~ A painting by Titian, Rest on the Flight into Egypt, c. 1508, sold for a record-breaking sum (£17,560,000 or $22,178,280) on the 28th of June, 2024, during Christie's Classic Week in London, England.
The artwork, oil on panel, roughly 10 feet by 5 feet, portrays Joseph, Mary, and Jesus as they stop to rest during their flight into Egypt. It depicts the biblical voyage of the newborn Jesus, along with Mary and Joseph as described in the Gospel of Matthew. The Gospel describes the Holy Family fleeing as the result of a vision from an angel, who told Joseph to bring them to Egypt since King Herod would be coming to kill the baby Jesus.
The amazing thing is it has been estimated Titian was only in his late teens or early twenties when he painted Rest on the Flight into Egypt!
Andrew Fletcher, Christie's global head of the Old Masters department, said:
"This is the most important work by Titian to come to the auction market in more than a generation and one of the very few masterpieces by the artist remaining in private hands. "It is a picture that embodies the revolution in painting made by Titian at the start of the 16th century and is a truly outstanding example of the artist's pioneering approach to both the use of colour and the representation of the human form in the natural world, the artistic vocabulary that secured his status as the first Venetian painter to achieve fame throughout Europe in his lifetime, and his position as one of the greatest painters in the history of Western art."
Rest on the Flight into Egypt first appears in documentation in the collection of a Venetian spice merchant, Bartolomeo della Nave whose collection of Venetian Renaissance
masterpieces included some 15 Titians spanning his career. The artworks
in his collection are known from an inventory dated 1636. When Della
Nave died in 1632, the collection was sold, almost in its entirety, to
James, 3rd Marquess of Hamilton (later 1st Duke of Hamilton), but sold
again soon after because Hamilton was executed by the English Parliament
for high treason in 1649 a few weeks after the execution of King Charles I.
It was then bought, similarly en bloc, by the Habsburg
Archduke Leopold Wilhelm of Austria and it was owned by Habsburg archdukes and emperors until 1809, when it was stolen from Belvedere Palace in Vienna by French troops during the Napoleonic Wars; Napoleon took it to Paris during his Egyptian campaign.
Six years later (1878), it returned to Vienna and it entered the collection of John Alexander Thynne, 4th Marquess of Bath, at Longleat House in Wiltshire, when he purchased it from Christie's. In 1995 the painting was stolen, but it was recovered seven years later by private detective Charles Hill in a bag at a bus stop in London (??????). It remained back in Wiltshire until it was consigned to the auction last month.
Net links:
ABS-CBN News ~ Previously stolen Titian work: Flight into Egypt
Christie’s ~ Titian masterpiece stolen not once, but twice
