Buyer is betting heirloom’s a Mola

A paralegal from Garden Grove put an heirloom painting up for auction on Super Bowl Sunday, hoping she’d get a few thousand dollars to help offset her daughter’s tuition at UC Berkeley. Now she’s probably going somewhere a lot more swank than Disneyland.

The unsigned picture fetched $620,900 from an unnamed New York dealer who apparently is betting that it’s a lost work by Pier Francesco Mola, a 17th century master.

Redge Martin, president of Clars Auction Gallery in Oakland, which conducted the international bidding by telephone, said the woman didn’t want her name divulged, but described her and her husband as “real salt of the earth” folks with the daughter at Berkeley and another in high school.

The highest price paid for Mola’s work appears to be $2.8 million, although several have sold for $100,000 or less, Martin said.

The painting shows a gray-haired, bearded man working on papers; in the background is an armillary sphere, an instrument used in ancient astronomy. The picture was a gift to the seller’s grandmother, who for years kept it hung in her home in Pisa, Italy.