Beato Angelico's youthful Crucifixion sold for £5 million: it's a record

It’s a record for Beato Angelico: his youthful Crucifixion , an important work that went to auction yesterday at Christie’s in London, was in fact sold for £5 million (€5.8 million). The work started from an estimate of 4-6 million pounds. No other work by the great Renaissance artist had fetched such a high price at auction before. The youthful panel, measuring 59 x 34 cm, was discovered and published in 1996 by Francis Russell, Christie’s current vice-president for the United Kingdom, who wrote an essay on the work published in Burlington Magazine in May 1996, arousing widespread interest among scholars (on these pages we have covered the history of this Crucifixion in detail ).

Thus, a few days after the news spread that the work would go to auction, Angelo Tartuferi, a great expert on Fra Angelico, commented: “Absolute and indisputable masterpiece of Fra Angelico’s youthful phase, yet not belonging to the restricted nucleus of Fra Angelico’s early works. Christ and the beautiful, unforgettable St. John seem in fact to anticipate the heights of the 1930s. Therefore, the work should date in our opinion in the second half of the 1520s...Beato Angelico’s chronology is by far, as is well known, one of the most problematic.”

This is a very rare work, especially since works such as these rarely appear on the market: since 2000, only two works by Beato Angelico have gone to auction. In total, yesterday’s Christie’s sale at Christie’s totaled 68,156,850 pounds, or 79,607.201 euros, with three individual records: in addition to that of Beato Angelico, new auction records were also set by Michael Sweerts (an unpublished work of his, depicting the artist’s studio, sold for 12.6 million pounds, 14.7 million euros, from an estimate of 2-3 million pounds) and Bartholomeus Van der Helst (a portrait sold for 504,000 pounds). By contrast, Antonio Canova, who was present at the auction with a Bust of Helena sold for £3.5 million, came close to the record. “This sale, which included three major rediscoveries,” said Clementine Sinclair, head of Old Masters at Christie’s, “was highly anticipated and achieved the highest sales total for an Old Masters Part I auction at Christie’s London since 2016. The works for sale generated much excitement in the Old Masters market, and in the run-up to the sale attracted record numbers of visitors to the view in London and preview tours in New York, Hong Kong, Amsterdam, and Paris. Sweerts’ sensational, completely unpublished and unknown work achieved the highest price in the sale and set a new world record for the artist at auction. The rarity of Rembrandt’s last known hanging portraits in private hands, also recently rediscovered, generated international bidding well beyond the high estimate. Beato Angelico’s beautifully preserved Crucifixion, a discovery by my colleague Francis Russell, set a new record price for the artist, demonstrating the demand for images of this high caliber that so rarely come on the market. Canova’s bust of Elena, the artist’s personal gift to Viscount Castlereagh of unbroken provenance, was highly sought after by multiple bidders, achieving a price close to a world record. All this underscores the demand for fresh works on the market, with interesting provenances and in exceptional original condition.”

Beato Angelico's youthful Crucifixion sold for £5 million: it's a record

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