Titian's A Sacre Conversazione (click on image to enlarge)
There was a new auction record for Venetian Renaissance master Titian at Sotheby’s in New York on January 27. A Sacra Conversazione: The Madonna and Child with Saints Luke and Catherine of Alexandria sold for $16,882,500 to a European private collector. The painting is also known as The Mystic Marriage of St. Catherine. The price paid exceeded the previous record of $13.6 million, which had held for 20 years. A Sacra Conversazione is one of only a handful of multi-figured compositions by Titian that remain in private hands, and is the most important to appear at auction in decades.
See antiquesandartireland.com post for November 2, 2010