The most unlikely auction story of the year ended without an auction. The marble maquette attributed to Pietro Bracci — bought for £300 at a Wiltshire salvage yard after being mistaken for a concrete garden ornament — was withdrawn from sale before Woolley & Wallis's Autumn Fine Furniture & Collections sale closed on October 8. There was no hammer, no paddle, and no result price to report. The withdrawal quietly closes a chapter that briefly captivated the art world. Woolley & Wallis's furniture specialist Mark Yuan Richards had identified the roughly two-foot-tall marble as a circa-1736 maquette for Bracci's lost bronze portrait of Pope Clement XII, the only known model for the work — the full-size bronze, cast by Francesco Giardoni for the Palazzo Nuovo, was melted down during the Roman Republic of 1798. The house gave the piece a £5,000–£10,000 pre-sale estimate, a figure that made the £300 find one of the season's most talked-about discoveries. ARTSK reported the attribution on October 1, and the story's pre-sale search wave brought the site 3,777 Google impressions across October 1–2 — a measure of just how far the discovery travelled. Coverage by artnet, People and others followed within days. No reason for the withdrawal has been made public, and neither Woolley & Wallis nor the vendor has commented. Withdrawn lots are sometimes re-offered in a later sale or sold privately, so this may not be the final word on the Bracci maquette — but for now, the £300 salvage-yard find remains unsold, and the market never got its chance to bid.