A rare painting recently went to auction in Florence:
“Half-length, with her head resting in her hands and her elbow on a red damask cushion, the beautiful and melancholic Cleopatra holds the venomous asp that threatens her exposed breast with a fatal bite.” (cit.)
This is how Cleopatra is described—an artwork by perhaps the most famous female painter of all time, celebrated even during her own lifetime: Artemisia Gentileschi.
The painting was sold at auction on May 15th by Pandolfini Auction House, fetching four times its estimated value.
Like other major auction houses, Pandolfini has started to accompany its most important catalog pieces with targeted diagnostic studies, made available to interested buyers. In this case, the analyses included X-radiography and scanner-based reflectography, carried out by Art-Test.
The catalog featured a detailed entry authored by Dr. Cristina Terzaghi, supporting the attribution of the work to the seventeenth-century painter. Artemisia, born in Rome to a Pisan father, left her home and her father’s workshop—where she had been trained—after surviving a rape, to establish herself as an independent artist in Florence. There, she became the first woman admitted to the prestigious Accademia delle Arti del Disegno.
This painting was already known to scholars: in 1975, Prof. Raffaele Causa supported the attribution at a time when little was known about Artemisia’s technique. In 2012, Francesca Solinas included it in a Paris exhibition, and about three years ago, it was linked to a painting of a Penitent Magdalene (in the Robilant + Voena collection), which—thanks to an extensive diagnostic campaign—was revealed to hide a Cleopatra beneath its preparatory layers.
The Artemisia Gentileschi painting presented by Robilant + Voena in 2023 shows, in X-radiography, a serpent beneath the final composition’s skull, suggesting a transformation of subject.
Dr. Terzaghi, by comparing the works and their respective diagnostic findings, proposes that the painting sold at auction represents Artemisia’s original idea, which she later adapted and transformed in the R+V collection piece.
In the Pandolfini painting, the version with the serpent is the only one present.
The work was hotly contested, with bids coming from the room, online participants, and phone buyers.
One phone bidder, in particular, set the pace, raising the stakes until the final moment. Just as the auctioneer was about to close the sale at €470,000, a last-second bid of €480,000 came in—right before the hammer struck. The auctioneer updated the lot, gave other bidders a chance, but no one countered. The painting was awarded at €480,000 (+ fees)—a significant sum, although quite distant from the €7 million asking price for the R+V version.
We hope to see diagnostic art analysis increasingly used as part of supporting documentation for works at auction. It is a crucial tool for studying and enhancing the value of art.
