After a five-minute bidding war, the hammer fell at $9 million;
with premium, the successful bidder in the hall pays $10.7 million.
This makes the painting of a young man holding a piece of paper, recently attributed to Bronzino, which came up for auction at Sotheby's in New York as part of the “Master Paintings Part I” auction, the artist's most expensive work ever sold at auction.
The previous estimate was $5 million.
The moving history of the work may have played a decisive role in the strong interest.
Ilse Hesselberger, the granddaughter of the founder of the German sewing machine factory Joseph Wertheim in Frankfurt and wife of the Munich industrialist Frank Hesselberger, acquired it in 1927 from the Munich art dealer Julius Böhler.
At that time the picture was still considered a work by Francesco Salviati.
As a Jew, Ilse Hesselberger was among the first to be deported during the Nazi dictatorship;
In 1941 she was murdered in Kaunas, Lithuania.
The Mannerist painting from her possession, now attributed to del Conte, had ended up in the art trade again through expropriation or compulsory acquisition and from there into the Linz Führer Museum.
After the Second World War, the painting ended up in the hands of the German Parliamentary Society, which finally handed it over in 2021 to the estate of Ilse Hesselberger’s daughter, who had escaped to New York in 1938.
The attribution to Bronzino, according to which it may even be a self-portrait of the artist, followed last.
According to Sotheby's, the proceeds from the auction will benefit Selfhelp Community Services, which supports Holocaust survivors in America, and the Lighthouse Guild, a Jewish health organization.