Mystery Buyer Snaps Up Painting Attributed to Caravaggio Before Auction

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/06/26/arts/design/caravaggio-painting-mystery-buyer.html

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It was estimated to sell on Thursday in Toulouse, France, for at least $110 million, the highest auction price ever achieved for any artwork in Europe.

Then on Tuesday came the announcement that the auction of “Judith and Holofernes,” an early 17th-century canvas billed as a rediscovered masterpiece by Caravaggio, had been canceled. The painting had been sold privately to a collector outside France, the auctioneers Marc Labarbe and Eric Turquin said in a statement.

Both the identity of the buyer and the purchase price were covered by a confidentiality clause, the statement said. The painting will “soon be exhibited in an important museum” where it will “finally come into the light for all to see,” it added.

In a telephone interview on Wednesday, Mr. Turquin, a Paris-based expert and dealer in old master paintings, declined to name the museum. Mr. Turquin has spent five years researching and marketing the painting after its discovery by Mr. Labarbe in the attic of a house in Toulouse in April 2014. He said the price accepted by the owners was more than the minimum bid level of €30 million, or about $34 million, that had been planned for the auction.

“They did not exactly get cold feet, but they decided it was good for them,” said Mr. Turquin. When the painting was shown in London in February, Mr. Turquin had said it would be auctioned without a reserve price, meaning it could, potentially, have sold for a far lower figure.

Immediately after the offer was made on Monday, “three or four” other prospective buyers were asked if they were prepared to bid to a higher level, Mr. Turquin said, but no firm commitments were made and the auction was canceled. “Over €30 million is such a height that the oxygen is rare,” Mr. Turquin added.

The most innovative and admired painter of the Baroque era, Caravaggio, like Leonardo da Vinci, is one of the few timeless old masters whose works are capable of selling for more than $100 million in a market dominated by modern and contemporary art.

In 2017, Christie’s sold the much-restored panel painting, “Salvator Mundi,” cataloged as a rediscovered masterpiece by Leonardo, in a New York auction of contemporary works for a staggering $430.3 million, the highest price ever paid for any work of art. Until then the highest auction price for an old master had been $76.7 million in 2002 for Peter Paul Rubens’s “Massacre of the Innocents.”

But the Toulouse “Judith and Holofernes,” like the “Salvator Mundi,” has its expert supporters and disbelievers. Cataloged as being painted in Naples in about 1607, the painting was thought to have been Caravaggio’s second rendering of this gruesome Old Testament subject. The rediscovery was viewed by a number of key specialists in an exhibition at the Pinacoteca di Brera museum in Milan in 2016-17.

“At the time, I thought it was a good picture, with some very good passages, but also with some inexplicable weaknesses,” said Davide Gasparotto, senior curator and department head at the J. Paul Getty Museum in California, who saw the “Judith and Holofernes” in Milan.

Mr. Gasparotto said there is “some scholarly consensus” about the attribution, “but there are still several authoritative opponents.”

If this “Judith and Holofernes” is by Caravaggio, it would join a body of 68 accepted paintings, of which just five are in private hands. No authenticated works by the artist appear in the Artnet database of auction prices. An export license for the painting, valued by Mr. Turquin at €120 million, was refused by France’s Ministry of Culture in 2016, to give a French museum a chance to purchase the work, but no buyer was found and the export ban was lifted in December.

“The French said they didn’t have the money,” Mr. Turquin said. “They said they had doubts.”

But the Paris-based dealer said he was “thrilled” with the outcome of the sale. “The person who bought the picture is close to a great museum,” added Mr. Turquin, without naming the institution. “The vendors said they always wanted it to go to a museum.”

Mr. Gasparotto, the Getty curator, said that given the fate of the “Salvator Mundi,” an undisputed Caravaggio would fetch $150 million at auction, “or perhaps more.”

“The collector who bought it did a bold move,” said Mr. Gasparotto, “but only time and a more profound understanding of this passage of Caravaggio’s career will prove if this was a smart acquisition.”