"The child's character is still so unformed. He behaves like a spoiled child, but he does not lack intelligence. We shall have to wait and see what is inside this chrysalis. Perhaps an artist?". So wrote the mother of Italian artist-to-be Amedeo Modigliani (known as  "Dedo" to his parents and "Modi" to his friends) when he was 11 years old in 1895.

Some prophecy. Livorno-born, Paris-based Amedeo Modigliani's Nu couché (Reclining Nude), painted between 1917-18, was unveiled in Hong Kong today at Christie's auction house. Almost 100 years old, but so lustrous was its sheen and so vivid the texture, it might have been painted 100 minutes ago - a cosmetic mood board with a Shu Uemura make-up palette. Step close enough and you could feel its pulse. 

To be auctioned in New York on November 9, this little-known and even lesser-seen masterpiece is being offered for sale, surprisingly, for the first time - a commercial virgin extraordinaire that's worth her reserve (US$100 million) and then some. 

Whatever the outcome, it should surpass the existing auction record (US$70.7m) for the artist's work Tete, a sculpture of a goddess's head (1911-12) made with limestone that Modigliani had purloined from a Paris construction site and which sold last November. The artist's most valuable painting to date, Jeanne Hébuterne (au chapeau), which depicts his lover and common-law wife in 1919, sold for US$42.1m in 2013 to a Russian client.  

Modigliani's work and life is a tale of contrast, debauchery, womanizing, pharmacopeia and ill-health. As much influenced by Italian Renaissance art and sculpture, and artists such as Sandro Botticelli, Giovanni Boldini and Domenico Moirelli (a melodramatic Italian Biblical painter) as by Paris, Pablo Picasso and Toulouse-Lautrec, one of his teachers called him "Superman", as Modigliani was known to regularly quote from Friedrich Nietzche's Thus Spoke Zarathustra and appreciate the thinker's radical philosophies. Modi wasn't shy to speak his mind either. On meeting Picasso in 1907 who was dressed in workmen's clothes, Modigliani said though the man was an artistic genius such talent shouldn't "excuse his uncouth appearance".

While Modigliani maintained a dapper sartorial silhouette, he dispensed with dress in matters related to his models. His reclining nudes, begun in 1916, were based on women he knew, had conjugated with or even married. But unlike Renaissance painters or 19th century artists who invested their images with allegory or mythological references and attributes, Modigliani focused - implicitly and explicitly - on his model's eroticism. As such, his nudes were considered by many to be pornographic and caused police in Paris to seize a portfolio of his canvases in 1918. He was dead two years later, at the tender age of 36. His wife committed suicide the day after his death, jumping from a window bearing the couple's unborn baby. Their orphaned daughter Jeanne Modigliani, born in 1918, lived to 1984 and wrote a biography of her father, Modigliani: Man and Myth. 

The provenance of Nu Couche is unknown, as is the model. But, the work stands head and shoulders (we often don't see hands and feet in Modi's works) above his prodigious output. In its dazzling contemporaneity, Modigliani's Nu couché  is Botticelli's Birth of Venus for the modern age. In this moment, this sumptuously stylized triumph on paper, Modigliani made magic as fresh today as it was controversial then. Ladies and gentlemen: any advance on US$130m? 

ADDENDUM: The above artwork sold in New York on November 10 for US$170.4 million to Chinese collector Liu Yiqian and his wife Wang Wei, making it the second most expensive artwork at auction after Pablo Picasso's The Women of Algiers which sold in May 2015 for US$179.4 million. Liu and Wang own Shanghai's Long Museum. Said Christie's auctioneer Jussi Pylkkanen who oversaw the sale. "We are in a masterpiece market." 

IMAGE: Amedeo Modigliani (1884-1920), Nu couché , oil on canvas, 59.9cm x 92cm, 1917-1918. Courtesy of Christie's 2015.