A long-lost painting of Jesus Christ’s crucifixion by Flemish Baroque master Peter Paul Rubens fetched $2.7 million at auction Sunday in Versailles.
“Christ on the Cross,” painted around 1613, was hidden for more than 400 years before grabbing the attention of auctioneer Jean-Pierre Osenat from the wall of a private Paris mansion, where he was appraising assets for sale.
He way It stopped him cold.
“I immediately had a hunch about this painting,” Osenat told The Associated Press.
To authenticate the work he called in renowned German art historian Nils Büttner, chair of the Centrum Rubenianum in Antwerp. Büttner had the painting X-rayed, then analyzed the pigment under a microscope to determine that it was indeed the work of the 17th-century Flemish master. The in-depth analysis revealed blue and green pigments in the mix with white, black and red tones, all part of Rubens’ typical depiction of human skin, the auction house said.
AP Photo/Michel Euler
The long-lost painting “Crucifixion of Jesus Christ” by Rubens is displayed at the Osenat auction house in Versailles, west of Paris, on Sunday. (AP Photo/Michel Euler)
“It is a masterpiece,” Osenat told Agence France-Presse of the 42-by-29-inch depiction of Jesus Christ on the cross. “It is an extremely rare and incredible discovery.”
To boot, the artwork was in “very good condition” and was “a true profession of faith and a favorite subject for Rubens, a protestant who converted to Catholicism,” he added.
Before Osenat’s discovery, art historians only knew of this work’s existence from engravings. Büttner was struck by how long the painting’s significance went unnoticed. At one point it was owned by French academic painter William Bouguereau (1825-1905), but he may not have known what he had, Büttner said in a paper he shared with Artnet News.
“It was painted by Rubens at the height of his talent,” Osenat told AFP. “It’s the very beginning of Baroque painting, depicting a crucified Christ, isolated, luminous and standing out vividly against a dark and threatening sky.”
“Christ is shown isolated, standing out brightly against an ominous, dark sky,” Büttner wrote in his paper. “In a painfully realistic manner, Christ’s upper body arches forward, its weight shown by the strain on the arms. Behind the green and overgrown rocky backdrop of Golgotha is a view of Jerusalem illuminated, but apparently under a rainstorm.”
While Rubens painted many crucifixion scenes, they rarely depicted “the crucified Christ as a dead body on the cross,” Büttner told the packed house before Sunday’s auction. “So this is the one and only painting showing blood and water coming out of the side wound of Christ, and this is something that Rubens only painted once.”
With News Wire Services
