Botticelli Sold For $45.4 Million at Sotheby’s Auction

Bastien Eclercy, the Städel’s curator of Italian, French and Spanish paintings before 1800, wrote in the exhibition catalog that the “rediscovered painting from a private collection” not only represented “an important new example of Botticelli’s late period,” but also added a “striking facet to our understanding of the depiction of Christ in the Renaissance.”

The attribution was endorsed by Laurence Kanter, the chief curator of European art at Yale University Art Gallery, and Keith Christiansen, former chairman of the department of European paintings at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, according to Sotheby’s.

Sotheby’s describes “The Man of Sorrows” as a late work by Botticelli from about 1500, a period when, according to Giorgio Vasari’s 1550 “Lives of the Artists,” the Florentine painter fell under the influence of the fire-and-brimstone preaching of the Dominican friar Girolamo Savonarola, becoming an adherent of the preacher’s sect. Works from Botticelli’s later period have been viewed by modern scholars as being imbued with an intense religious fervor. Sotheby’s composition is notable for its halo of grieving angels circling the risen Christ’s thorn-crowned head.

The re-attributed painting, billed by Sotheby’s as the “defining masterpiece of Botticelli’s late career,” was given a global marketing tour with viewings in Los Angeles, London, Dubai and New York. It was hung on its own in sepulchral gloom next to photographs that invited prestigious comparisons with Albrecht Durer’s famous “Self-Portrait” in the Alte Pinakothek in Munich, Germany, and Leonardo da Vinci’s “Salvator Mundi,” or “Savior of the World,” which sold for $450.3 million at Christie’s, a record for any artwork offered at auction.

It proved to be the second big-ticket Botticelli sold by Sotheby’s in the space of 12 months. Last January, “Portrait of a young man holding a roundel,” from the estate of the New York-based real estate magnate and art collector Sheldon Solow, sold for $92.2 million, a record price for both a Botticelli at auction and an old master picture at Sotheby’s.

Article source: https://www.nytimes.com/2022/01/27/arts/design/botticelli-sothebys-auction.html