UPDATE: HAMMERED DOWN FOR $152 MILLION

Christie's is banking on a nude by Amedeo Modigliani to fetch a record price in the coming fall sale series.

Financial markets will be tested following a summer of turmoil when Modigliani’s 1917 “Nu Couche (Reclining Nude)” heads to Christie’s second specialized sale of 20th-century art on Nov. 9 in New York. "The Artist's Muse" is a small, hybrid sale that will precede Christie's postwar and contemporary art sale.

Private Swiss collectors are offering the work, which has never before been on the auction market.

“She is a woman of incredible elegance and dignity,” Jussi Pylkkanen, Christie’s global president and chief auctioneer, said in a telephone interview with Bloomberg. “It’s the Holy Grail of the artist’s work.”

Christie's estimates the nude will hammer down at over $100 million. The artist's auction record is for a sculpture, set by a woman's head, "Tete," at $70.9 million last fall.

The highest price paid for a Modigliani painting at auction is $68.9 million, set in 2010, at Sotheby’s. In a private sale, Russian billionaire Dmitry Rybolovlev reportedly paid $118 million for a work from hedge fund manager Steven A. Cohen's collection.