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A Rubens painting lost to history and misidentified for almost 300 years has re-emerged with the help of X-ray analysis and could now fetch up to £6 million ($7.7 million) at auction next month.
Flemish painter Peter Paul Rubens completed “Saint Sebastian Tended by Two Angels” more than 400 years ago.
His brushstrokes depict the story of the Roman soldier Sebastian, pierced by soldiers’ arrows and left to die after he converted to Christianity, before angels miraculously intervene.
It left a “forceful impression” on George Gordon, Sotheby’s co-chairman of old master paintings worldwide, when he first saw it at an exhibition.
“It’s the liveliness of the brushwork,” Gordon told CNN. “So it was easy to appreciate the speed and the vivacity with which it was painted, which seemed to me to speak very strongly for Rubens’ own brush.”
Likely commissioned by Italian nobleman and military commander Ambrogio Spinola, the painting was believed to have been completed around 1606-8 in Italy, or around 1609-10 in Antwerp once Rubens had returned to his hometown.
