PARIS — An anonymous marble bust picked up in a Paris art
market has turned out to be a 200-year-old sculpture of a young
Napoleon Bonaparte, Sotheby’s said Friday.
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The auction house said the once-famous bust was
going up for sale on July 5 in London, expected to fetch between £120,000 and
£180,000.
“It was discarded as an embarrassment after the fall
of the empire, deemed valueless and eventually lost without trace for two
centuries,”
Christopher Mason, a Sotheby’s specialist said in a statement.
The bust was carved by Italian sculptor Giuseppe
Franchi in 1797, commissioned by a 28-year-old Napoleon in Milan after a series
of stunning military victories.
An unnamed collector came across the sculpture at an
art market in 2020, where it was described simply as an “anonymous man in the
19th century style”.
Olivier Ihl, a researcher at Sciences Po Grenoble
Institute, used archival documents and comparisons with other works by Franchi
to confirm it had rather more illustrious origins.
A letter even allowed him to pinpoint when it was
commissioned: a dinner held by Napoleon at the Palazzo Serbelloni in Milan
shortly after his victory over the Republic of Venice.
Ihl found evidence that the sculpture was displayed
at the Society of Arts in Geneva as part of efforts to bolster Napoleon’s image
ahead of the region’s annexation, and that the emperor saw it himself later that
year.
After his ignominious fall, the sculpture crashed in price,
Sotheby’s said, eventually being flogged for a pittance to an unknown
Englishman.
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