A painting depicting Jesus’ crucifixion rendered by Baroque master Peter Paul Rubens sold for nearly $3 million at an auction in Versailles Sunday after it was hidden for nearly four centuries.
The masterpiece was only recently uncovered in a private townhouse in Paris, just over 400 years since it was finished.
Rubens was best known for his other depictions of Jesus, namely “Christ on the Cross,” which shows the full scene of the crucifixion, complete with the two thieves flanking Jesus.
The newly discovered painting, though, is a solo portrait of Jesus before a particularly bleak background. Where “Christ on the Cross” places the viewer in the chaos of the crucifixion, the long-lost piece is isolated and appears more like an account of the aftermath after the crowd faded.
It sold for a record $2.7 million through the Osenat auction house as part of a French collection, and many surmise may have been one of Rubens’ abandoned workshops.
“I immediately had a hunch about this painting, and I did everything I could to try to have it authenticated. And finally, we managed to have it authenticated by the Rubenianum, which is the Rubens committee in Antwerp,” auctioneer Jean-Pierre Osenat said.
Nils Büttner, a Rubens expert, explained that while the Baroque mainstay is best known for his crucifixion works, he rarely opted to depict “the crucified Christ as a dead body on the cross.”
“So this is the one and only painting showing blood and water coming out of the side wound of Christ, and this is something that Rubens only painted once,” Büttner told auctiongoers.
The Osenat auction house assured that they verified the painting’s authenticity through scientific analysis, including microscopic examination of its layers.
The in-depth study revealed that the painting had layers of white, black and red to help pigment the skin, which many artists do. However, it also had extra blue and green pigments, which Rubens was known to use when painting human skin.
Eric Turquin, an art expert, told the eager bidders that the painting disappeared in the early 1600s not long after it was finished. He said that they believe it somehow fell into the hands of 19th-century French classic painter William Bouguereau, who passed it down in his family until it wound up in the fateful townhouse in Paris.
In 2018, Rubens’ “A Satyr holding a Basket of Grapes and Quinces with a Nymph” sold to tech billionaire Sean Parker for nearly $6 million, well above his estimated net worth at the time.
The seller, though, claimed she had withdrawn the piece from the lineup before the auction and sued to try and get it back.
With Post wires
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