A three-and-a-half-foot marble torso of a Roman emperor, dating to the first half of the 1st century CE, sold for $34.3 million at Sotheby's Wednesday night "Magnum Opus" sale in New York — a sum the house calls an auction record for a Roman antiquity, as ARTnews and Yahoo both report.

Sotheby's had estimated the fragment, adorned with an elegant bronze cuirass, at just $8 million to $12 million. With buyer's premium included, it brought in nearly triple its high estimate after five bidders competed for roughly fourteen minutes, according to the accounts from both outlets.

The winning bidder was not initially named.

The object's backstory may be as striking as its price. ARTnews reports that the statue, thought to have come from Dalmatia, belonged for years to the heirs of Wilhelm Aloys Maximilian Neumann, a 19th-century collector in Graz, Austria.

At the end of World War II, with Soviet troops advancing into Austria, the family hid the sculpture between two doors and plastered over the portals; a redesign of the home finally revealed it again.

Sotheby's last sold the work in 2010 to an Austrian collector for $7.36 million — ARTnews notes that a house official had initially pegged it at no more than $900,000 before investigating further, per a 2010 New York Times report. In fifteen years, the piece has more than quadrupled in value.

Yahoo reports Sotheby's described the torso on X as a work from "the earliest days of the Roman Empire" whose carvings and commanding scale would have projected Rome's supremacy 2,000 years ago.

Like many Roman statues, it is a copy of a Greek original and is believed to depict an emperor of the Julio-Claudian dynasty.

ARTnews observes that the previous benchmark comes close: in 2007 Sotheby's sold a 2,000-year-old bronze statue of Artemis for $28.6 million, more than four times its estimate, to British dealer Giuseppe Eskenazi. Sotheby's did not release the prior record figure, according to ARTnews.

The torso accounted for more than half of the $63 million total — with premium — that ARTnews says the "Magnum Opus" sale tallied, outpacing the $60 million Sotheby's had estimated for all three of this week's auctions when they were announced over the summer.

The evening also saw paintings by Canaletto, Luis Meléndez, and Jacob van Ruisdael sold, though none set records, alongside a Roman head of a girl for $2.5 million and a Safavid carpet fragment for $448,000.

ARTnews reports the sale drew entirely from one unidentified collector's holdings, part of 600 objects due to be auctioned this week, with further sales in New York and Paris through 2027 — a supply stream antiquities watchers will be measuring against this record.