The auction of a religious painting with a reserve price of €1,500 has been halted by the Spanish government after experts said it was likely to be a lost Caravaggio masterpiece worth up to €150 million.
The discovery of what may possibly be an Ecce Homo by Caravaggio, which depicts Pontius Pilate displaying Christ to a crowd and is thought to have been kept in Spain for four centuries, prompted the government to quickly ban its export.
In the catalogue of the Madrid company that had scheduled it for auction today the work was titled “Coronation with Thorns” and attributed to the entourage of the 17th century Spanish artist José de Ribera.
However, a few hours before it went under the hammer José Manuel Rodríguez Uribes, the culture minister, said the painting had been declared “not for export . . . on suspicion it may be a Caravaggio”. The decision to withdraw the canvas from auction was made within hours after the government was informed about its possible sale earlier in the week. “The painting is valuable, we hope it’s a Caravaggio,” he added.
The value of the painting is not known for sure but Vittorio Sgarbi, an Italian art historian, said: “The price could be between €100 and €150 million, if you sell it to a private investor, or €40 or €50 million if you sell it to the Prado Museum.”
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The details of how experts discovered the painting, which was among more than 1,400 works up for auction, are not yet clear but earlier this week rumours began circulating that museum specialists and international buyers had rushed to try to get a glimpse of it.
Maria Cristina Terzaghi, one of the foremost Caravaggio scholars and professor of modern art history at Roma Tre University, arrived in Madrid a few days ago when an art buyer friend told her that the piece was going to be auctioned. Terzaghi, who was able to see the painting, told El País: “It’s a Caravaggio, I have no doubt.”
She said that in the painting, the cloak worn by Jesus had “the same quality as the red of [the cloak of] Salome” in Caravaggio’s painting of Salome with the head of John the Baptist at Madrid’s Prado Museum. She added that the image of Pontius Pilate in the foreground was “reminiscent of the martyred St Peter in Madonna of the Rosary” at Vienna’s Kunsthistorisches Museum.
The culture minister said that Madrid’s regional authorities should declare it a work of cultural interest to extend further protection under legislation governing Spain’s heritage. The process of verification will soon be started, the government said.
Some experts disagreed that it was a Caravaggio but others pointed to documentary evidence supporting the theory. ABC newspaper cited a 1994 Prado Museum study suggesting that a lost Caravaggio work similar in description to the supposed Ecce Homo is mentioned in 17th-century Spanish documents.
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Rodríguez Uribes said that the government had acted quickly to block its export because in the 1970s a lost Caravaggio that had resurfaced in Seville ended up in the United States.
In 2014 a lost masterpiece by Caravaggio, Judith and Holofernes, which was found under an old mattress in an attic in the French city of Toulouse and estimated to be worth $170 million, was bought by an anonymous foreign collector two days before auction.
