The Last Communion of Saint Mary of Egypt by Marcantonio Franceschini

Marcantonio Franceschini's "The Last Communion of Saint Mary of Egypt" (1680) came to auction at Sotheby's London in July 2008 with a modest estimate of £6,000 to £9,000. It sold for £84,500, roughly $169,000 at the time, after a fifteen-way bidding war. The price was a testament not to a famous name but to an object's sheer, quiet quality.

The painting is small and painted on copper, a support that lets light bounce back through thin glazes of oil. Look at the luminous white of Mary's robe as it pools on the ground, and the concentrated faces of the priest and the attendant angel. The exact moment of contact, the spoon at her lips, is the theological and visual center, rendered with an almost surgical tenderness.

Franceschini was the leading classicist in late-Baroque Bologna, the heir to Carlo Cignani, and a painter who rarely left his native city. Yet here he depicts an Eastern liturgical detail: communion administered by spoon. Saint Mary of Egypt was a 5th-century Alexandrian penitent who lived forty-seven years alone in the desert. The priest Zosimas, who found her, gave her the Eucharist moments before her death.

The copper panel now sits in a private collection. Fifteen people on the phone that day recognized what the catalogue estimate had not: a flawless, jewel-like object and a story of rapture perfectly told.