A dazzling tiara featuring emeralds believed to have belonged to Eugenie, wife of Napoleon III, sold for a record 11.28 million Swiss francs ($12.80 million) to an anonymous buyer at Sotheby’s.

The diamond and emerald tiara was commissioned by German prince Guido Henckel von Donnersmarck’s for his second wife Katharina.

It was top lot at a sale that netted 78.9 million Swiss francs, third highest for a jewellery sale, the auction house said.

An extremely rare translucent pink diamond fetched a price of $10.8 million at a Sotheby’s auction on Tuesday, the third-highest price ever paid for one of the pink stones at auction.

“It is the third-highest price for a pink diamond at auction,” auctioneer David Bennett told journalists after the sale.

The 10.99-carat, emerald-cut stone was classed as a type IIa diamond, with the type II category making up less than two percent of gem diamonds.

A celebrated masterpiece by Pablo Picasso has sold at Sotheby’s auction house in London for £25.2 million ($40,5 million), more than double its pre-auction valuation.

“La Lecture” is a work from the Spanish painter’s “annus mirabilis,” 1932, and depicts the artist’s famous muse, Marie-Therese Walter.

Seven bidders vied for the coveted Picasso work, the hammer eventually coming down after six minutes of bidding to finalise the sale to an anonymous phone buyer.

A Chinese face or two in the crowd at the world’s auction houses often means one thing: the gavel will fall on a price far beyond the seller’s wildest dreams.

Fierce bidding by Chinese buyers for a vase at a small London auctioneer in November, for example, drove the price up nearly 40 times beyond its estimate, from around $1.9 million to $70 million.

It was the highest price ever paid for a Chinese artwork sold at auction and equivalent to a huge lottery win for the sellers, who found the 18th Century Qianlong Emperor-era piece while clearing out a house after a relative died.

A sumptuous painting of the Madonna and child by Renaissance master Titian sold for a record $16,882,500 Thursday in New York.

The Sotheby’s auction easily broke a 20-year-old record of $13.6 million for a Titian.

The painting, “A Sacra Conversazione: The Madonna and Child with Saints Luke and Catherine of Alexandria,” depicts the Virgin Mary and the two saints posed around a chubby infant Jesus as he stretches out his left hand.

A rare copy of John James Audubon’s ‘Birds of America’ set a new world record for a printed book at auction Tuesday, selling for 7.3 million pounds in London.

The four-volume book was subject to competitive bidding on the phones and in Sotheby’s New Bond Street galleries, and sold for 7,321,250 pounds.

Originally estimated to sell for between four and six million pounds, the book was bought by London dealer Michael Tollemache.