File this one in the category of "research pays off."
In May 2000, Christies South Kensington auctioned the contents of Harrnigton House, Leamington Spa, in the UK. Not many people gave a second thought to a peculiar looking 3-foot high stone statue that was cataloged as a "sculpted stone copy of an Egyptian Ptolemaic queen or goddess, late 19th or early 20th century." Its £1,000-£2,000 estimate suggested it was a perfectly nice garden ornament.
Even so, competition for the object pushed the hammer price to £6,815 ($10,600). Woe to the underbidder.
The statue was indeed a high quality garden ornament. What folks didn't know at the time was that it is thought now to have originally decorated the garden at Hadrian's Villa near Rome.
Sally-Ann Ashton, curator of the Fitzwilliam Museum at Cambridge, England, who included the statue in her "Roman Egyptomania" exhibition in 2004-05, says the work is a Roman copy based on an Egyptian original, not a modern copy. She says there are parallels in the Vatican museum and the blended Egypto-Roman style of the object fits perfectly into Hadrianic Period aristocratic Roman aesthetics.
More definitive history has now come to light. The statue is illustrated in a villa near Padua in a 1787 book published by Justine Wynne, a lover of Cassanova, with a reference that the statue came from Hadrian's villa.
Giovanni Tomasso, a Leeds-based art dealer who acquired the statue, is not offering the spectacular basanite sculpture, albeit at a price more in live with its pedigree past. The asking price? A cool £3.5-million.
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