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At an auction outside Paris on Sunday, the unsigned work, measuring just 26cm by 20cm, fetched €19.5m under the hammer, rising to over €24m when fees were included.
The Actéon auction house in Senlis said in a statement that the sale was the biggest for a medieval painting and the eighth highest for a medieval or old master painting. The painting now ranks alongside works by Leonardo da Vinci, Rubens, Rembrandt and Raphael in the top 10 of
most expensive old painting sales.
“When a unique work of a painter as rare as Cimabue comes to market, you have to be ready for surprises,” said Dominique Le Coent, who heads the Actéon auction house in Senlis. “This is the only Cimabue that has ever come on the market.”
As 800 people gathered in the auction hall in Senlis, the crowd fell silent during the nail-biting final moments of bidding. Some bids came in by telephone to agents. As the auctioneer brandished his hammer as the price crept up, he said: “There will never be another Cimabue at auction.”
Actéon did not reveal the identity of the buyer but said a foreign museum had been among the bidders.
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In June, when the woman decided to sell her house and move away, an expert at the Senlis auctioneers was contacted to look at the contents of the house in case some of it could be sold.
“I had a week to give an expert view on the house contents and empty it,” Philomène Wolf told Le Parisien last month. “I had to make room in my schedule … if I didn’t, then everything was due to go to the dump.”
Wolf said she noticed the painting as soon as she entered the house. “You rarely see something of such quality. I immediately thought it was a work of Italian primitivism. But I didn’t imagine it was a Cimabue.”
The auctioneer, who began her job at the auction house only last year, suggested that the woman bring the painting to experts for an evaluation. She initially thought there might be a sale price of €300,000-€400,000, until art expert valued it at millions.
About 100 other objects from the house were sold for around €6,000 and the remaining furniture and decorations were disposed of at the local dump.