€300,000 high estimate leads Sotheby's Milan on 28 October
A 1965 necklace of intertwined ribbons tops a sale of more than 300 lots in Milan. It holds 35 carats of oval sapphires and about 55 carats of brilliant-cut diamonds, and four further lots sit at a €100,000 floor.
By Carat Capital
What changed
Milan names its lead lot. A 1965 sapphire and diamond necklace of intertwined ribbons tops Sotheby's Fine Jewelry and Watches sale on 28 October at a high estimate of €300,000. The sale runs to more than 300 lots.
What it means
- If you buy signed period jewellery: Four of the top five lots share a €100,000 floor. The distance between the leader and the field is narrower than the top estimate suggests.
- If you value by the carat: Ninety carats of stone against €300,000 is €3,333.33 a carat blended, before anything is attributed to design, age or signature.
- What this is not: A result. No reserve, total or sell-through exists until 28 October, and five estimates are the whole of what is public.
Key figures
| High estimate, the lead necklace$333,524 at Rapaport's rate | €300,000 |
|---|---|
| Stone in the lead lot35 ct sapphire, about 55 ct diamond | 90 ct |
| Per carat at the high estimateon our division, blended | €3,333.33 |
| Lots in the saleMilan, 28 October | 300+ |
Source: Estimates as published by Sotheby's and carried by Rapaport News on 15 October 2026, read in full from the raw feed, 200, 48,713 bytes. Dollar conversions are Rapaport's own at 1.11175 to the euro. The per-carat figure is Carat Capital's division. Nothing has sold.
Ninety carats, one ceiling
The necklace is dated. Sotheby's gives the piece as 1965 and describes it as intertwined ribbons. It holds 35 carats of oval sapphires and an estimated 55 carats of brilliant-cut diamonds.
A low blended rate. On this paper's division, €300,000 across 90 carats is €3,333.33 a carat. That is a design and signature price, not a gemstone price.
Diamond weight is estimated. Sotheby's gives the sapphires at 35 carats and the diamonds as approximately 55, so the denominator in that division is partly the house's estimate.
| Lot | Estimate (EUR) | Estimate (USD) |
|---|---|---|
| Sapphire and diamond necklace, 1965, intertwined ribbons | up to 300,000 | up to 333,524 |
| Necklace convertible to a hair accessory | 100,000 to 200,000 | 111,175 to 222,349 |
| Ring, 9.09-carat brilliant-cut diamond | 100,000 to 150,000 | 111,175 to 166,748 |
| Ring, 15.08-carat oval Burmese sapphire | 100,000 to 150,000 | 111,175 to 166,748 |
| Lucio Fontana cuff, white lacquer on silver | 100,000 to 150,000 | 111,175 to 166,748 |
Notes on this table
Arithmetic printed so it can be checked. The lead lot holds 35 carats of oval sapphires and an estimated 55 carats of brilliant-cut diamonds, so 300,000 / 90 = 3,333.33 euros a carat at the high estimate, blended across two materials and before any value is attributed to the mount, the date or the signature. Rapaport's conversions imply a rate of 333,524 / 300,000 = 1.11175 dollars to the euro, and the same rate reproduces 111,175, 222,349 and 166,748 from 100,000, 200,000 and 150,000 exactly, so one rate is used throughout its item. The second lot's component weights, about 4.10 and 4.20 carats at the front with further stones between 2 and 2.90 carats and two pear shapes of about 1.20 carats, do not sum to a published total and no per-carat figure is given for it.
The field sits at one floor
Four share €100,000. A convertible necklace, a 9.09-carat diamond ring, a 15.08-carat Burmese sapphire ring and a Lucio Fontana cuff all start at the same figure.
Two ceilings, not four. The convertible necklace reaches €200,000 and the other three reach €150,000. The spread across the whole top five is €300,000 to €100,000.
Artist and origin collide. A pierced white-lacquer Fontana cuff carries the same floor as an oval Burmese sapphire of 15.08 carats. One is priced on a name, the other on a stone.
What has not been published
No reserve exists publicly. The house has given five estimates and a lot count above 300. No reserve, no total and no sell-through will exist before 28 October.
Signatures without lots. Cartier, Bulgari and David Webb are named among the designers represented. No individual lot is attributed to any of them in this report.
Lot two lacks arithmetic. Its stone weights are given as approximations in parts and never totalled, so no per-carat figure can be built from them.
What to watch
- Before 28 OctoberThe full catalogue. Five lots are priced publicly against a sale of more than 300.
- 28 OctoberWhether the leader clears €300,000. The figure is a ceiling, not a reserve.
- 29 OctoberBonhams Paris the next day, where an 81.17-carat Paraiba leads at a €80,000 ceiling. Two Continental sales in two days.
The story so far
Go deeper
What would change this call
The catalogue. This is one trade report of a pre-sale announcement, and the carat weights behind the €3,333.33 figure include an approximation the house itself flagged. If the diamond total is materially below 55 carats the blended rate rises, and a buyer paying for a 1965 Italian design would not price it per carat in any case. No lot has sold and no reserve is public.
Why a per-carat rate on period jewellery is a floor test
Dividing an estimate by the carats inside a piece is a crude instrument and it is useful for exactly one thing: telling you whether a house is pricing the stones or pricing the object. A 1965 necklace holding 35 carats of sapphire and about 55 carats of diamond, estimated to €300,000, works out at €3,333.33 a carat blended. Sapphire and diamond of auction quality can each fetch multiples of that on their own, which means the estimate is not built up from the stones at all. It is built on what the design, the date and the maker are expected to fetch, with the gem content effectively acting as a floor under the lot. That is the ordinary arrangement in a mid-market period sale and it explains the shape of the rest of this catalogue, where a Lucio Fontana cuff in lacquer and silver sits at the same €100,000 floor as a 15.08-carat Burmese sapphire. One lot is priced on an artist's name and the other on an origin, and the house has decided they meet at the same number. The reading a specialist takes from that is about the room rather than the goods: Milan draws buyers who will pay for Italian twentieth-century design, and a sale assembled for that room prices its gemstones conservatively because the stones are not what the competition will be about.
Method
The item was read in full from Rapaport's own RSS feed, fetched in this run and saved as raw bytes: rapaport.com/feed/, 200, 48,713 bytes. The publisher's article page refused an ordinary browser identity with HTTP 403 at 5,919 bytes, so the feed's content:encoded block is the text relied on and every figure printed here appears inside it. Date established from the feed item's own pubDate, Thu, 15 Oct 2026 06:42:54 +0000. ARCHIVE, by entity: grep -ril 'Milan' website/*.html returns 8 hits; each was tested for the string Sotheby and only two carry both, watches.html and the-record.html, which are a desk index and the corrections record rather than articles. The Milan passage in watches.html was opened and read and concerns a Patek Philippe Gondolo exhibition, not an auction. grep -ril 'Lucio Fontana' returns 0, validated against the positive control grep -ril 'Sotheby', which returns a large hit set on this archive. NEW. ONE FIGURE DELIBERATELY NOT RECOMPUTED: Rapaport describes the Bonhams Chaumet sapphire in a separate item as 13.70 carats where this paper's own article of 10 October gives 12.5 carats from the Bonhams catalogue; that discrepancy concerns a story already published and is routed to the standards desk rather than resolved here.