Roman emperor's marble torso sells for US$34.3 million at Sotheby's

A marble torso of a Roman emperor sold for US$34.3 million at Sotheby's in New York earlier this week. Sotheby's, the London-founded auction house, described the result as a record for a Roman antiquity, meaning an object made in the ancient Roman world. ArtNews reported the sale.

The bidding took 14 minutes. Before the sale, Sotheby's had set a pre-sale estimate, the price range it expected the piece to reach, of US$8 million to US$12 million. The final price was almost three times the top of that range.

The statue is three and a half feet (about 107 centimetres) tall. It shows an emperor wearing a bronze cuirass, the armoured chest-piece worn by Roman commanders. Sotheby's dates it to the Julio-Claudian period, the first dynasty of Roman emperors, in the first half of the 1st century CE. Its documented ownership history, known as provenance, says it is thought to have come from Dalmatia, a region on the Adriatic coast in what is now Croatia.

The torso has a long and unusual history. It belonged to the heirs of Wilhelm Aloys Maximilian Neumann, a 19th-century collector from Graz, Austria. According to ArtNews, the Neumann family hid the sculpture between two doors and plastered over the openings at the end of the Second World War. It came back to light during a redesign of the family home.

It has been sold before. Sotheby's sold the same torso in 2010 for US$7.36 million to an Austrian collector. The sale this week was the second time it has changed hands at the auction house in about 16 years.

The torso was guaranteed, which means Sotheby's had promised the seller a minimum sum. Before the auction, it had also received more than one irrevocable bid, meaning offers that could not be withdrawn. Sotheby's has said the piece is among the most significant Roman Imperial sculptures ever offered at auction.

The torso was one of the works in the "Magnum Opus" sale. Every lot in that sale came from the holdings of a single collector. ArtNews said the total for the sale was US$63 million, and the torso made up more than half of it. That figure ran past Sotheby's US$60 million presale estimate for the three auctions held that week. The torso is part of a group of about 600 objects that Sotheby's plans to sell in New York and Paris through 2027.

Ancient sculpture has reached high prices at auction before. In 2007, a bronze statue of the goddess Artemis, about 2,000 years old, sold at Sotheby's for US$28.6 million to Giuseppe Eskenazi, a British dealer, according to ArtNews.

For the people who handle these works, the sale means crating, insurance and shipping decisions on a very large scale. For museums and private buyers, it shows the prices that rare ancient works can now command. Whoever owns the torso next will be the one to decide where it stands and who gets to see it.