A rare 17th century drawing by Italian sculptor Le Bernin was auctioned on Saturday for 1.9 million euros in Compiègne in the Oise, shattering "a world record for a drawing" by this artist, according to the house. of sales.
Auctioned between 30,000 and 50,000 euros, the work, a red blood produced between 1630 and 1640, was finally auctioned for 1.3 million euros on Saturday afternoon during an online sale organized by the house Actéon, for a total price of 1,937,500 euros with the purchase costs.
“The world record for a Bernini drawing of 139,000 euros dating back to 2014 is shattered.
We are extremely happy to have played our role of revealing works of art, ”
declared auctioneer Dominique Le Coënt to AFP.
The work will leave France
The identity of the purchaser - who was represented - has not yet been revealed but "it is probably an Anglo-Saxon purchase", specified Dominique Le Coënt, for whom the work will "leave the France".
This academy drawing, representing a man seated in a plant setting, is
"a typical expression of Baroque art and the genius of Bernini,"
he added.
According to the auction house, “Académie d'homme” belongs to an
“extremely small corpus of academic figures known to Bernini”
, art historians counting “only seven” others,
“all kept in museums and institutions, including one at the Uffizi Museum in Florence ”
.
The sale, broadcast live on the internet, attracted the interest of many collectors, mostly international, with the participation of nine bidders by telephone.
Discovered in an estate of a compiégnoise property, the drawing was first attributed to the French sculptor Pierre Puget before being authenticated as a work of Bernini. Gian Lorenzo Bernini (1598-1680), known as Le Bernin, is notably famous for his statues of the famous fountain in Piazza Navona in Rome, of which the large male nude in the drawing can be compared.
In 2019, the house Actéon had already broken a record with the sale of the “Mocked Christ” by the Italian painter Cimabue, which had been sold for more than 24 million euros.