Magna Carta's worth is relative these days. Last night, Sotheby's sold Ross Perot's copy of the 13th century English charter that gave birth to habeas corpus and set the foundation for basic human rights. The buyer was Carlyle Group founder David Rubenstein who paid $21 million for it, less than the record price paid for Jeff Koons's Hanging Heart last month and about half the sum required to obtain an apartment at 15 Central Park West. Michael Moore may have a seizure and finally move to Canada.

Still, the single sheet of parchment dating from 1297 scored quite a mark-up over the $1.5 million Perot paid for it in 1983 when he acquired the 2,500-word medieval Latin manuscript from the Brudenell family of Deene Park. Twenty-some years later Perot's family-run foundation decided to sell the sole copy in private hands (a total of 17 originals are known to survive before the year 1300) and the only Magna Carta outside of Britain aside from an example in Australia. The manuscript, which carries the seal of King Edward I, was estimated to make $20/30 million (with proceeds going to education, medicine, and assisting wounded soldiers and their families), a fraction of the some $60 million Perot reportedly paid in his bid to become president in 1992.

Shortly after 7 p.m., Sotheby's vice-chairman David Redden took to the podium before 150 seated guests, a single phone bank, and a salesroom thick with professional camera crews alongside burly men with digital cameras and Revolutionary War types sporting curled mustaches. "So Magna Carta . . . " Redden announced with understated relish, "What should we say? $12 million to start it . . ." Bidding was nonexistent in the room aside from a lone suitor, a fair-skinned female seated in the phone bank, bidding on behalf of Rubenstein. "On the telephone, on my left. Fair warning at 19 million dollars," Redden paused before bringing down his hammer. "$19 million to the telephone."

Magna Carta's debut at auction lasted less than five minutes. The crowd applauded the result, then milled about waiting for word about the identity of the new owner who would join the ranks of Bill Gates, the buyer of Leonardo da Vinci's Codex Leicester for $30.8 million at Christie's in 1994, and television and movie producer Norman Lear who paid $8.14 million for a copy of the Declaration of Independence seven years ago (some may recall spotting it at P. Diddy's 2004 White Party).

Rubenstein, who flew in last night to attend the auction, made a personal appearance after the sale. Holding court before a purple-clothed case displaying the 710-year-old document, he announced that he would return the manuscript to the National Archives where it had been on exhibit for the last 20 years on loan from Perot. Sotheby's heralded Rubenstein as having saved Magna Carta for America.

Redden described the sale as a high point in his 33-year career at Sotheby's and recalled that in the 1970s he and his fellow Sotheby's associates had created a board game. "We debated whether the star lot would be the Mona Lisa or the Magna Carta," said Redden after the auction. "We decided on the Magna Carta." Turns out that in today's market Magna Carta is more Marvin Gardens than Park Place.

--Kelly Devine Thomas

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

Tomorrow Christie's will hold the first spirits auction in New York since prohibition. It's being billed as an historic moment, and while the long-term impact will be more evolutionary than revolutionary –expect whiskey and cognac lots in wine auctions – the first something is a bang.

Nearly 1,000 lots will be offered. The whiskeys are grabbing the headlines, but the auction is as rich in Maderias and Cognacs, including a strong showing of 18th– and early 19th–century bottlings, like the famous Haley's Comet vintage of 1811, and the Waterloo vintage of 1815.

Some highlights:

* Single bottle of Verdlheo 1748, a Solera. Estimate: $7,500-$12,000.

* Case of Terrantez 1795, a good year for Madeira. Estimate: $30,000-$48,000.

* 'Grande Armée Cognac 1811, with the letter 'N' embossed in glass at the shoulder (it was a good year for Napoleon). Estimate: $3,000-$5,000.

* Cognac, Grande Fine Réserve 1811, from the private cellar of Doris Duke. Estimate: $1,000-$1,500.

* Single bottle of the Macallan, 1856. Estimate: $16,000-$24,000.

* Single bottle of the Macallan 1926, bottled in 1986 and rebottled in 2002; possibly the finest whiskey ever created and the cult object of the auction. Estimate: $20,000-$30,000.

* Armagnac from the war years, 1940-1946, from Marquis de Montdidier, Chateau de Cahuzac. Estimate: $500 to $700 each.

* Single bottle of rye whiskey made in George Washington's still with his recipe. A limited edition of 24 bottles was produced in 2003, and bottle #1 was won at auction by Marvin Shanken for $100,000 (and donated to the distillery's museum); this is bottle #8. Estimate: $10,000-$20,000.

* Collection of 8 bottles designed by Art Deco master Erté for Courvoisier in 1988. Estimate: $8,000-$12,000.

* A superlot of 729 whiskeys from a collector in the Pacific Northwest, the star of the auction. Estimate: $70,000-$100,000.

Everyone is fixating on the spirits, but about one-third of the lots are investment-grade wine: heavy-hitting Bordeaux from the 1980s and 1990s, Domaine de la Romanée Conti. Expect savvy wine buyers to wait out the spirits and cherry-pick bottles of the softer stuff.

--Oliver Schwaner–Albright

Apparently Russians have a love of money. Eliciting comparisons to Saudi high rollers of the 1970s and Japanese consumers of the 1990s, they shop for Gulfstream G550 airplanes and diamond-encrusted car grilles at modestly named shindigs. They also have a thing for cultural heritage and Faberge eggs.

Last week, Christie's and Sotheby's sold a combined $160 million worth of Russian artworks in London--a record haul that toppled previous highs. Among the highlights was a pink Faberge egg with a peek-a-boo diamond-set cockerel that sold for $16.5 million, a good bit of change more than the asking price of this ovoidal architectural wonder.

Goncharova's Bluebells

The world has been smitten with Russian collectors ever since an anonymous fellow with a bad dye job and apparently worse shoes mysteriously showed up at Sotheby's a year ago last May and plunked down $95 million for a Picasso. Today Russia claims some 53 billionaires and more than 100,000 millionaires, according to the New York Times. The nation also claims title to the most expensive female artist: Natalia Goncharova whose Picking Apples, sold for $9.8 million in June. Last week Goncharova's Bluebells fetched $6.2 million at Sotheby's, the top lot of its inaugural Russian evening sale. 

Vik Muniz

Vik Muniz

With its burgeoning scene of art-infatuated oligarchs (and their wives), art foundations, collecting clubs, art fairs, galleries, and private museums, Larry Gagosian paid a well-heeled visit to Moscow in the fall. Now Vik Muniz, who will render you and your significant other in Bosco chocolate syrup for $110,000 (thank Neiman Marcus) for the holidays, has rendered Russian icons in puzzle pieces and sand for an exhibition at Moscow's Gary Tatintsian Gallery. Must be love or something like it.

--Kelly Devine Thomas

There's a pleasing symmetry to an auction of a single object belonging to the first president.  If you're going to keep it simple, however, it helps if the object in question is unique -- say, an Order of Cincinnati Medal -- and is estimated to fetch up to $10,000,000. That will be the case at Sotheby's on December 11 when you can bid on Washington's gold medal, which has not been seen in America since the Chicago World's Fair in 1893.

Made in France in 1784, the medal was subsequently presented by Washington's family to the great man's respected colleague, Marquis of Lafayette, in 1824.  The Society of Cincinnati, founded by the officers of the Continental Army in 1783, was intended to maintain the ideals of the American Revolution.  It had quite an impressive membership, including 23 signers of the Constitution. For their first president they selected, not surprisingly, George Washington.

--David Coggins