A small marble statue bought for £300 at a salvage yard in Wiltshire has been identified as the work of the 18th-century Baroque sculptor Pietro Bracci — and could fetch £10,000 ($13,300) when it goes under the hammer on 8 October. The roughly two-foot-tall figure was misidentified by the owners of the business and acquired by a sharp-eyed collector, who took it for appraisal to Woolley & Wallis, the regional auction house, where specialists recognised it as the only surviving maquette for a bronze statue of Pope Clement XII cast by Francesco Giardoni. The bronze itself is long gone: it once stood inside the Palazzo Nuovo in Rome, the palace the pontiff established in 1734 as the home of the Capitoline Museums — the world's first public art museum — before being melted down during the short-lived French-imposed Roman Republic of the late 1790s. The only other surviving record of Bracci's composition is an engraving by the artist brothers Stefano and Rocco Pozzi, active in mid-18th-century Rome. That makes the modest marble, overlooked among the salvage, an extraordinary survivor of papal Rome's artistic splendour. 'To have a rare eighteenth-century marble figure of Pope Clement XII by Pietro Bracci come to light is a remarkable opportunity,' said Mark Yuan Richards, the auction house's furniture specialist. 'Bracci was one of the great sculptors of eighteenth-century Rome, and this extraordinary survivor offers a tangible connection to the world of the papal court.' The statue will be sold as part of Woolley & Wallis's Fine Furniture and Collections auction — a regional sale that has suddenly acquired an international art-historical headline, and a reminder that masterpieces can still hide in plain sight.