A youthful work by Raphael is set to
go under the hammer at Sotheby's in New York Thursday and could
fetch millions of dollars, experts say.
The small oil on wood, Mary Magdalene in Prayer, has been valued
at between 2 and 3 million dollars by the auction house, and is
protected by a guarantee that makes its sale certain.
The 38 by 13 centimeter panel is dated 1503, when the artist was
just 20 years old.
In 2000, with the subject identified as Saint Mary of Egypt, it
was offered at auction by Christie's, reaching a total of 611
thousand dollars.
The panel is painted on two sides: on the marbled 'verso' "you
can see Raphael's fingerprints", Daria Foner, an Old Masters
specialist at Sotheby's, told ArtNews.
The expert noted that Raphael used his fingertips to paint other
paintings of the time such as the Mond Crucifixion, today at the
National Gallery in London.
The Magdalene was part of a small triptych for private devotion:
in the center is Saint Catherine of Alexandria, now in the
Galleria Nazionale delle Marche in Urbino.
The saint is depicted without the oil jar, one of her
traditional attributes: borrowing an iconography inspired by
Jacobus de Voragine's thirteenth-century Golden Legend,
Magdalene wears a dress made of hair or fur, a symbol of
renunciation of worldly pleasures and entry into a life of
repentance.
According to Foner, "we are faced with an example of what
Raphael could do at the beginning of his career" after his
apprenticeship in Perugino's workshop.
The best-known depiction of the Repentant Magdalene is
Donatello's wooden sculpture in the Museo dell'Opera del Duomo
in Florence.
Filippino Lippi painted two versions of the same subject: one at
the Galleria dell'Accademia in Florence and the other sold for
$2.25 million at Christie's in New York in 2005, then resold by
Sotheby's in 2022 for just $64,500.
Donatello sculpted the Magdalene with sunken eyes and a face
marked by deep wrinkles, while Lippi depicted her as emaciated
and unkempt.
Raphael's saint instead appears radiant in her hairy robe,
illuminated by an aura of sanctity despite her humble attire.
Raphael's auction record is £29.16 million ($48 million), paid
in 2009 at Christie's in London for the chalk drawing Head of a
Muse, a preparatory study for the fresco Parnassus in the
Vatican.
The most expensive painting, Portrait of Lorenzo de' Medici,
Duke of Urbino (1518), was sold at Christie's in London in 2007
for £18.5 million ($37.3 million), while in 2016 a profile
portrait by Valerio Belli achieved a price of $3.2 million at
Sotheby's.
photo: Raphael's Tomb in Pantheon on 500th anniversary of
artist's death on April 6, 2020
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