Miniature Rubens drawing.
In December 2020, the Louvre partnered with the auction houses Christie's and Drouot to hold a unique auction called "Bid for the Louvre". The proceeds were used to create a new museum space dedicated to artistic and cultural education called Studio (the auction total was over EUR 2.3 million).
The top lot was a 1962 painting with the generic title "Peinture" by Pierre Soulages, which went for EUR 1.4 million. Apart from paintings, the auction offered exclusive experiences.For example, there was a private tour featuring the annual inspection of the Mona Lisa outside her display case with the museum's director.
There was also a watch by Vacheron Constantin with the client's chosen masterpiece from the museum on its dial. The watch lot raised EUR 280,000 for the Louvre. And now two years later, Vacheron Constantin has presented the result of the project: a watch created as a unique piece with a reproduction of the Battle of Anghiari drawing by Rubens.
The work by the Flemish artist is itself a copy of a fresco Leonardo da Vinci planned in the Salone dei Cinquecento of the Palazzo Vecchio. Apart from the impressive detail in ink and watercolor, another thing that makes this work by Rubens unique is that da Vinci's fresco is considered lost.
Da Vinci's depiction of the battle was most likely covered by Giorgio Vasari's Battle of Marciano following renovations in the mid-16th century. The dial with the Rubens drawing is yet another example of the manufacture's possibilities as part of their Les Cabinotiers project.
Vacheron Constantin has been working with the Louvre since 2019, inviting collectors to transfer their favorite work from the walls of the museum to their own watches.
In order to reproduce the drawing by Rubens on a dial measuring 3.3 cm in diameter, the enamel artist used around 20 shades of brown, gray-brown, cream-brown and sepia-brown. The application of each new layer to the miniature painting was followed by a separate firing for each tone at 900°С. But enamel reproduction of canvases isn't the only thing this manufacture is capable of.
In 2022, the artists at Vacheron Constantin created a series called Métiers d'Art - Tribute to Great Civilisations with dials displaying sculpted objects like the Nike of Samothrace statue (Victoire de Samothrace); and a marble bust of Caesar Augustus (Buste d’Auguste). All you have to do is choose a masterpiece you want to admire every day.