A rare painting by Agnolo di Cosimo known as Bronzino (1503-1572), “Portrait of a young man with quill pen and sheet of paper”, recently rediscovered and restored, was sold late on Thursday 26 January for 10 7 million dollars at Sotheby’s auction of “Old Masters” in New York. After a five-minute bidding process, the painting was awarded to a bidder present in the room, doubling the maximum estimate of 5 million and setting a new world auction record for the Florentine Renaissance painter. Proceeds from the sale will benefit Selfhelp Community Services, a humanitarian organization that helps Holocaust survivors in North America, and the Lighthouse Guild, a Jewish healthcare organization.
The new award surpassed the previous record for Bronzino, which was held by «Portrait of a Young Man with a Book», sold for over 9 million dollars at Christie’s in New York in 2015. «Portrait of a Man with Quill and sheet of paper” was sold after a history of ownership and misattributions. The German Jewish collector from Munich Ilse Hesselberger bought the painting in 1927, believing that the portrait was the work of another Florentine artist. During the Second World War Hesselberger was forced to give up the work in exchange for her freedom but she, deceived by the Nazis, was murdered in the Kaunas concentration camp. The painting was seized by the Nazis, reattributed and installed in various government offices in Germany.
In 2021 the work was returned to Hesselberger’s heirs, who delivered it to Sotheby’s. In the laboratories of the auction house it was restored and its radiant surfaces were recognized as emerging from the sure hand of a young Bronzino (it is probably also his self-portrait, as the scholar Carlo Falciani claims), echoing his other youthful oils such as the “Portrait of a Woman in Red” (about 1533) in the Städel Museum in Frankfurt.
Dating from around 1527, this youthful and sophisticated work entitled “Portrait of a Young Man with Quill and Sheet of Paper” is an important addition to the artist’s corpus. The record-breaking painting will be published for the first time next spring by Carlo Falciani, art historian and professor of History of Modern Art at the Academy of Fine Arts in Florence, with an article in which the hypothesis that it could it was a self-portrait by Agnolo di Cosimo. «This incredible portrait is one of the most interesting recent discoveries relating to the famous Florentine artist Agnolo di Cosimo known as Bronzino – explained professor Carlo Falciani – It is extraordinary that a painting of this quality, a true masterpiece of 16th century portraiture, has remained unknown to the scientific community. The rediscovery of him not only brings to light one of the artist’s most beautiful portraits, but also improves our understanding of his youthful activity. Already at the beginning of Bronzino’s career, portraits were the most convincing expression of his dual interest in the word and in the image. As also seen in the recent exhibition «The Medici, Portraits and Politis» at the Metropolitan Museum in New York (2021), this artistic sophistication is typical of Bronzino’s mature period, when he worked at the court of Cosimo I de’ Medici; however, this portrait demonstrates that the same literary and visual concepts underpinned his work even in his youth ». Numerous «Old Masters» masterpieces were awarded on the evening of Thursday 26 January at Sotheby’s in New York, with the auction totaling 86.6 million dollars, exceeding the estimates of 74.1 million dollars. Among the lots in the Fisch Davidson Collection, one of the most important collections of Baroque art ever to appear on the market, the masterpiece by Peter Paul Rubens (1577-1640) stood out «Salome with the head of St. John the Baptist» (1609), which reached $26.9 million (the third highest price for the artist at auction).