Guennol Lioness

At the time of its 2007 sale, the price paid at auction for The Guennol Lioness was the highest paid for a sculpture to that date, easily exceeding the record of Pablo Picasso's Tete de femme (Dora Maar). On 3 February 2010, however, the second edition of the cast of the sculpture L'Homme qui marche I (Walking Man I) by Alberto Giacometti sold for £65,001,250 ($104,327,006) and surpassed The Guennol Lioness as the most expensive sculpture ever sold at auction.

The limestone sculpture measures just over 8 cm (3.25 in) tall. It was described by Sotheby's as "one of the last known masterworks from the dawn of civilization remaining in private hands." One day before the auction, experts had been estimating that the highest bid would be between $14 million and $18 million. The sale price of the lioness-woman exceeded the $28.6 million paid for Artemis and the Stag, a 2,000-year-old bronze figure that Sotheby's also sold in New York during June 2007 and which then held the record for the most expensive antiquity to be sold at auction.

History

According to Sotheby's, the sculpture was "said to have been found at a site near Baghdad", and had reached New York by 1931. It was on loan to the Brooklyn Museum of Art from 1948 until it was purchased at auction by an English collector. It is thought to have been created at approximately the same time as the first known use of the wheel, the development of cuneiform writing, and the emergence of the first cities.