This Titian Can Break $32 Million On July 2

The rare early Titian, “Rest On The Flight Into Egypt,” (c. 1508), is a remarkable painting for several reasons, but chief among them is its soaring artistic and historical merit as a kind of compass bearing true north at the beginning of the long, illustrious narrative of its painter, Tiziano Vecellio. As we know, Titian became the central artist in Renaissance Venice and arguably the portraitist whose artistry and frontal depth of feeling for his subjects brought European painting to a new form of modernity. His use of color and the azure-green light bouncing off the Adriatic was unmatched, as was his sense of the humanity of his subjects.

It’s in part Titian’s depth of understanding the human condition that makes “Rest On The Flight Into Egypt” such a rare and captivating work. All of the elements of the master are present in the figures, and in the movement of the baby to his mother, wholly innocent and wholly divorced from the reality of the harsh trek he and his parents are on. The Christ child wants to play.

Then, there’s this incredible fact: As near as can be calculated by the serious students of Titian’s life and work — his birth date is uncertain, but he’s generally thought to have painted this masterwork as he was nineteen or twenty.

Its provenance is, understandably, also a big part of the reason that the painting is thought to be able to easily exceed its low estimate, but in the case of this Titian, there are more than a few peaks and valleys in that wild tale. First appearing in the collection of renowned 17th-century Venetian spice merchant and arts patron Bartolomeo della Nave, the painting migrated to the collection of Habsburg Archduke Ludwig Wilhelm, then regent of the Spanish Netherlands, where, in miniature, it was actually rendered in a larger portrait by David Teniers in the mid-17th century in the Archduke’s jammed “art room” in Brussels.

A century and a half later, the painting was back in the Habsburg seat of Vienna, where none other than Europe’s baddest early-19th-century actor, Napoleon, stepped into the provenance by sacking Vienna in 1809. His troops removed the treasured Titian to the “Musée Napoléon,” now more familiar to us as the Louvre. Napoleon being Napoleon, and his escapades leading inexorably to his very own Waterloo, the painting was back in Vienna after Austrian Field Marshal Karl Philip von Schwarzenberg helped his British allies bring Napoleon to heel.

Said another way, the Titian caught the eye all of those notable characters and made them all think that ferrying it back and forth across the Continent was worth it. The painting’s travels were not yet done at the end of Napoleon’s wars.

It was most recently sold in 1878 to the 4th Marquess of Bath, John Alexander Thynn, in whose collection it hung more or less in peace for a century and a bit. But it was from the marquesses of Bath’s whose famous Elizabethan estate, Longleat, that the Titian was stolen for the second time on January 6, 1995. With its return decorated by a $100,000-plus reward, it was found (without its frame) and returned to the 7th Marquess of Bath by well-known British stolen-art detective Charles Hill, who was famously led to a spot at a London bus stop where the painting was deposited in plaid, woven plastic carry-all, which is being held by the manager of the Longleat estate in the picture below at the public announcement of the painting’s return.

In short, Titian’s luminous early work, Rest On The Flight Into Egypt, has drawn the great and the good and has inspired plenty of actors of malicious intent to covet it for the entirety of its 420-odd years on earth, and that is a major part of why Christie’s thinks it’s going to go north of $30 million on Tuesday in London.