NEW YORK – Christie’s capped off the first day of Classic Week: New York with a 100%-sold triumph. Arms and Armour from the Mougins Museum of Classical Art, Part I, totaled $6,562,080, which is 155 percent hammer against low estimate. This sale is the second chapter of A Collecting Odyssey, a series of six sales from December 2023 to December 2024 of works, spanning art history from antiquities to contemporary sculptures, that were the nucleus of the beloved Mougins Museum of Classical Art in the South of France. Founded by Christian Levett in 2011, the Mougins Museum of Classical Art closed its doors to the public on the 31 August 2023 and will reopen in June 2024 as Female Artists of the Mougins Museum, dedicated solely to works by female artists from The Levett Collection.

The Head of the Ancient Art and Antiquities Department in New York, Hannah Solomon said: “This sale shows the enduring strength of the market for Antiquities, and the passion, connoisseurship, and energy that Christian Levett brought to assembling the varied collection that has made the Mougins Museum such an inspiration to all who have experienced it.”

The top lots of the sale span more than a millennium of European history, from the Archaic Period of ancient Greece, to the Merovingian Kingdom of the early middle ages. The top lot is the Guttmann Mouse Helmet, an important Roman iron, brass and copper helmet with a punched inscription for the helmet’s original owner, Julius Mansuetus, which fetched $1,260,000. Other notable results include: a Roman Iron and Tinned Bronze Cavalry Helmet of the Antonine Period, which made $693,000; a Greek Bronze Warrior’s Panoply, Archaic to Classical Periods, which earned $504,000; a Greek Bronze Corinthian Helmet of the Late Archaic to Early Classical Periods, which made $478,800; a Greek Tinned Bronze Chalcidian Helmet, Late Classical to Hellenistic Periods, which brought $315,000; A Roman Sheet Brass Helmet Of Weisenau Type, Flavian To Trajanic Period, which earned $315,000; and a Merovingian Gold and Jewel-Mounted Iron Sword, circa 5th-6th Century A.D., which realized: $252,000.