A newly discovered canvas by the female 17th-century Italian painter Artemisia Gentileschi sold for almost 4.8 million euros ($5.3 million) on Wednesday, a record for the artist, auction house Artcurial said. The sale came amid a surge of interest in the rare female baroque painter`s extraordinarily dramatic work, and smashed the base estimate of between 600,000 and 800,000 euros. The painting `Lucretia` depicts the ancient Roman noblewoman who killed herself after being raped, showing her bare-breasted and about to plunge a dagger into her chest. It was discovered only recently, in a private collection in the southeastern French city of Lyon, where it had been stored unrecognised for some 40 years. After a `long bidding battle` over the telephone, the painting was sold in Paris for 4,777,000 euros to a European collector, the French auction house said. It nearly doubled the previous record for her wo
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