Sandro Botticelli’s Portrait of a Young Man Holding a Roundel from c. 1480, sold at Sotheby’s this past Thursday, January 28th with a hammer price of $80 ($92.2 million with the buyer’s premium). For a good article about the auction, including information about the buyer who spent $144 million in all, click here. This is the second-most-expensive Old Master painting to ever sell at auction. Of course, the most expensive one was Leonardo da Vinci’s Salvator Mundi that sold in 2017 for $450.3 million. These two works of art sold for high prices more than anything else because paintings by these important artists very, very rarely come up for sale. But let’s take a moment to appreciate why Botticelli is an “important artist” in the first place.
Sandro Botticelli was a Florentine painter who was patronized by the Medici family, who essentially bankrolled the early Italian Renaissance. When he was working at the Medici compound in Florence, a center for humanist learning, the artist created works of art with subjects from ancient mythology, like his Birth of Venus.
Botticelli was the promising student of Fra Filippo Lippi, who was a monk – albeit a rowdy one who impregnated a nun among other things. Botticelli adopted his teacher’s “linear style” of painting where all forms have graceful and elegant outlines. The painting that sold at Sotheby’s shows this with the delicate contours of the young man’s face and his hair that is set against the clear blue background. The portrait also has the subtle modeling that is a hallmark of Botticelli’s style. The softness of the shadows makes the skin almost glow and you wonder if the artist was inspired by the polished marble of the ancient sculptures that he saw in the Medici collection.
