Maurizio Cattelan Revives “La Nona Ora” as a Miniature Edition of 666 for Easter
A pope felled by a meteorite is returning to the market — this time in the palm-sized language of editions, lotteries, and livestream confession.
Italian artist Maurizio Cattelan (b. 1960) has partnered with Avant Arte, the London-based online platform known for artist editions, to release a miniature version of his notorious sculpture “La Nona Ora” (1999). Timed to coincide with Easter and framed around the 21st anniversary of Pope John Paul II’s death, the drop reanimates one of the most polarizing images of turn-of-the-millennium contemporary art: a wax figure of the pontiff lying on a red carpet, struck down by a meteorite.
The original work’s title translates as “The Ninth Hour,” a reference to the moment Christ died on the cross. When it first appeared, “La Nona Ora” split audiences into camps: those who read it as blasphemy, those who saw a stark emblem of human vulnerability, and those who recognized it as a signature Cattelan provocation — a collision of reverence and slapstick that refuses to settle into a single moral.
The sculpture also proved its staying power on the secondary market. In 2001, “La Nona Ora” sold at Christie’s New York for $886,000.
Avant Arte’s new edition translates the scene into hand-painted resin at a markedly smaller scale: each miniature measures 11.8 inches long and 4.9 inches high. The edition size is 666 — a number that leans into the work’s Catholic charge with a wink — and each is priced at EUR 2,200 (approximately $2,554).
Access, however, is structured less like a conventional checkout and more like a performance. The opportunity to purchase is allocated by random draw. Collectors who submit a confession receive early access, and a further twist turns the release into a public spectacle: those selected to confess on a livestream will receive a “La Nona Ora” miniature for free.
Cattelan has long understood how to make distribution part of the artwork’s meaning. Since the 1990s, he has cultivated a reputation as contemporary art’s enfant terrible, using deadpan humor and institutional symbols to test the boundaries of taste, belief, and power. In recent years, his market profile has been buoyed by works that travel easily as headlines: “America” (2016), his fully functioning 18-carat gold toilet, and “Comedian” (2019), the banana duct-taped to a wall that ignited a frenzy at Art Basel Miami Beach.
An edition of “America” was acquired at Sotheby’s in late 2025 for $12.1 million by Ripley’s Believe It or Not!, while “Comedian” later sold at Sotheby’s for $6.2 million.
Avant Arte CEO Mazdak Sani positioned the new release as a kind of seasonal resurrection. “Few works have been consecrated in the collective imagination quite like La Nona Ora,” he said, adding that bringing it back for Easter — “its second coming as an edition of 666” — felt “almost predestined.”
Whether the miniature reads as satire, memento mori, or collectible relic, the mechanics of the drop make one thing clear: for Cattelan, the artwork is never only the object. It is also the ritual around it — who gets in, who is left out, and what, exactly, the audience is asked to confess along the way.
