For all the anonymous 18th-century portraits that turn out to (maybe) be Titians, there are Gauguins that turn out to be exceptionally unattractive fakes. This week the Art Institute of Chicago announced that The Faun, in its collection for a decade, wasn't by Gauguin as it had surmised but was rather the product of a 47-year-old forger whose cohort parents had consigned it to Sotheby's in 1994.

While forger Shaun Greenhalgh was sentenced to serve four years and eight months in a British jail last month and his octogenarian parents await their fate, the museum reportedly is looking to Sotheby's for a refund. Perhaps its Board of Trustees will have better luck than these folks.

Sotheby's was involved in a bestial surprise of another kind last week when a limestone lioness from ancient Mesopotamia fetched a triple-estimate $57 million--the highest price ever paid at auction for a sculpture. Measuring just over 3 in. tall, the palm-sized figurine with killer deltoids and washboard abs was on loan to the Brooklyn Museum of Art for nearly sixty years by Alastair Bradley Martin, an amateur tennis champion and heir of steel magnate Henry Phipps. The mighty feline in a bodybuilder pose is said to have been found at a site near Baghdad and was acquired by Martin and his wife Edith in 1948.

Two holes in the back of its 5,000-year-old head suggest that it was worn 50 Cent-style around the neck of a powerful leader perhaps to repel misfortune and ward off evil forces. Or perhaps it was designed to attract renown and vast fortune: Sotheby's sold the purported amulet as The Guennol Lioness, adopting the Welsh name for Martin that graces the couple's formidable collection and their former estate.

--Kelly Devine Thomas