Lucio Fontana’s 1961 painting of St Mark’s Square at noon sold for €6,815,000 at Christie’s in Paris on 22 October. The price, with fees, was reported by the Italian financial site We Wealth. Christie’s has published the total of the evening on its results page: €66,014,000 for 80 lots. The work, “Concetto spaziale, Mezzogiorno in Piazza S. Marco”, is an oil on canvas of 150 by 150 centimetres, and Christie’s had estimated it at €5.5m to €7.5m. On the house’s fee scale, the price corresponds to a hammer of €5.5m, the low estimate, by our calculation. It led Thinking Italian, the modern Italian section of the sale, according to We Wealth. The format is 25 years old.
€6,815,000 for Fontana’s noon in St Mark’s Square
Fontana, who was born in Rosario, Argentina, in 1899 and died in 1968, is best known for the holes and cuts he made in his canvases. As the founder of Spatialism, he gave the title Concetto spaziale, spatial concept, to much of his work from the late 1940s on. In 1961 he painted a group of canvases on Venice. The title of this one means noon in St Mark’s Square. The hour matters. Christie’s catalogue records its exhibition history in the city itself, at Palazzo Grassi on the Grand Canal, in the exhibition Arte e Contemplazione.
The painting came to Paris from “an important private European collection”, in Christie’s description, and it had never been offered at auction before, according to We Wealth. The buyer has not been named. The same report gives €6,205,000 for Amedeo Modigliani’s “Minoutcha”, of 1916 and 1917, against an estimate of €5m to €7m. Both prices correspond to hammers at the low estimate, by our calculation.
25 Italian lots and €21,015,000
Thinking Italian is the name Christie’s gives to its sales of modern and contemporary Italian art. We Wealth puts this year’s section at €21,015,000 for 25 lots. Two were sold for charity. Michelangelo Pistoletto’s “Migrante”, a work of 2026, made €450,000, and Mario Schifano’s “Verginale”, of 1961, the year of the Fontana, made €320,000. Christie’s preview of the section ran from Giorgio de Chirico’s “Les Tragédiens d’Eschyle”, of 1925, to Alighiero Boetti’s “Ononimo”, of 1973, with works by Schifano, Pistoletto and Marino Marini. Renato Pennisi, international senior specialist at Christie’s, told We Wealth that “L’aspetto più interessante di quest’asta per me è la sua caratura internazionale”: for him, the most interesting aspect of the sale was its international reach. The sellers came from Japan, the United States, Germany, the Netherlands and Scandinavia, according to the same report. On those figures, Fontana and Modigliani together account for €13,020,000, more than 60 percent of the section. Two works led it.
Signac, Lalanne and Giacometti: selected results of the evening
All prices include fees. The first four were reported by We Wealth; the others come from Christie’s results.
| Work | Price (EUR) |
|---|---|
| Lucio Fontana, Concetto spaziale, Mezzogiorno in Piazza S. Marco, 1961 | 6,815,000 |
| Amedeo Modigliani, Minoutcha, 1916-17 | 6,205,000 |
| Michelangelo Pistoletto, Migrante, 2026 (charity) | 450,000 |
| Mario Schifano, Verginale, 1961 (charity) | 320,000 |
| Paul Signac, Saint-Cloud | 3,277,000 |
| François-Xavier Lalanne, Mouton de Laine | 1,728,000 |
| François-Xavier Lalanne, Mouton de Laine | 1,600,000 |
| Alberto Giacometti, Nu debout | 1,088,000 |
| Pierre Soulages, painting dated 18 October 1963 | 1,049,600 |
| Georg Baselitz, Oda | 1,024,000 |
| Marc Chagall, Le village sous la neige | 1,024,000 |
Christie’s billed the evening as “the much-anticipated Evening Sale of 20th and 21st Century Art”. Outside the Italian section, its results run from Paul Signac’s “Saint-Cloud”, named after the town on the Seine west of Paris and offered as “The Property of a European Private Collection”, to two of François-Xavier Lalanne’s woolly sheep. The Signac had been estimated at €1.5m to €2m, and each sheep at €700,000 to €1m. Soulages, who died in 2022 at the age of 102, titled his paintings by their dimensions and dates. Giacometti’s “Nu debout” is a standing nude. Chagall’s title means the village under the snow.
From December 2000 to a Paris evening sale
Christie’s held its first auction of 20th-century Italian art in December 2000, and the sales became Thinking Italian. The format moved to Paris in 2023, according to We Wealth. Paris is now its home. In 2025 it ran inside “Avant-Garde(s) including Thinking Italian”, from 23 October, and Pennisi told We Wealth that the 2025 edition sold every lot. Before this year’s sale, Mariolina Bassetti, chairman of Christie’s Italy, looked back on the category’s growth in a story published by Christie’s. In an interview with Exibart, she said that “L’arte italiana non era valutata quanto meritava”: Italian art was not valued as highly as it deserved.
“It has been so satisfying, watching the modern Italian art category grow.” Mariolina Bassetti, chairman of Christie’s Italy
The Luxury.it perspective
The Fontana result is about Venice as much as about the market. Light was the subject. Fontana painted the city’s light in 1961, and this canvas carries the name of its most famous square at the brightest hour of the day. For collectors, the evening shows that the Italian section holds its own inside a Paris sale of 80 lots: in We Wealth’s figures, its 25 lots made about a third of the total. For travellers, the square is still the place to start. La Fenice opens its season on 13 November and the Carnival begins on 23 January 2027, as in our guide to Venice in winter. The evening before, in London, Christie’s sold Barbara Hepworth’s Eos for £6,190,000, as in our report from the London sale.
Related guides
Christie’s Paris: a Boucher and a Fragonard · Mondrian’s Composition III at Christie’s London · Art Basel Paris and Frieze London · All 13 Key hotels in Venice
