Portrait by Renaissance master expected to soar past $80M

[left-of-center2012]

An enigmatic painting from Renaissance master Sandro Botticelli will go on auction next year and art watchers will be seeing if it fetches more than its eye-watering $80 million estimate, despite the pandemic. Botticelli’s 15th-century portrait of a nobleman in “Young Man Holding a Roundel” is the highlight of Sotheby’s Masters Week sale series in New York in January.

Opportunities to acquire a Botticelli — the artist behind such masterpieces as “Primavera” and “The Birth of Venus” — are very rare. “The fact that there are 12 known portraits by Botticelli puts it in an elite type of situation,” said Apostle. “These are the most personal things he produced, in a way. It’s just something he’s doing with one individual.”

The painting — believed to have been executed in the late 1470s or early 1480s — actually represents two art works. Botticelli painted the noble sitter but the roundel — a circular disc used as a symbol — depicts a saint and is an original 14th-century work attributed to the Sienese painter Bartolommeo Bulgarini. Who the young man depicted has been lost to history as well as why he holds the roundel. Some scholars believe he is associated with the ruling House of Medici or another powerful family in Florence.

Apostle says some things can be inferred: The young man’s hair is long and fashionable for the time. His tunic is buttoned up and restrained, dressed in a republican way. “There’s a rectitude to this picture and a lack of arrogance while still being very confident that I think exemplifies that attitude that these republicans in Florence felt about themselves,” he says. “Also, by presenting this medallion, he’s just making sure we’re aware he’s a cultivated person.”

In the past 50 years, the painting has spent extended periods on loan at the National Gallery in London, the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York and the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C.

https://apnews.com/article/virus-outbreak-new-york-painting-archive-b2334ece4ed57c9409e998427bdb33da

[soothsayer]

1. The crackdown on money laundering via the art world might keep the price down

[left-of-center2012]

2. From the link's article ...

"The auction house believes it could get over $100 million."

[soothsayer]

3. Or that!

I guess there’s “honest” money out there for such a rare gem.

[lunatica]

4. I appreciate quite a few elements in this painting

The overall rather restrictive use of straight lines and rectangles which give it an almost austere composition, yet there is a great deal of softness in the pleasant human face and form and hands. The young man is not being framed by the the rectangle form behind him. He’s painted breaking up the straight lines all around him and his left hand with the two fingers seems to be intruding into the bottom straight geometric form below it, so it looks like his fingers are painted past the hard rectangle, like they’re escaping past the edges of the canvas. The medallion is also in a different position, being the only part that is cut off by the hard edge of the canvas. The effect is of a subtle softness not conforming too strictly to its surrounding environment.

Because there is no sense of what his surroundings really are other than flat rectangles the human figure is dominating the structure by the modeling of the highlights and shadows within it.

That’s my two cents. Great painting.