In sharp contrast to its arch rival Christie’s more subdued sale yesterday, Sotheby’s staged a rousing morning session of Important Old Master Paintings and Sculpture today that realized $53,376,500, nicely within its pre-sale estimate range of $38 million to $55 million.

Top lot honors went to Jupiter and Antiope, a decidedly bawdy and large-scale mythological scene from 1612 by Hendrick Goltzius, which sold to an anonymous telephone bidder for a record $6,802,500 (est. $8–12 million).

Sotheby’s later identified the buyer as a private European, squelching pre-sale rumors that old master collector Jeff Koons was fancying the picture.

Though the sale fell short of its estimates (and indicated a sharp drop in the secret reserve price), it still shattered the Goltzius’s previous high, set in 1996, when The Fall of Man made $1,542,500 at Christie’s New York.

But the biggest surprise of the morning session was the last-minute withdrawal of a second star lot, Rembrandts 1632 Portrait of a Young Woman with a Black Hat, also estimated at $8-12 million.

A spokesperson for the company said it was withdrawn at the request of the seller, who acquired the work at Sotheby’s New York in January 2007 for $9 million on an estimate of $3-4 million.

A slice of the two-and-a-half-hour sale was devoted to 10 deaccessioned works from the Los Angeles County Museum of Art that cumulatively made $2.7 million against a high estimate of $1.3 million.

Of those, Christoph Ambergers striking 16th-century Portrait of Hans Jakob Fugger, three-quarter length, before a green drape, elicited a bidding battle that pushed the price past its estimated $200–300,000 to $1,202,500. It had been gifted to the museum in in 1968 by the Michael J. Connell Foundation.

Judd Tully is Editor-at-Large for Art+Auction.