Some 62 Italian bronze sculptures from the Beit collection were sold for €3.8 million (£2.58 million) at an auction in London yesterday.
The 16th-century bronzes were assembled by art collector Alfred Beit and his brother Sir Otto Beit and were expected to sell for £1.5 million.
Lady Beit donated the collection of early Italian bronzes to the Alfred Beit Foundation before her death in 2005 to secure the future of Russborough in Co Wicklow, home of the Alfred Beit Foundation.
The collection includes a bronze figure of a gladiator by one of the leading sculptors of the Renaissance, Andrea del Briosco, called Riccio (1470-1532), which fetched €1,086,336 (£736,000). Riccio was a contemporary of Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci and Raphael, and is most famous for casting small bronze figures in an antique style.
A 26 cm high figure of a rampant satyr attributed to Riccio also sold yesterday for €342,432 (£232,000).
A late 15th-century bronze figure of David from the workshop of Bartolomeo Bellano (circa 1440-1496), sold for €38,966 (£26,400) and a bronze figure of Neptune attributed to Tiziano Minio (d.1552) fetched €177,120 (£120,000), over twice its estimate.
A bronze doorknocker from the workshop of Bartolomeo Ammanati and dating to the second half of the 16th century, sold for €210,182 (£142,400), over four times its estimate.
And a bronze figure of Morgante the dwarf, cast in the workshop of Giambologna in the late 16th century, sold for €85,018 (£57,600) after a pre-sale estimate of €7,000.
The Beit collection passed on to Sir Alfred Lein Beit, son of Sir Otto Beit, when he died in 1930. Sir Alfred moved to Russborough, which became home to one of Europe's most impressive private art collections and the headquarters of the Alfred Beit Foundation. In 1986 and 1987, Sir Alfred donated the majority of the collection to the National Gallery. He died in 1994.
At a separate auction in Sotheby's, London, correspondence between Samuel Beckett and Henri and Josette Hayden, 1947 to 1985, was sold for €310,210 (£210,000). The letters were part of a sale of items associated with modern Irish literature.
At the same auction, a rare inscribed copy of James Joyce's Dublinerssold for €103,400 (£70,000).
A Paris first edition of Ulyssessold for €9,601 (£6,500), while a 1935 New York edition fetched €10,636 (£7,200).
And Oscar Wilde's copy of Swinburne's Essays and Ballads, used by him while at Magdalen College, Oxford, in 1876, sold for €6,647 (£4,500). A first edition of WB Yeats's Where There is Nothing - Volume I of plays for an Irish Theatre, sold for €13,300 (£9,000). However, eight other works by Yeats were withdrawn.
