A carved Guennol Lioness, measuring just over 8 cm tall, easily broke all previous records for the highest price bid for any sculpture at auction.
An English buyer claimed this extremely rare 5,000-year-old white limestone sculpture from ancient Mesopotamia, bidding 57.2 million dollars. The occasion was Sotheby’s auction in New York on Wednesday. Acquired by a private collector Alastair Bradley Martin in 1948, it was put on display in New York’s Brooklyn Museum of Art ever since.
This figure was endowed with meticulous craftsmanship that even today evokes the imagination of antiquity lovers owing to brilliant combination of an animal form and human pose. With this record sale for an antiquity, it broke two previous records that involved $29.1 million for Picasso’s “Tete de Femme and 28.6 million dollars paid for ‘Artemis and the Stag,’ a 2,000-year-old bronze figure which sold also at Sotheby’s in New York in June.
