Da Vinci-Linked ‘Horse and Rider’ Flops at Auction in New York
It took less than a minute for the price to drop below $10 million from $50 million, and still no bids came.
(Bloomberg) -- A bronze sculpture said to be linked to Leonardo da Vinci was expected to fetch as much as $50 million when it hit the auction block. But it took less than a minute for the price to drop below $10 million, and still no bids came.
“Horse and Rider,” an 11-inch statue depicting a nobleman on a bucking horse, failed to find a buyer among the 15 people who gathered Wednesday in a ballroom at the Pierre hotel in New York.
“This is life,” said a visibly disappointed Arlan Ettinger, the president of Guernsey’s auction house, which had set a low estimate of $30 million for the piece. “The sculpture remains unsold, but it doesn’t detract from its potential importance.”
It was cast in 2012 with a mold taken from a beeswax model created more than five centuries ago, according to Guernsey’s. The original’s current whereabouts are a mystery, and da Vinci scholars have disagreed about the work’s authenticity.
Carlo Pedretti, who wrote scores of books on the Italian Renaissance master, examined the mold in 1985, around the time it was made, and declared it to be genuine. But Martin Kemp, a da Vinci authority and emeritus professor of art history at Oxford University, has said it lacks “the characteristics of understanding horse anatomy and Renaissance armor that you would expect from Leonardo.”
Scholarly disagreement is common whenever a work attributed to da Vinci surfaces. There’s still debate over the exhaustive restoration of “Salvator Mundi,” which fetched $450 million at Christie’s in 2017, becoming the most expensive artwork ever sold.
Ettinger had said he struggled to put a price on “Horse and Rider.” Only four contemporary sculptures, three by Jeff Koons and one by Louise Bourgeois, fetched more than $30 million at auction, according to Artnet data.
Guernsey’s, which Ettinger helped found in 1975, specializes in collectibles. It has auctioned off items including the baseball Mark McGwire hit for his then-record-breaking 70th home run, Jerry Garcia’s guitars and Princess Diana’s jewels.
The auction house offered the bronze without a reserve, meaning it could have sold at any price, but they opted to call it a night when it became clear there was no interest.
To contact the reporters on this story: Hailey Waller in New York at hwaller@bloomberg.net;Katya Kazakina in New York at kkazakina@bloomberg.net
To contact the editors responsible for this story: James Ludden at jludden@bloomberg.net, ;Pierre Paulden at ppaulden@bloomberg.net, Peter Eichenbaum, Steven Crabill
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