Today, Sotheby’s New York sold a Sandro Botticelli painting for a whopping $92 million. That final number—which was fetched after just four and a half minutes of bidding between two interested parties—marked the culmination of an extensive and months-long marketing effort. More significant still were the trends that the news seemed to indicate—and the mysterious backstory of the portrait itself.
Happily, for the art market, the sale proved to be a positive bellwether for 2021. Despite the ongoing pandemic and worldwide economic disruption, auction houses have seen continued success when it’s come to their virtual and IRL auction events. As the first big sale of the year, the success of the Botticelli painting seems to indicate that the art market might just be able to continue marching along at an impressive clip.
Also of note was the fact that the work—simply titled, Portrait of a Young Man Holding a Roundel—now holds the record for the highest price paid for an Old Master piece since Leonardo Da Vinci’s Salvator Mundi. That painting, which went for a staggering $450 million in 2017, marks the most ever paid for a single work of art at auction.
The seller of Portrait of a Young Man was revealed to be the foundation of the recently deceased billionaire Sheldon Solow. The organization made a considerable profit on the painting, considering the fact that Solow purchased the piece for just $1.3 million in the early 1980s. It’s possible that they may now use the newly acquired funds to open a private museum in New York City.
This could easily be the end of today’s story and the start of a new one. But in fact, the tale of the painting itself—or lack thereof—is arguably just as intriguing. Despite the household-name status Sandro Botticelli enjoys today, the artist was in fact forgotten for hundreds of years after his death, as the New York Times details. (Members of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood helped repopularize his works during the 19th century.) Nevertheless, that prolonged period of dormancy in terms of Botticelli’s fame helps explain why most works attributed to the Florentine artist are not known definitively to have been painted by the master—including this one. Notably, the roundel included in the composition, as well as the youth of the subject, are unusual in terms of the rest of Botticelli’s oeuvre. That latter attribute of this painting is however perhaps part of its appeal. “It’s a handsome youth of high birth and manners,” art consultant Beverly Schreiber Jacoby commented to the Times. “You don’t have to be a collector of Old Master painting to want to buy it.”
