ART

Prices Soar: Thirty-one Italian Old Master paintings from the J. Paul Getty Museum brought a total of $3.33 million--well above the pre-sale estimate of $2.65 million--in a sold-out auction Thursday at Christie’s New York. Prices for works by Mattia Preti, Domenico Beccafumi, Paolo Caliari and Jacopo Robusti soared to as much as eight times their estimated values. The paintings, bequeathed to the museum upon the oil baron’s death in 1978, had been in storage. Proceeds will be used for new acquisitions at the wealthy museum, which occasionally pays tens of millions of dollars for a single artwork.