Classic Week at Christie’s: What to Look Forward To

Classic Week is back in the Big Apple! From a pair of 2nd century BC golden earrings to Pieter Breughel the Younger’s The Seven Acts of Mercy, Christie’s invites bidders to embark on a journey through thousands of years of global art to find their next exceptional treasure. Through a series of six auctions over a span of four days, the auction house will bring together some of the most celebrated names of the art world and its finest works of art, each with storied provenances and captivating artistry. 

On February 4th, the series will kick off with the Antiquities sale at 10 am EST, which features a diverse selection of works from the ancient Mediterranean, including Greek, Roman, Egyptian, and Byzantine objects, with gorgeous ancient jewellery. Four hours later, at 2 pm EST, the Old Master and British Drawings sale offers an array of Italian, Northern, French, and British sketches, prints, and drawings from the fifteenth to nineteenth centuries. A featured work in this sale is J.M.W Turner’s Approach to Venice (ca. 1840), which, according to the auction house, is an “exciting rediscovery” and one of the few of Turner’s sketches still in a private collection to this day. 

February 5th sees both parts of the Old Master Paintings and Sculpture sales, highlighting some of the finest examples of European art spanning six centuries. The Old Master sale (or Old Master Paintings Part I) boasts sixty lots from the Dutch Golden Age, Venetian Rococo, and 19th century European Art and will be headlined by El Greco’s Saint Sebastian (estimate: $7,000,000 – $9,000,000 USC), which has been hidden from public view for forty years. Later that afternoon, the Old Master Paintings and Sculpture Part II sale will feature 128 lots, ten of which are properties from the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. Other artists represented in this sale encompass some of the most famous Dutch Golden Age artists (including the workshops of Lucas Cranach I and Pieter Brueghel II), Angelica Kaufman, and Jean-Honoré Fragonard, along with ancient-inspired sculpture and panels with Biblical scenes. 

From the Zilka Aldobrandini Tazza to sumptuous Japanese lacquer to the marvels of global silver craftsmanship, the Global Treasury: The Life and Collection of Selim & Mary Zilkha sale gives buyers a look into the unique and “spectacularly rich ensemble of rare works” in the Zilkha collection on February 6th. In this “modern Kunstkamer in the princely tradition,” the auction house is proud to showcase 173 lots, which were, for many years, kept in the Zilkhas’ home in Bel Air. 

Finally, on February 7th, the auction house closes the series with the Important Classic & Decorative Art Sale. This sale includes furniture, silver, sculpture, porcelain, and other works with “important provenance, impeccable craftsmanship or rarity,” including a 66 million-year-old Tyrannosaurus rex tooth, a Roman bust of Odysseus from the 1st century CE, and a coveted Fabergé bearberry study, the only known work of its kind to exist. 

In total, the auction comprises 588 lots, all of which will be open for viewing at Christie’s Rockefeller Center galleries at 20 Rockefeller Plaza from January 31st through February 3rd so that members of the public can explore these celebrated works ahead of the auction series. 

Discover just a selection of the auction’s highlights below!

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Antiquities 

4 February, 10am EST, Live

The Christie’s Antiquities sale will feature works of art, sculpture, and material culture from ancient Greece, Rome, Egypt, and Byzantium between the 3rd millennium BC to the 12th century AD. Some of the ancient jewelry present in this sale belonged to the collection of Ernst and Marthe Kofler-Truniger of Lucerne, which has been described as the “cream of the cream” of collections, since many museums, like the Met, the Detroit Institute of Art, and the Swiss Thyssen-Bornemisza have acquired pieces from it. 

These earrings, according to G. Max Bernheimer, Deputy Chairman of Ancient Art and Antiquities, are one of “only about three pairs of this type in existence today.” Made in Athens during the Late Geometric Period (ca. 750-725 BC), Bernheimer is captivated by the “quality of the granulation…[the] intricate patterns formed by tiny balls of gold that have been soldered in place.” The lot essay for these earrings notes that their central biconical disk “was once centered by an inlay, perhaps of either rock crystal, glass or amber.” Perhaps the most striking feature of these earrings is not only that they were made with gold, a material that was not widely accessible until the reign of Alexander the Great, but also that the granulation was applied by hand during the Attic period when now, magnification is required to study them. They are estimated to sell between $10,000 and $15,000.

The Brygos Painter, active around 490-470 BC, is “among the finest red-figure cup painters of the early fifth century BC.” Over 200 vessels (including lekithoi, kylikes, and rhyta, among others) have been attributed to the Brygos Painter on the basis of style and his signature, and this kylix (estimate: $700,000-$900,000) is no exception. As the Getty Museum writes in their essay on his work, “the naturalness of his forms and the flow of his draperies are consonant with the early Classical period in ancient Greece, but his energetic figures and lively compositions distinguish his personal manner.” While both sides of this kylix’s exterior “present scenes from the palestra,” a place for training in wrestling, the tondo (or flat area of the cup’s inside) “depicts the aftermath of overindulgence at the symposium in which a bearded reveler vomits into a lekane held by a nude boy.” 

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Old Master & British Drawings

4 February, 2pm EST, Live

In this sale, expect to see 119 lots comprising works from Italian, French, and British artists spanning the 15th and 19th centuries and materials ranging from pen and ink to watercolor. While Jacopo Ligozzi’s black chalk, pen and brown ink drawing, The head of a woman in profile to the right, wearing an elaborate headdress, is headlining this sale, don’t miss out on other works by Bolognese artists, the Spaniards, the British school, and, most excitingly, female French and British artists from the 17th to 19th centuries.

Rosie Jarvie, Specialist in British Drawings and Watercolors, deems this watercolor “The Holy Grail of English watercolours” as it was recently discovered to be a Turner, rather than its original attribution to John Ruskin. As one of only a handful of Venetian watercolors left in private collections, this work is expected to sell, at its highest estimate, for half a million dollars. In his collection of Venetian watercolors, which mostly focus on notable landmarks like the Piazza San Marco, this work focuses on the lagoon between San Francesco della Vigna and the island cemetery of San Michele, a scene that Turner painted during his visit in 1840. Through the “impressionistic freedom” of Turner’s strokes, viewers can “grasp the movement of water, the beautiful recession out into the lagoon and the feeling of the waves,” according to Jarvie. She also notes that “while it’s probably an apocryphal story, Turner famously strapped himself to the mast of a ship so he could experience the effects of a snowstorm—actually feel it. I think you get that experience here.” 

Capturing the “gamut of British landscape” was a task undertaken by many late 18th and early 19th century artists who sought to capture British landscapes in picturesque views. Paul Sandby, an English painter and watercolorist, is known by many as the “father of English watercolor” based on his training as a draughtsman during the 1745 Jacobite uprising and chief drawing master at the Royal Military Academy. This work (estimate: $30,000-$50,000) captures a view from Coton Hill with Severn barges on the river. The catalogue essay identifies the two spires to the right of the work as “those of St. Mary's Church, one of the highest in England and St. Alkmund's Church.” Shrewsbury Castle, the square tower structure and castle on the hill, “was built by Roger de Montgomery in the years immediately following the Norman invasion of 1066” and this depiction of it “predates the modifications by Thomas Telford in the later 1780[s].” 

The final highlight of the Old Master Drawings sale is an extraordinary study by Eugène Delacroix, the artist behind Liberty Leading the People. This drawing, which was previously in the collection of Abby Rockefeller and exhibited by the Art Institute of Chicago, is expected to fetch between $40,000 and $60,000 and depicts a Greek soldier in traditional costume “with sword, bonnet, and elaborate gaiters.” In his own journal, as the lot essay records, Delacroix wrote: “At M. Auguste’s I saw some admirable paintings after the masters; costumes, and especially horses, admirable beyond anything Géricault ever did. It would be a great advantage to have some of these horses to copy, as well as the costumes, Greek, Persian, Indian, etc.” In that same year that he created this drawing, Delacroix painted The Massacre at Chios, a work that depicts the Ottoman attack on the Greek island of Chios and that Christie’s believes “must have aroused his curiosity about Greece.”

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Old Master Paintings Parts I

5 February, 10am EST, Live

The highlight of Classic Week is the Old Master Paintings sale, which has been split into two parts. The first part, Old Master Paintings Part I, highlights 59 lots from the Dutch Golden Age (including Lucas Cranach, Pieter de Hooch, and Caspar Netscher), the Dutch Baroque, the Venetian Rococo, and 19th century European artists like Jean-Baptiste Camille Corot and Cornelis Springer. Two featured collections include properties from the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston and a distinguished private, yet anonymous, collection. 

As the “earliest surviving portrait by one of the most celebrated painters of the Italian Mannerists,” David Ekserdjian, Emeritus Professor of Art and Film History at the University of Leicester, recognizes the artistic quality of this Parmigianino portrait through the “‘remarkable maturity of technique, invention, but above all of psychological understanding, that it is hard to believe they were painted by a young man in his late teens and very early twenties.’” Christie’s expects that this portrait, one of a small number of portraits that Parmigianino painted in Parma, will fetch between $500,000 and $800,000 at auction on 5 February. 

Included in the Classic Week Auction Highlights article, Cranach’s “provocative and boundary-pushing” oil on panel work (estimate: $1,000,000-$2,000,000) reinterprets the story of Hercules and Omphale, a myth depicted in Diodorus Siculus’ Biblioteca, Ovid’s Fasti, and Sophocles’ Trachiniae, among other ancient sources. The lot essay for this work notes that Giovanni Boccaccio’s De mulieribus claris would have been the source through which Cranach would have encountered this story and on which he would have based his work. The story of Hercules and Omphale in Cranach’s painting is inspired by Boccaccio’s tale, as Cranach’s Hercules, in 16th century Saxon court dress, “has been driven mad with unbridled lust, shamelessly grasping at his captors while holding a giant distaff, which comically has replaced his mighty club. The smitten demigod has already made advances toward one of Omphale’s maidens, as suggested by her disheveled hair.” The Latin inscription of the painting reads: “The Lydian maidens give spinning wool to Herculean hands / That god bears the authority of his mistress / Thus do crazed lust and soft love crush even great spirits / Once their heart has been conquered,” serving as a didactic to men who may be swayed by “flattery, lust and deceit.”

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Old Master Paintings and Sculpture: Part II

5 February, 2pm EST, Live

The second part of the Old Master Paintings and Sculpture sale will also begin with Dutch Golden Age properties from the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. Other works to look out for in this sale include those by British, French, Italian, and Spanish artists, including many renditions of the Flight into Egypt, Franco-Flemish panels depicting the resurrection of Christ, and Italian decorative sculpture.

This oil on copper work (estimate: $15,000-$20,000) is one of many reproductions of the Flight into Egypt, the story recounted in the Gospel of Matthew (Matthew 2:13–23) when Mary, Joseph, and the newborn Jesus flee from King Herod’s death sentence to Egypt. Artists from Giotto di Bondone (1266–1337) to Vittore Carpaccio (1465-1525) to Claude Lorraine (1600-1682) have all depicted this scene, but the Workshop of Jan Brueghel II captures a moment where the Holy Family takes refuge in a lush landscape filled with towering trees, bright flora, and a glassy body of water in the background. As a collaboration piece, many people in the workshop may have contributed to this piece, but it seems that Jan Brueghel II might have “contributed the colorful and individualized flowers at lower right” while other parts of the work were “inspired by a woodcut after a Rubens composition.”

This work from the studio of Adriaen Brouwer is the highlight of the Old Master Paintings and Sculpture Part II sale as part of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston collection. As Taylor Alessio, Head of Sale for Old Masters Paintings and Sculpture: Part II, notes, “This picture is the party picture—it’s a fun moment to start the sale.” The “great insight” that Brouwer gives viewers into “the everyday life of the people” sheds light on a world that “was completely different than the one Brouwer’s collectors would have occupied, showing people partaking in activities that many still love today—drinking, smoking, singing.” As one of only 60 works that have been attributed to Brouwer in the art world, this oil on panel is rare, a notion that, beyond the lively scene it depicts, gives it an incredible “‘wow’ factor.” It is estimated to sell between $20,000–$30,000.

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Global Treasury: The Life and Collection of Selim & Mary Zilkha

6 February, 10am EST, Live

As the second to last sale in Classic Week, the Global Treasury: The Life and Collection of Selim & Mary Zilkha sale boasts 173 lots with master examples of goldsmithery from the Renaissance to the 19th century. These works, each “linked through sublime craftsmanship and illustrious provenances,” once belonged to Selim and Mary Zilkha, California collectors who “amass[ed] one of the world’s most important collections of sculptural Renaissance and Baroque silver.” Christie’s silver specialist, Jill Waddel remarks that “this type of property is especially rare to see at auction in the United States,” with regard to the amount of Renaissance silver that the Zilkhas had in their collection. In a video filmed for Christie’s Instagram, the couple’s children, Michael and Nadia Zilkha, shared their favorite pieces from the collection—Michael’s was a set of 16th century German parcel-gilt silver playing cards while Nadia chose a 16th century parcel-gilt, silver-mounted coconut cup in the form of an owl. Both Michael and Nadia remember how their parents “collected with such passion” and hope that Both Michael and Nadia hope that the people who buy these objects will “want to be with them and see them everyday.”

The star of the auction-show is the Nero and Augustus Aldobrandini Tazza (estimate: $2,000,000-$3,000,000), which was once purchased by agents of Cardinal Pietro Aldobrandini in the 17th century (account records show he purchased the tazza in March 1602) and passed down through the collection of the Pamphilij family, including Olimpia Aldobrandini-Borghese Pamphilj and Doria Pamphilij. Though the maker and the tazza’s origin remain a mystery, recent studies conducted by the Met “present a revised and compelling argument about their region of origin, a more precise date of creation and a strong case for the client for whom they were commissioned.” The tazza’s striking history includes significant events like the double royal wedding ceremony of November 1598, presided over by Cardinal Aldobrandini. Though Strikingly, the chased scenes on the tazza seem to come from the Roman historian Suetonius (69 AD-after 122 AD), who is famous for De Vita Caesarum (The Twelve Caesars) or the biographies of the first eleven emperors of the Roman Empire. 

As one of Nadia’s second favorite objects in her parents’ collection, this parcel-gilt silver Ostrich cup (estimate: $500,000-$800,000) once belonged to the Rothschild family, whose silver coat-of-arms is placed on the silver egg, which makes up the ostrich’s chest, and was later confiscated by the Nazis in 1938. At the top of the catalogue essay, Christie’s has included a quote from Henry VI, Part II, when Jack Cade threatens Alexander Iden with “Ah villain… I’ll make thee eat iron like an ostrich, and swallow a sword like a great pin, ere thou and I part.” The ostrich eating iron—perhaps misattributed to the belief that ostriches ate anything—remains a staunch symbol of the iron industry with all the associated “connotations of strength and moral fortitude.” Andreas Wickhert, Augsburg goldsmith and the maker of this work, has a “remarkable talent for sculpture, as demonstrated by the naturalistic detail and lifelike dynamism of the present ostrich cup.” The ostrich’s enameled collar, which is set with rubies, seems to be the work of a specialized jeweler who worked with Wickhert on this piece.

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Important Classical & Decorative Art

7 February, 10am EST, Live

And to close off everything that Classic Week has to offer is the Important Classical & Decorative Art sale, which “features a select group of furniture, silver, sculpture, porcelain and other items with important provenance, impeccable craftsmanship or rarity.” This sale will be led by a 64 million-year-old T-rex tooth (see below) and other highlights include a bust of Benjamin Franklin by John Michael Rysbrack, a Roman bust of Odysseus, a Fabergé hardstone (see below), a Sarah Bernhardt allegorical study, English mahogany commodes, and a Chinese export “Tobacco leaf” pattern dinner service, among others. 

The most ferocious object of all the sale series is this T-rex tooth, which is estimated to fetch between $100,000 and $150,000 at Friday’s auction. While the catalogue essay for this object focuses on the tooth’s position in the dinosaur’s mouth—it is an anterior dentary (AD3) which was “designed to efficiently transfer the immense force of its bite into the victim's body”—the tooth’s provenance records that it was discovered in May 2023 in South Dakota, USA. It appears that other T-rex bones and fossils have since been found in the same location in South Dakota, including a now-sold tooth discovered in “Tooth Draw Quarry,” Butte County, South Dakota at the Hell Creek Formation.

The final item featured here is a rare Fabergé flower study that was purchased directly from the House of Fabergé by Grand Duchess Maria Alexandrovna (1853-1920) on April 30, 1913, for 250 roubles. The level of craftsmanship in this work is simply breathtaking, given that the vase for the bearberry sprig does not hold water; rather, it is entirely made of rock-crystal. In fact, the trompe l’œil technique achieved through this single piece of rock crystal “give[s] the illusion of water” and complements the bearberry’s “shaped golden stems,” nephrite leaves, and enameled gold flowers and berries. Margo Oganesian, Head of Fabergé and Russian Works of Art at Christie’s, echoes this sentiment as she underscores that “Fabergé flower studies are some of the firm’s most intricate and interesting creations.” Curiously, the inspiration for many of these studies can be traced to a “variety of sources–from the European Art Nouveau to Asian artistic traditions, including Chinese hardstone carvings. The collaborative process involved many skilled artists and goldsmiths of the firm.”

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It is clear that Classic Week New York is truly history come to life. With extraordinary paintings, drawings, sculptures, silver, jewelry, antiquities, woodworks, panels, busts, portraits, and more lining the walls of Christie’s Rockefeller Galleries, no stone is left unturned as the auction house seeks to showcase “the pinnacle of talents and subjects from antiquity to present day.” If Classic Week New York is anything like the Paris or London sales from last year, the art world is in for a treat. Stay tuned after February 7th for the auction results and, if you are in New York City during these chilly February days, don’t miss out on the opportunity to see the lots on display!

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(Cover Image: An Over-Lifesized Roman Marble Head of Apollo, ca. 1st century BCE to 1st century CE, marble, 18 in. (45.8 cm.) high via Christie’s New York)