we saw how bad it could be for most of this year.

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Rare Donatello Relief Goes Up For Auction

by Deidre Woollard (RSS feed) —

The loss of an Italian church may be your gain if you have a few million dollars. The Independent reports that the parishioners of San Giovanni Battista Church in Padua sold a terracotta relief of the Madonna and Child in 1902 in order to pay for a new organ. The piece is now going up for auction at Sotheby's in New York on January 26 and is expected to sell for up to $6 million. The piece was so covered in stucco and paint that the last time it came up for auction in 1990 it didn't sell. A recent cleaning and new research however assured the fact that it is definitely a Donatello, making it extremely valuable since there is only one Donatello in a public collection in the U.S.

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Tags: art, art history, artists, auction, donatello, italian art, renaissance, sotheby's