“The estimate on the picture was £300-£500. When its turn came last Tuesday at Gilding’s – a small, family-run auction house that holds about 45 sales per year – something truly extraordinary happened. The final hammer price was £205,000. And, enormous as the figure may seem, that’s just the start of it. The London fine art trade is now abuzz: this painting is very probably a Titian, painted in Venice between about 1510 and 1520. And as such, its real market value is likely to be upwards of £5m.”