Long-Lost Baroque Masterpiece Found for Pocket Change in English Salvage Yard

Quick Smiles:

• A centuries-old Italian statue surfaced in an ordinary English reclamation yard for the price of a weekend dinner.
• The tiny bronze model was sculpted by the same artist who created Rome’s beloved Trevi Fountain.
• Its rediscovery restores a missing piece of art history and leaves scholars smiling at the unlikely journey.

Resting quietly among terracotta gnomes and weathered birdbaths, a 27-inch bronze model created by Baroque sculptor Pietro Bracci has been recognized as an important historical artifact.

The piece was the original presentation model for a never-realized bronze statue of Pope Clement XII that the Roman Senate had commissioned in the 1730s.

“It was simply labeled ‘garden ornament’ and priced at three hundred pounds,” the auction house’s specialist later recalled.

After careful examination, experts confirmed the model’s distinctive hand-finished surfaces and the artist’s signature tooling marks, linking it directly to the Trevi Fountain workshop.

Now destined for a museum display, the small statue reminds us that great treasures can still appear in the most ordinary places.

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