Auction houses are where many galleries, museums, and serious collectors buy art. They are great alternatives to commercial galleries, where works originally bought at auction are resold, trends are pushed, and prices are often inflated to advance whatever is fashionable.

Galleries can prey on both our penchant for the new and on our faith in the established past – whichever is currently more popular. And they can hold works until the market is more favorable. At galleries, backroom artworks with deep provenance by established artists typically have high price tags; a squeaky clean, get-’em-while-they’re hot aura surrounds the latest works by contemporary artists.

On the other hand, neither the gallery nor the buyer need feel rushed: Old art has been around a while and there is rarely any shortage of new art. This keeps the gallery market, relatively speaking, pretty balanced and stable.

At auction houses, things move much faster.Estate heirs who may prefer Rockwell to Rembrandt are anxiously waiting for their share of the inheritance. Artworks are priced to sell and bring only what that day’s market will bear. Works that do not meet their reserve prices may reappear in a clearance auction, where they go for a mere fraction of their original minimum. This means that some lots will sell at astronomical prices and others will go for even less than what their frames are worth.

This is certainly possible this week in New York, where Sotheby’s, Christie’s, Bonhams, and a whole slew of galleries are offering hundreds of Old Master works for sale.Available during Old Masters week are spectacular works by Rubens,Tiepolo,Watteau, Guardi, Piero di Cosimo, Domenico di Michelino, van Ruisdael, and van Huysum, as well as numerous sculptures and religious artifacts.

Among the stars is Chardin’s oil on canvas “Still Life With Leeks, a Casserole, and a Cloth” (1734), estimated at $500,000 to $700,000. The painting is an ingenious orchestration of objects, including a dancing mortar and pestle that twists away from an animal-like copper pot, whose threatening lid opens ominously, like the mouth of a giant fish. Claude’s large oil “Pastoral Landscape With Huntsmen” (1639), estimated at $2 million to $3 million, is a magisterial work filled with a serene, pink, buttery light, and its flowers and faces pop with both strength and naturalism. (Both works are being auctioned today at Sotheby’s.)

Granted, most of the works up for sale are not masterpieces. Many, especially in Sotheby’s Saturday auction of Old Master and 19th-century European art, are mediocre or worse, but if you forget about name brands and trust your own eyes, you can certainly find something well worth the time and money spent.

Connoisseurship is not an exact science: Artworks have been misattributed at auction, and others, listed at auction as merely “attributed,” have later been discovered to have already been documented in an artist’s catalogue raisonne. Big names bring big prices, but fame is not a guarantee of quality. At the auctions this week, some of the works listed as “in the school,” “workshop,” or “circle of” equal or outshine some of those by textbook masters, and they sell for a fraction of the price.

Sotheby’s life-size oil “Portrait of a Nobleman, Full-Length, Standing, Wearing a Black Silk Doublet and Cloak,” attributed to van Dyck and estimated at only $200,000 to $300,000, feels to me like an autograph work.Sotheby’s newly rediscovered Rembrandt oil on panel, “Study of an Elderly Woman in a White Cap” (c. 1640), estimated at $3 million to $4 million, which has been heavily restored and cleaned, is clearly an authentic work. But it feels watered down and is missing some of the intensity of light and life I associate with Rembrandt.

Other works, because they are small or not nearly as favored as others, could be purchased for a song. Bonhams is listing a tiny, amazingly delicate drawing by Theodore Rousseau, “Sea Shore,” a spacious view of sailboats on the horizon, for only $500 to $700.

Sotheby’s this week is at once a museum, flea market,and bazaar,and a variety of oddball things are on offer. Today the house is listing two larger-than-life, freestanding, English 18th-century polychrome dummyboard figures (c. 1750), depicting grenadiers of the Royal Scots Fusiliers, 21st Foot Regiment, in full uniform complete with fusils (offered separately at $30,000 to $40,000).

Tomorrow, a wonderfully quirky, though macabre, handpainted 19th-century French dentist’s sign, estimated at $3,000 to $5,000, is going on the block. The curved sign, framed by extracted bloody teeth, reads “Sans Douleur 1 Franc.”It is an illustrated vi gnette, a la Delacroix or early Cezanne, in which the patient sits and reads the newspaper while the dentist works on his head, completely detached from his body and held in a vise with its mouth open wide, with pliers.

The queen and king of the Old Masters ball are Donatello’s “The Borromeo Madonna” (c. 1450), a terra-cotta relief sculpture 32 inches high, and Michelangelo’s study of a male torso (after 1541), a black chalk drawing roughly 7 inches by 10 inches.

Donatello’s work, which goes on the block at Sotheby’s today, is estimated at $4 million to $6 million, and is a fully developed sculpture. A miraculous low to high relief carving of the Madonna and Child, it explores longing, loss, eroticism, bitterness, intimacy, and compassion. The sculpture’s tightly compressed forms combine the softness of Donatello’s David with a rough-hewn and gnarly, graceful yet wildly overgrown quality – cloth, hair, and fingers made seemingly of twisting roots, rock, and rapids – experienced in his “Old Market Woman.”

The Michelangelo drawing, offered by Christie’s and estimated at $4 million, went on the block on Tuesday and brought a high bid of only $3.2 million. Failing to satisfy its reserve price, the drawing remained unsold. The masterful,monumental drawing,unmistakably a Michelangelo, in which the torso is more mountain than man, is (if it is possible to say this without being struck dead by the gods) just a Michelangelo. It is not surprising that the work, more artifact than art, closer to an unfinished sketch or a holy relic than a fully realized drawing, did not bring its inflated minimum.And yet, how can you put a price on a Michelangelo?

Certainly, at auction houses, without the hand-holding of gallery directors, you may have to work harder, but you have the thrill of the hunt, and with each bargain you are guaranteed bragging rights. And even if you do not buy anything, auction-house galleries can be great places to view art. Some of the works on view have been in hiding for decades and may disappear again for decades more.

At any of these sales, you could probably buy a whole room full of beautiful Old Master drawings (often in gorgeous period frames) for the cost of a single atrocious work by John Currin, Damien Hirst, or Jeff Koons. And this is at a time when the Old Master market, because so few substantial works come up for sale, is generally considered to be one of the strongest and most dependable.

The surreal fact that so many collectors would rather have a Currin, Hirst, or Koons than a Chardin, a Claude, or an “attributed” van Dyck attests to how absurd and inverted the contemporary art market really is. In this inflated, topsy-turvy market, who would dare speak of inflation anywhere near Michelangelo?

lesplund@nysun.com