Builder who paid £300 for a junkyard statue is set to pocket up to £100k after it was identified as a Baroque masterpiece

From the Newshound archive · first published 1 October 2026.

A marble statue bought for £300 at a Wiltshire salvage yard is heading for auction with a top estimate of £100,000, following its attribution to Pietro Bracci, the Italian sculptor behind Rome's celebrated Trevi Fountain. The 290-year-old maquette depicts Pope Clement XII and was wrongly identified as concrete by the yard's owners until an anonymous builder spotted its true worth. The sale is being handled by Woolley & Wallis in Salisbury, where international interest has already driven bidding far above the £10,000 pre-sale estimate.

Before arriving at the Wiltshire reclamation yard, the statue had passed through a Hampshire country house near Andover.

Bracci made the piece as a small-scale working model for a monumental bronze that once stood in Rome's Palazzo Nuovo but has since been lost.

Because the original bronze no longer exists, the maquette is believed to be the only surviving example of its kind, giving it both considerable historical significance and exceptional rarity.