Apollo: Antiquities took centre stage at auction in London this July. Despite the excitement about t

It has been some time since anyone had to fight their way into a London saleroom. But at Sotheby's on the evening of 7 July it seemed that the art world was out in force to witness the sale of Vermeer's A young woman at the virginals. Every seat in the house was taken, the crush at the back and sides of the room--and the heat generated by the TV cameras and the body mass of spectators was almost unbearable. Everyone was curious to see what late would befall one of the most enigmatic--and problematic--'rediscoveries' to land on the art market in years.

It had taken over a decade of scientific investigation and research to persuade a reluctant world that the picture was not only an authentic seventeenth century painting but that it was an autograph work by the Delft master himself (although some suspected that Vermeer had begun but abandoned the canvas and someone else had finished it after the artist's death). By the time of the sale, few doubted the picture but equally few liked it. What troubled many was Sotheby's estimate--'in excess of 3m [pounds sterling]'. If it were an unquestioned and more beautiful Vermeer, the estimate would have been more like 30m [pounds sterling].

In the event, the diminutive 25.2 x 20 cm work fetched 16m [pounds sterling], bought by a telephone bidder widely believed to be the Las Vegas casino owner Steven Wynn--someone who one can imagine might want the last Vermeer likely to come up for sale. According to Sotheby's, seven bidders were chasing the painting. The underbidder, Dutch dealer Robert Noortman, seated in the front row, proved a major player in the sate but came away securing only a few relatively minor works.

A rare Rubens night scene, Old lady and a boy, proved the second most expensive painting that night, selling on target to Alfred Bader for 2.5m [pounds sterling]. More striking was the fate of Jan Lievens's Study of an old bearded man, estimated at 200,000 [pounds sterling]-300,000 [pounds sterling] and finally claimed by London dealer Johnny Van Haeften for a mighty 1.85m [pounds sterling], and the wonderful early Lucas Cranach the Elder panel painting of the Head of Christ crowned with thorns. Expected to fetch 100,000 [pounds sterling]150,000 [pounds sterling], the latter sold for 677,600 [pounds sterling]. As Sotheby's export George Gordon put it after the sale: 'Buyers are becoming much more sophisticated and are paying big prices for pictures which previously would not have been considered very commercial. The Lievens would not necessarily have made any more if it had been of a pretty woman.' Interestingly one of the most beautiful and admired pictures of the sale, Bernardo Daddi's monumental gold ground Coronation of the Virgin sold on only one bid to dealer Giacomo Algranti for 1.57m [pounds sterling]. The sale realised just under 30m [pounds sterling] and was 90 per cent sold by lot and 65 pet cent sold by value.

Christie's sale earlier in the day was, by contrast, a lacklustre event, hardly helped by the fact that its star let, a fine Melendez still life, failed to sell. Deemed too expensive at 1.5m [pounds sterling]-2m [pounds sterling], there were, however, two offers for it before the end of the sale and eventually a private purchase was negotiated for a price within the estimate. The top lot here was the pair of Paninis which fetched a record price--2.3m [pounds sterling]--for these views of the interiors of St Peter's, Rome and of the church of San Peele fuori le Mura. There were casualties aplenty, even among the usually sought-after eighteenth-century Italian view paintings (this sale was 61 per cent sold by lot and 64 per cent sold by value). As one dealer said of the Old Master sales: 'lf is a very difficult, selective market. There are not a lot of buyers out there. The only things that have been selling are works that are fresh to the market and dealers are buying them in the hope of selling them on.'

A late, great and wholly unexpected sale dropped into the end of the London summer season was the 'Highly Important Antiquities' offered at Bonhams in Bond Street on 14 July. At the core of this 25-lot single-owner sale was an outstanding group of Roman and Anglo Saxon glass, all but one piece of which had been acquired at Sotheby's in 1997 at the sale of the British Rail Pension Fund collection of ancient glass. At that event, the group had been knocked down to an anonymous telephone bidder, widely believed to be Sheik Saud bin Mohammed al-Thani, the cousin of the Emir of Qatar, who has spent hundreds of millions over the last seven years or so hoovering up outstanding works of art in a wide variety of fields, much but not all of it destined for Qatar's new museums and library.

Insiders were perplexed to discover that the sheik or the state--if, indeed, either were the vendor should want to dispose of these pieces, a small but far from insignificant selection of Qatar's holdings of antiquities. Here, for instance, was the prized Constable-Maxwell cage cup, an extraordinary tourde-force of the glassmaker's art. Both the bowl and its 'cage' of linked rings which stand proud of the vessel by means of the slenderest of bridges were carved from a piece of blown or cast glass, painstakingly wheel-cut and then ground and polished in a process fraught with potential disaster. It survives in remarkable condition--and is the only example not in captivity in a public collection. It came to the block as the most expensive piece of ancient glass ever offered at auction, bearing an estimate of 1.5m [pounds sterling]-2m [pounds sterling]. A masterpiece most definitely, but what would the market make of it and the sale as a whole, given every piece was acquired at auction within the last decade?

The answer, it seems, is that a vendor sells within ten years at his or her peril. The cage cup, as one might expect, retained its twice-won record as the most expensive piece of ancient glass ever sold at auction. At the Constable-Maxwell sale at Christie's in 1979 it had fetched a hammer price of 520,000 [pounds sterling]; in 1997 at Sotheby's, 2.1m [pounds sterling], and in July 2004, a perhaps slightly disappointing 2.4m [pounds sterling]2,646,650 [pounds sterling] with premium. While every lot sold (for a total of 5.9m [pounds sterling]), other Roman glass saw mixed fortunes. A glorious Hellenistic mosaic glass bowl, for instance, sold for 171,650 [pounds sterling], a significant 100,000 [pounds sterling] less than it had fetched in 1997. A skyphos similarly brought 80,000 [pounds sterling] less.

What fared best were the

Egyptian pieces. The black basalt block statue of General Pakyrer, for instance, more than doubled expectations to make 666,650 [pounds sterling], and a little shabti figure of Ay commanded 215,650 [pounds sterling] (estimate 59,000 [pounds sterling]-80,000 [pounds sterling]). The lot that almost stole the show, an impressively large Tairona figural pendant of an alligator-headed deity of around 1000-1500 that had fetched $563,500 in New York in 1997, now soared to realise 534,650 [pounds sterling] and became the most expensive Pre-Columbian artefact ever sold at auction.