The 1506 Rome discovery that just sold for £13.6 million in London
A 19th-century bronze based on the marble Laocoön and His Sons, unearthed in Rome in 1506, sold at Sotheby's for £13.6 million ($18.1 million), a record for a Neoclassical sculpture.
In 1506, workers in Rome unearthed a marble sculpture that would go on to shape centuries of European art: Laocoön and His Sons, showing the Trojan priest and his two sons struggling against giant serpents. The discovery became one of the defining moments of the Renaissance, and its influence eventually produced a 19th-century bronze that has just sold at Sotheby’s in London for £13.6 million ($18.1 million).
The bronze, known as the Hamilton Laocoön, is a life-sized 19th-century interpretation of that ancient marble. It had not appeared at auction for around 150 years before this sale, and its return set a new benchmark — the highest price ever achieved by a Neoclassical sculpture at auction.
The path from marble to bronze ran through Napoleonic-era Paris. After the ancient sculpture was taken there under the Treaty of Tolentino, a plaster cast was produced at the Musée Napoléon in 1797. British collector George Watson-Taylor commissioned a bronze from that cast, and in 1817 French sculptor Auguste-Jean Marie Carbonneaux completed four monumental versions using it as his model. Only a small number survive: one in the French Parliament, one at Houghton Hall in England, and the Hamilton example.
Watson-Taylor never paid off the commission, so the bronze reached the auction market only a few years after it was cast. It was bought by writer and collector William Beckford, then passed to the Duke of Buckingham and Chandos and later the Duke of Hamilton, before appearing in the duke’s 17-day estate sale at Christie’s in 1882, where industrialist Thomas Merthyr Guest acquired it.
The sculpture stayed within the Guest family for generations, rarely seen in public, before returning to the market at Sotheby’s this week. Bidding opened at an estimate of £2 million to £3 million and moved well beyond it as several collectors competed before an Old Masters buyer secured the piece.
The sale took place ahead of Sotheby’s broader evening auction of Old Master and 19th-century works, which also featured a restored early Rembrandt, Let the Little Children Come Unto Me (1627), sold for £8 million, alongside pieces by Edwin Landseer, William Hodges and Sandro Botticelli.
Wikimedia Commons/by LivioAndronico
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